MarketingSherpa Blog

“I’ve put my kids through college with just my ideas.”

A friend of mine who owns an agency told me this over a beer one night. And I think it’s an apt description of a career in marketing.

But here’s the rub – it’s hard to come up with ideas. Day after day. Month after month. Especially if you’ve worked at the same brand for any length of time.

So I’m always looking for ways to get unstuck. And I stumbled across one recently while leading MEC300: Develop Your Creative, an education offering within the AI Guild.

I hesitate to call it a ‘course’ or ‘training’ per se, because I focus the time we have together on interactivity. There’s plenty of content people can dive into between sessions, but during the sessions we review their work building their marketing funnels and – back to that word – help them get unstuck.

While coaching a participant, my co-leader for this track – Dhruv Patel, Chief Product Officer, MeclabsAI (Meclabs is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa) – shared an expansive visual. He took many different concepts he’s learned throughout his career and made one, overarching image that could spur even the most perplexed marketer or entrepreneur to get unstuck.

I’ll show you the visual and then we’ll dive into some of the concepts behind it.

Read more…

During AI Guild research briefings and LiveClasses, guild members ask questions using the Zoom chat feature. And we answer those questions right here…

Why Claude 2 vs ChatGPT? It’s important to pick a long-term tool to be able to teach it in depth. So looking to understand the pro’s / con’s.

I’ll challenge the idea of the need to pick a long-term tool (although we’ll get into that in the next question in this blog post).

The biggest difference I’ve seen between Claude and ChatGPT is that Claude can process much larger inputs than ChatGPT. You can even attach files when you message Claude.

This is a key differentiator if you want Claude to analyze a chat log, write a summary based on a transcript, or give you feedback on a long article.

ChatGPT gives you the ability to tune all of its responses to some extent using the custom instructions feature, although this is only available in the Plus subscription for $20 per month. The Plus subscription also gives you access to GPT-4.

The site explains the features as “Custom instructions let you share anything you’d like ChatGPT to consider in its response.” It is not available yet in the UK and EU or the free version of ChatGPT, which is currently using GPT-3.5, but there are plans to roll it out to all users soon, according to OpenAI’s website.

If you choose to upgrade to the Plus subscription, you can turn this feature on by clicking the three dots next to your email address in the lower left, going to the “Beta features” section and moving the slider next to “Custom instructions” to green. Then you will have access to two questions:

• What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?
• How would you like ChatGPT to respond?

You could, for example, include information about your ideal customer when answering these questions. If you would like ideas for how to get AI to build a customer persona, AI Guild members can go to the Briefing Notes for MEC200 [08-02-23], scroll down to the “Ken Ducey” group coaching and click the drop down carrot, and read the prompt under “Using GPT and the new Custom Instructions.”

Keep in mind both ChatGPT and Claude have a knowledge cutoff in 2021 (ChatGPT specifics September 2021 and Claude is less specific), so if more recent information is key to your prompts, you should consider AI connected to the internet, like Bing.

I also asked both Claude and ChatGPT about their pros and cons. Like any market leader might say about its challengers, ChatGPT ‘never heard of it.’ In fairness, this is probably literally true. As I mentioned, ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff is currently September 2021, and Claude was first released in April 2022.

Claude said that ChatGPT has broader capabilities since it was trained on more data, but that Claude does a better job of staying on topic and remembering context from previous conversations. That has pretty much been my experience, and I have been using Claude more because of it. While ChatGPT can have some truly outstanding responses, it can also be wildly off base. I see that less with Claude but it does happen as well.

And in fairness, this has been a challenge with all generative AI tools. For example, a guild member mentioned in the chat that he had trouble with Bing giving fake info then getting upset.

If you’d like more insight about different AI tools, AI Guild members can go to Guild [07-26-23], scroll down to the Prompt School section, and read point #6 “Note the best uses for each of your primary AI platforms.”

Whichever tool(s) you use, the AI won’t do everything. The prompts and prompt stacks you input will significantly impact your results. Flint McGlaughlin walks through an example in Sales Funnel and ChatGPT: 6 ways to leverage AI now to develop a powerful value proposition.

Why do you say ‘no’ long-term use of AI tools? Just because of the rate of change?

Don’t build a house on sand.

Vendor lock in is a challenge with any industry, but the mass adoption of artificial intelligence is so new and moving so quickly that what is true today may already be dated in three weeks, let alone three months or three years.

For example, the ChatGPT feature I mention about for “custom instructions” is listed as a beta feature. And OpenAI states, “As a Plus user, enjoy early access to experimental new features, which may change during development” (my emphasis added).

Now there may be some artificial intelligence you have to lock into on some level. For example, MECLABS AI is built on ChatGPT, the best available option at the time we launched. You might train an AI chatbot and add it to your website or use AI for many different things like media buying. These choices will inherently necessitate placing a bet. But do everything you can to stay as fluid as possible and avoid vendor lock in.

However, when it comes to using generative AI chatbots, they are easily switchable (all you need to do is open a different tab in your browser). So keep your options open, stay curious, and keep playing.

Yes, you would need to teach a customer service or sales AI chatbot you put on your website in-depth information about your company. But I’m unaware of how much any generative AI LLM really learns from your interactions with it between sessions (other than the simple feature mentioned above in ChatGPT). So the downsides of brand loyalty may trump the upsides.

I want to mention another element of not thinking “long term” that goes beyond AI tool selection – designing your offer. Keep enough flexibility in your business model that you can bob and weave and pivot as technology changes. I’m not one to make predictions, but here’s a sure bet – things are going to get pretty interesting over the next few months and years.

To remix a Ferris Bueller quote, “AI moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss a really good business opportunity.”

Anyone have any ideas on how to use AI for lead gen? Specifically, analysis and recommendations to get in front of ideal prospects?

This question sets up the importance of AI prompts.

When I asked Bing AI this question for a wedding industry company with a very low-priced product, I got back some pretty rote answers. For example, “Share success secrets from thought leaders.” and “Create helpful videos to solve issues for prospects.” This is the type of basic advice you’d already find in an SEO-ed up blog post about lead gen.

But then I copied a bunch of reviews for this wedding industry company, pasted this into Claude, and gave it the prompt…

Analyze reviews. Who is the ideal customer for this company?

Claude gave me a series of attributes about the customer. Then I asked Claude…

How can I get in front of this ideal customer?

Some of the recommendations were pretty basic, like “Advertise on wedding planning websites and forums like TheKnot, WeddingWire, etc. Brides often turn to these sites when planning their wedding on a budget. You can sponsor content or run ads.”

But it also came up with this response as well, “Target ads in college towns, where many younger budget-conscious brides get married right after graduation.”

I thought that was a pretty good idea for a low-cost wedding service. An idea I hadn’t thought of when reading the question (although, in fairness, an entrepreneur who has worked in this field for several years might have already considered it).

To show how you can use multiple generative AI tools in tandem (in response to the two previous questions), I then pasted the ideal customer description from Claude into GPT-4 (remember, Claude is better at analyzing large amounts of information) along with the same prompt.

Again, most of the suggestions were pretty obvious to anyone with even a modicum of marketing experience. For example, “Optimize your website and blog content with keywords that this audience would likely use when searching for affordable wedding video solutions. Keywords could include phrases like ‘budget-friendly wedding video,’ ‘DIY wedding video,’ ‘guest-shot wedding video,’ and similar terms.”

So I pushed GPT-4 a little harder and said…

All these answers seem obvious to someone with marketing experience. Give me some truly breakthrough and out-of-the-box ideas.

It gave me seven more ideas, and I thought this one was something really unique that I hadn’t thought of: “Video Capsule Partnerships: Collaborate with a tech company that offers ‘time capsule’ services, where users can send messages (including videos) to their future selves. Couples could use the company to capture their wedding and then ‘send’ the video to be viewed on a future anniversary.”

This won’t generate instant leads, but it would give the company a reason to followup with happy customers down the road, at which point they could offer a referral bonus.

So I got two original ideas after only spending a few minutes with some AI tools. Not a bad ROI. If I really engaged deeply for an hour or more, if I was the entrepreneur and it was my business, I probably would have gotten much more from the generative AI tools.

The biggest point is – AI can feel like magic. And it is in a sense, but not the way we normally talk about magic as waving a wand and getting an instant, amazing result.

Magic in the real world is a carefully crafted illusion, powered by hard work and a keen methodology. And AI is no different.

You can’t just ask a general question and get an amazing result, usually. But feeding AI tools info about your ideal customer and the design of your offer will produce better results, especially for something as difficult as finding a new way to get in front of your customer.

Check out Marketing Funnel Optimization: A straight-forward guide to design your offer if you are unfamiliar with offer design. And if you’re an AI Guild member, you can go to the briefing notes for this week’s session at MEC200 [08-02-23] to see how Flint McGlaughlin used artificial intelligence to build customer profiles. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the names of people we conducted group coaching for in this week’s LiveClass.

Related Resources

AI Marketing Prompts: 14 prompt examples marketers and entrepreneurs found most useful

MECLABS AI Guild

Wednesdays at 2 pm EDT we hold an AI Guild briefing. Chat with MECLABS AI if you would like to register to attend.

In the session, marketers and entrepreneurs can ask questions in the webinar chat. And we answer a few of them right here…

What is an example of a “what will you give” when you are looking to simply get them on a sales call? If you have no freemium model, is it typically a white paper?

This question came up while we were discussing the Customer-First Objective tool available to AI Guild members as they design their offer.

I hope the questioner doesn’t mind if I challenge the basis of the question. Because it gets to the very fundamental reason the Customer-First Objective tool can be helpful – no one wants to be sold, they want to be helped. If you start with helping people, if we all start there, it can help open all our minds to help more people, and in so doing, ultimately bring them towards the conversions we need for a profitable enterprise.

However, if we start with shoehorning people onto a sales call, then we are more likely to lose people who could potentially be ideal customers.

As Bill, an AI Guild member, said in the chat, “I’m wondering who actually desires a ‘sales call.’ What might actually be desirable that you can give them without pressure or obligation?”

This isn’t marketing morality, it’s a simple fact of life. And I guarantee you act the same way when you are a customer. You’re not excited to jump on a sales call. You want help so you can meet your goals and overcoming your pain points.

This gets to a fundamental challenge for why ads, landing pages, and other marketing can underperform. It isn’t necessarily that the design doesn’t pop enough, or that the wording isn’t exactly right in the body copy. It’s that the framework all that marketing is built on – the offer – just isn’t serving a potential customer.

It is really difficult for marketers and entrepreneurs to see this, though. After all, they built the thing. Or they are pouring their life energy into the company to market it. Flint McGlaughlin called while I was writing this, and he told me the following when we discussed the Customer-First Objective tool, “We’re not just trying to help people get an offer, we’re helping them face a hard truth before the marketplace does it for them, before they learn through their data cycles [of ad and landing page testing].”

If you want to build a SuperFunnel, you start with a customer-first objective. You craft a customer journey that begins with a beneficial offer to the customer. On this path, you will help them and build trust. And the ideal customer will get to the point where they want to get on a call with you.

Now this is easier said than done, of course. So here are some examples of engaging the customer earlier in their journey even if you don’t have a freemium model. Sometimes, as the questioner mentioned, it is a white paper. But it could also be:

• A price drop email, which engaged ‘lost leads’ better than a straight-up promo email for an apartment rental agency. See quick case study #3 in Effective Audience Engagement Strategies: Real-life examples from social media and email marketing
  
• A sweepstakes, which got more opt-ins for a synthetic ice company. See quick case study #3 in https://marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/marketing-strategies
  
• A five-day free workshop for a business academy. See quick case study #3 in Online Business Strategy: Steps marketers took to create powerful marketing funnels with Google, Amazon, and Facebook

I hope you’ll see these as realistic examples. None of these three dropped business considerations entirely out the window and took a Pollyana-ish approach to helping customers. Nor were any of these as customer-first as they could be.

But they all moved closer to helping the customer and away from only focusing on the immediate promotional objective they had. Tiny steps, tiny steps. But tiny steps in the right direction.

To help you generate your own ideas, here are 54 elements that can help you guide your buyers’ journey through the marketing funnel.

And as I said, this is hard stuff. So here is a simple thought experiment you might try to help you reframe how you approach customers.

Pretend you’re out to dinner with a dear old friend and their spouse, catching up after many years apart. When they find out what you do for a living, it turns out they want to make a purchase in your field. However, they simply cannot purchase from you because you don’t serve their region. So you can’t sell them anything.

How would you help them? What would you do? If you sell bathtub refinishing, could you put together key trips for finding the right vendor? Give them guidance on how to check the installer’s license and insurance, how to understand if the warranty has value, mistakes to avoid in project planning, etc. Not to sell them and guide them only to your company, just to help them.

If you sell website hosting services, could you build a simple, free (or low-cost) tool that pings their cellphone the moment a denial-of-service attack is detected?

What could you do to help your friends?

And then – ok, super cheeseball alert here – don’t look at all those people in your ideal customer set as potential sales calls. Look at them as human beings, fellow wanderers on the journey, that you can help just like you helped your friends.

Fair warning though – these people will not know and trust you instantly, like your friends do. So once you make this internal shift and start offering something ‘free,’ you might get very excited. And assume just because it’s free you will get a lot of takers.

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but you likely won’t. Your free offering still needs a powerful value proposition. Too much to get into on that topic in this post, but feel free to read – Selling Free Content: Why Seth Godin never gives anything away for free.

Is the forum on LinkedIn? How do I find it?

You can join the MECLABS Super Funnel Research Cohort group on LinkedIn to discuss these kinds of topics. And you can join us Wednesdays at 2 pm EDT for an AI Guild briefing.

I recently answered a couple of questions that came up in a LiveClass with the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort (MECLABS is parent organization of MarketingSherpa). We are sharing them today on the blog as well in case they help you with your own efforts using content to help attract leads into your funnel.

How do you balance talking about the book (as a lead magnet) and highlighting the company that’s behind it and the CTA?

I think it’s important to remember the role of each. The book is the product you’re “selling,” (whether they are buying with money or just their time, trust, and information), so the focus should be on the book. That gets the majority of the micro-yeses.

The micro-yes(es) for the company behind it (and as I mentioned frequently, the author), are part of “Yes, I believe” and “Yes, I want this from you.” It’s the credibility for the book.

And then the CTA of course is the final micro-yeses. The main focus here is being clear what they have to trade to get the book – and emphasizing how the perceived value is greater than the perceived cost (which is why “get” can be better on a button than “enroll”).

As for the “balance,” I don’t have an exact formula. It’s probably something like 80 percent on the book, 15 percent on the author and company, and 5 percent on the CTA. That is just a rough ballpark.

But I want to encourage and remind you how books are sold – authors tend to offer information, value, to people who will never buy or crack open the book. They aren’t necessarily selling by selling (sure it happens some on the book jacket or in ads), they are mostly selling by serving.

So that is the fundamental question you have to ask yourself if you are trying to get people to download a book – how can I “sell” by serving?

And that means your landing page doesn’t even have to be a landing page. What if it was an article? Or an interview? To spark your thinking, here is an interview article I did with some Wharton professors about their book – Customer-Centric Mobile Marketing: Interview with Wharton’s Peter Fader and Sarah Toms. What if you tested that against a traditional “selling” landing page? Or at least had some element of the value they pull from their book in this article on your own landing page?

By the way, this book is a perfect example for why it is so hard to say the exact balance on the page. If you just put “by The Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive co-founder Sarah Toms” on a landing page, that would provide credibility right there. That doesn’t take up much space at all. But Wharton is such a powerful brand in the business world, it provides instant credibility.

In general, are the principles about VP (value proposition) on the book same for a more simple lead gen offer? Infographic, etc.?

The basis of the MECLABS methodology and well-known conversion heuristic is fairly simple and straightforward – to get someone to say “yes,” they must perceive more value than cost. All the rest is commentary.

So yes, while the principles are the same, the extent of work on each side of the fulcrum can vary. And it also brings up a fundamental question that you will have to answer for your unique audience. Is a 109-page book on the cost side of the spectrum, on the value side, or both?

Testing is the best way to answer that. My best guess is this though – if your offer is to save people 10 hours per week with simple automation tips, my guess is that a 109-page book is seen as more of a cost than a value. You’re selling quick. You’re selling time savings. A full book goes against that message. Here, some quick checklists might be a better lead gen magnet.

However, if you’re selling the best way to find the right person to hire, that 109-page book might be more on the value side. Hiring is complex, it’s hard to find the right people, there are legal issues and corporate dictates to follow, and on and on. In that case, the ideal customer might not want a simple checklist, they want to understand the topic in depth.

You mention “principles,” so I thought it might be helpful to bring up some principles Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MECLABS and MarketingSherpa, has taught in the past about lead management:

• Leads are people, not targets – which is why we want to create Customer-First Objectives
• People are not falling into the funnel, they are falling out – which is why we need that powerful value prop to power them through the funnel.
• We are not optimizing webpages or call scripts, we are optimizing thought sequences – which is why there may be differences between a book offer and a simple lead gen offer, and as I mention above, even different thought sequences between book offers in different industries to different ideal customers.
• To optimize thought sequences, we must enter into a conversation and guide it toward a value exchange – which is what our funnels are for.

You can read a nice, quick synopsis of these principles in this old blog post – Lead Management: 4 principles to follow.

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

Lead attribution is the process of determining which marketing activities should be credited for bringing in a potential customer, also known as a lead.

The exact definition of what is considered a lead will vary based on the lead management process at each company, but for the purposes of this article, we will consider a lead as a potential customer that indicates interest in a company (for example, filling out a form or calling for more information).

Lead attribution is extremely valuable

Lead attribution is both extremely valuable and maddeningly difficult.

It is so valuable because if companies know which marketing activities produce leads, and which do not, they can optimize their marketing investment. As department store owner John Wanamaker famously said more than 100 years ago, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

So even though lead attribution doesn’t have the creative glory of other marketing practices like copywriting, design, content marketing or branding, don’t overlook it. In fact, I’m writing this blog post because I received a question when I was waxing poetic about lead attribution in the recent article – 8 Mini Case Studies of Using Marketing as a Force for Positive Change in Our World While Getting Results for Your Company and Clients. In the article I say …

“Listen folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. So when I started looking for stories for this article, I had my assumptions about which marketing tactics this article was going to cover:

Landing page optimization to better communicate value —that’s a given.

Content marketing — probably more than one mini case study.

Better ad targeting — of course.

But lead attribution?

Valuable tactic? Absolutely. But it’s boring, behind the scenes, and has little direct correlation to bring about positive change for people. At least, that was that my assumption.

If you’ve had similar assumptions, check out this next story.”

The mini case study goes on to tell the story of how a marketing attribution technology helped fuel a little friendly competition between radio stations in a radiothon that ultimately raised $500,000 for Feeding America during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Which brings up the point — while lead attribution is the term I most often hear thrown about, attribution can be applied to any customer action that companies seek, including product purchases or, in the above case, donations during a radiothon. For that reason, there are other similar terms — like marketing attribution or revenue attribution – that refer to roughly the same thing: understanding which marketing or advertising (or even sales or public relations) activities contribute to a company achieving its goals.

Read more…

What drives a successful lead generation and nurturing strategy for a complex sale?

Is it the nature of the leads themselves? Was its success predetermined at the very birthing of the lead because of the way you generated the lead? For example, a lead filling out a hand-raise form for your service has a far likelier chance of success than a lead clicking on a PPC ad for a free iPad.

Or is it the learned behavior of the lead, the environmental factors you influence them with through your lead nurturing. In other words, no matter how good the lead is, you need to shepherd these people along and help them understand the value of your product or service.

True success requires both quality lead generation and intelligent lead nurturing. Here are tips and examples from some successful business enterprises to help you get better leads and nurture them effectively. (This advice has been edited for clarity and brevity)

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

NURTURE

Answering the unasked questions in the customer journey

Kristian von Rickenbach, co-founder, Helix:

 A Helix (mattress and bedding product manufacturer) lead will convert on average in three months. In that time, they are researching and evaluating dozens of mattress brands and many more mattress types.

We focus heavily on lead nurturing through drip emails for people who come through our mattress customization quiz.

With the personalization quiz, we are able to capture unique attributes about how people sleep. After completing the quiz, users are asked if they want to save their match. With this audience, we know a few things:

1) They took the time to get to the site and complete the quiz

2) Hand raised to save their mattress with the intention to return, and

3) Most importantly, their name

Personalization clearly resonates with this audience and we included the customer’s name in email subject lines. After doing that we saw a 54% increase in open rates which resulted in a 69% increase in revenue generated from that campaign.

Through various creative tests, we homed in on what specific value propositions over-indexed from an engagement and conversion perspective and use that to inform content for our standard drip and promotion campaigns.

Affordability was one value prop that stood out.

Knowing that we were launching with a new financing partner, we sent an email out that had unprecedented returns for the business. After seeing the performance of a one-off financing options email, it was apparent that this is an important proposition in their purchase decision.

Since that email, we have featured similar content as a standalone email in our welcome series and significantly decreased the five-drip series decay curve. On average, we see a 38% decrease in open rate from welcome series email one to email two and so forth. After adding the financing email to the series at touchpoint three, the trend reversed and increased 15% from email two to email three.

Read more…

“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

Those words probably sound familiar to you, as Newton’s first law of motion (the law of inertia). As a marketer, you can think of them as a physics-level explanation of a psychological phenomenon — customer behavior.

Rare is the customer who will go from zero to purchasing your product. That is, the impulse purchase.

For all other customers, they will tend to stay at rest until you get that ball rolling in the direction you want it to go.

Building momentum with intermediate payments

How do you start building momentum? Well, there are two other crucial payments from the customer that you should earn. And we’re calling them out by name in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post because, while your company may be doing them on some level already, these intermediate payments often get overlooked and under-resourced in favor of the granddaddy of them all — the fiscal transaction.

But all three of these payments require a value exchange, not just the fiscal payment. So make sure your company is providing unique value in order to earn all of these payments.

Payment #1: Attention payment

In the discovery phase, your ideal prospect shows some interest or has a felt need for your product. Sometimes this is front of mind, and they are particularly interested in the topic in their daily interactions.

Other times, it’s very subconscious, and they don’t even realize they were ever considering purchasing your product or even your product category until they come across your message.

Read more…

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

A squeeze page is an interstitial page with a form. In other words, if you link to a piece of content your prospective customers want, this is the page they get first. This page asks them for more information before they can get that content.

The squeeze page is the tollbooth on the expressway of information

Squeeze page is not a neutral term. It is pejorative, indicating disapproval with the process of “squeezing” people for information before giving them what they want.

Other more neutral terms for squeeze page are gate, content gate, gated content, information gate, or simply — lead form, lead gen form or lead generation form (although, not all lead forms are squeeze pages. Some are simply on landing pages that describe services and are a way for potential customers to ask for more information).

The information on the lead form is usually used for some type of lead nurturing or sales follow-up effort — ranging from subscribing people who fill the form out for an opt-in email list, setting them up with a drip campaign, following up with a sales call (or emailed sales pitch), or a combination of these tactics. (However you end up using information filled into a squeeze page, make sure you clearly communicate that to prospects before they fill out the form on that page, supported by a link to a privacy policy as well.)

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Inbound marketing is typically a term reserved for B2C companies striving to draw customers in with flashy social media campaigns, witty tweets and beautiful infographics.

B2B companies have the very unique challenge of asserting themselves and becoming a voice of authority in their respective industries, and inbound marketing can be a powerful way to do that – the nuances of which are not just reserved for those speaking directly to consumers.

Starting off, attracting the right people and the speaking to the right audience is essential in a B2B inbound marketing campaign.

Using three simple questions that you can use to structure your own campaigns, see how Stephen Bruner, Marketing Manager of Vertical Markets, Precor, detailed how the fitness equipment company successfully navigated an inbound strategy with a complex sale at Email Summit 2015.

Who are we speaking to?

Before you start sending a message, you first need to understand who it is that you’re communicating with. Different audiences require different perspectives, pieces of information and credibility indicators than others.

In the example below, Precor identified three key industries that it targets as customers. Each industry will demand unique selling points that will best serve the end user.

For instance, a traditional club gym might care more about user-friendly entertainment systems and headphone connectivity – features to distinguish them from competition — whereas an educational facility, such as a university gym, would want to know about longevity and quality of products.

What message are we trying to convey?

Once you’ve established who your audience is, establish how you fit into the conversation. This can best be done by either accentuating the positive elements that they already have or reducing, even possibly eliminating negative experiences.

In the Precor example below, the team focused on reducing a pain point or anxiety that a future gym owner is facing. (Realize that Precor first targets a specific audience before refining the messaging.)

Although the content is from Precor, notice that they are not selling product at this level. The content is simply establishing who the brand is in the mind of the future gym owner. The message being conveyed is simply presenting Precor as a resource for fitness center owners.

Creating this type of shareable and digestible content makes it easy to follow Precor on Twitter, with the understanding that these articles will help owners alleviate pain points throughout their careers – creating an association of credibility with the Precor brand at the genesis of the business.

What do we want them to do?

Lastly, establishing a year-long calendar for each persona is essential in maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers and followers.

In Precor’s example below, you can see the color-coded strategy for each persona across the year, having “flow-ups” through the second half of the year.

As you analyze the content schedule, you can see a very clear funneling throughout the year, pointing each group toward a purchase. Pointing, that is, but not pushing.

For example, from January to April, you can see the healthy content mix of infographics, videos, white papers, blog posts, with a few promos throughout. Fitness equipment is a complex sale, with expensive equipment and a limited budget.

This is a very intentional use of email and social content, driving the customer down the funnel with informative and sharable content. This plan establishes when a conversation will happen in a logical order throughout the course of a year, focusing on the long-term relationship between Precor and its customer.

By establishing such a plan and creating a hub of content, Precor is not only helping customers make decisions, but also creating fans and building credibility within the industry as a valuable resource.

You can follow Jessica Lorenz, Event Content Manager, MECLABS Institute on Twitter at @JessicaPLorenz.

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

How do you serve “ready to buy” customers and “just looking” prospects on the same page?

You don’t want to alienate one group while speaking to the other. However, you still need to offer both sets of customers the next step they need no matter their level of interest.

To answer that question and more for one B2B SaaS nonprofit, Jon Powell, Senior Executive Research and Development Manager, MECLABS Institute, worked with Shari Tishman, Director of Engagement, and Lauren Wagner, Senior Manager of Engagement, both of VolunteerMatch.

VolunteerMatch was selected as the “client” for this year’s Email Summit live test. The team designed a three-part series of experiments, the first two leading up the interactive live test to launch tomorrow, Feb. 24, here at Summit.

Since today marks the first day of Summit activities I’ll be giving you a behind the scenes look at Test No. 2 of the series. Check out the MarketingExperiments Blog to learn about the test background and call for treatment ideas and to learn about the results and what they mean.

Before we get into the specifics of this test, let’s review why this test is important to the series. The solutions page test will help us to understand the most attractive derivative value for actual sales-ready leads to include in the call-to-action section of the email for optimization at the Summit.

Basically, we should be able to take what we previously learned about prospects and transfer it to another channel of testing: email.

Experiment background

Primary Research Question: Which call-to-action variable cluster will achieve the highest contact page conversion rate?

Secondary Question: Which call-to-action variable cluster will achieve the highest total page click-through rate?

Test Design: A/B split test

Before the test

Prior to the test and its control, the VolunteerMatch team had already updated the call-to-action (CTA) on the product page. The original CTA read, “Let’s Get Started Together.” While the CTA did a good job of attracting customers across the spectrum of motivation levels, it seemed the pipeline became full of leads not motivated enough to move forward. This caused a lot of fruitless time for the sales staff.   That led the team to create a new CTA, which is the control for this test.

Control

To limit the amount of leads entering the pipeline, so that there are more qualified prospects, the team changed the copy to “Contact Sales for a Quote.” However, this left no option for those prospects simply trying to learn more. This lead to the creation of the two-option CTA for the treatment.

Treatment

When conducting analysis on the solutions page, click tracking showed that 2.39% of visitors were leaving the page to go to the demo page.

Since that would be a useful place for prospects to learn more if they weren’t ready to buy, the team thought it would make the most sense as a secondary CTA. Instead of letting those lower-motivated prospects blindly stumble around the site, a demo CTA would allow VolunteerMatch to guide them there. The copy of the Contact Sales CTA was also changed. The team hypothesized that “Contact Sales” could have produced a high-level of anxiety in visitors.

There was also a lack of clarity. What exactly does “contact” mean? And what will a quote consist of? To help answer some of those concerns, the team developed the “Speak to a Director” treatment of the CTA.

Results

Let’s look at the metric results to the secondary research question: overall clickthrough rate. As you can see, adding another CTA increased overall clickthrough. The question after that would be if it this impacted the clickthrough to the Contact Sales CTA. However, there was no statistical difference between the control and the treatment.

In fact, no visitor who clicked through to the sales contact form page on the control filled out the form. However, of those who landed on the sales contact page from the treatment, 30% of visitors filled out the form.

Additionally, of the 8.1% visitors to click on the demo CTA, 12.5% of them converted on the demo.

What you need to know

It’s possible to serve two groups of prospects on one solutions or product page. There can be fear when adding a second CTA that you will lose clickthrough or leads, but you won’t know if you don’t test.

For VolunteerMatch, that wasn’t the case at all. The second CTA did not diminish clickthrough to the contact form page. Rather, it seems as if the update copy in addition with another option to learn more allowed better qualified visitors to click through, seeing as the rate of completion went up.

Additionally, we were able to better guide lower sales-ready visitors to a page that might be better suited for them: the demo.

Adding the demo CTA allowed us to decrease the need for unsupervised thinking on the part of visitors. If left to themselves, visitors might not have found the demo and could have left the site without gaining information that would have led to an eventual sale.

Email Summit live test

Be sure to attend Jon’s session tomorrow after lunch with VolunteerMatch – “Hands-on Live Test Lab: Learn how to improve your already successful marketing” – to contribute to the live test.

If you’re not able to join us here in Las Vegas this week, we’ll be sharing a case study about the Email Summit live test in the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing newsletter after Summit.

If you liked to learn all of the top takeaways from Email Summit 2015, stay tuned to the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Newsletter. An event recap with everything you need to know will be published in the coming weeks.

You can follow Selena Blue, Manager of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute on Twitter at @SelenaLBlue.

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