MarketingSherpa Blog

At MarketingSherpa, we bring you the ideas and inspiration to help you come up with your next great marketing idea. We do that through our marketing case study articles, our data charts, and our How I Made It In Marketing podcast discussions.

The idea is – you are the hero of your own journey, sometimes you just need a little inspirational grit to build your next great pearl of wisdom around.

That’s usually great. Marketers are ideas people always looking for that next game-changing idea.

Of course, sometimes you just want something done for you. So today, we’re bringing you a bunch of tools built on MeclabsAI (MarketingSherpa’s parent company) leveraging not only MarketingSherpa’s 25 years of business journalism, but also Meclabs Institute’s patented marketing methodology.

No need to think. Just click and get something done for you. And MeclabsAI is free to try, you don’t even have to register to get started (although you will get additional free interactions if you do register).

Here’s a quick look at some of the 14 apps in MeclabsAI, along with a small piece of the outputs they gave me when I tried to get help on MarketingSherpa’s homepage.

Value Prop Analyzer

MeclabsAI CEO Flint McGlaughlin has taught extensively on value proposition, and he has built that methodology into this app.

Just give this app your homepage URL, paste in the contents of your homepage, or share the core of your value proposition and it will apply the Value Proposition Ranking Criterion, empowering you to identify and leverage your brand’s unique strengths while pinpointing areas ripe for optimization.

For example, when I paste in the MarketingSherpa homepage URL, it gives me…

Let’s delve into the Value Prop Ranking Criterion to assess your value proposition’s power across four dimensions: Appeal, Exclusivity, Clarity, and Credibility.

Your value proposition ranks as High on our scale, indicating a significant strength in attracting and retaining your target market’s interest. It suggests your offering is well-received yet harbors potential for enriched distinctiveness and trust-building efforts.

Try Value Prop Analyzer

Competitor Analyzer

“Know thy self, know they enemy,” Sun Tzu said. Competitor Analyzer can help outsmart the competition.

Just give it the URL for your website and a competitor and let the insights roll in.

First, I put in the URLs for MarketingSherpa and The Wall Street Journal, but the Competitor Analyzer called me out on that – “The websites you’ve provided are not typically direct competitors, as one specializes in marketing research and insights (MarketingSherpa), and the other is a comprehensive news outlet with a strong emphasis on financial and business news (The Wall Street Journal).”

So then I tried MarketingSherpa and MarketingProfs, and here is a part of the response…

Website Components Comparison

Try Competitor Analyzer

Chat Transcript Analyzer

Zoom sessions are harder to present on than in-person speaking, at least for me. I have a harder time connecting with the audience.

So I love the chat feature because I can get a little feedback, and tweak what I’m talking about to better serve the audience.

That’s a little easier to do when there is another speaker on the Zoom as well. Then I can read through the chat while that person is speaking.

If it’s only me, it’s hard to walk and chew gum, and often the best I can do is read the chat after. But it can be a lot of info to take in.

Chat Transcript Analyzer does a nice job summarizing it all for me. For example, I spoke on the AI Guild main session about process-level value prop and AI last week, pasted in the chat transcript, and here is part of the analysis I got…

Mathematical Analysis:

I’m glad to see that humor was used effectively. I love stand-up comedy. And I always love to infuse a bit of that ethos every time I speak.

Try Chat Transcript Analyzer

Webpages Analyzer

Just past in your URL. Here is part of the analysis I got for MarketingSherpa…

Try Webpages Analyzer

CTA (Call to Action) Builder

This app aligns with Micro Yes #7 (Yes, I will trade) and Micro Yes #8 (Yes, I will finish) in Meclabs Micro Yes Architecture approach to creating effective marketing.

When I pasted in MarketingSherpa’s homepage URL (and you can use landing pages as well), I like this point from MeclabsAI…

Value:

1. • Emphasizing immediate access to valuable resources, a CTA might read, “Gain Free Instant Access to Exclusive Marketing Insights,” showcasing the value exchange—action for knowledge.

Nowhere on the homepage do we say that MarketingSherpa’s case study articles, data charts, and interviews are free (they didn’t use to be).

Try CTA Builder

Headline Builder

This app aligns with Micro Yes #1 (Yes, I will pay attention) and Micro Yes #2 (Yes, I will engage deeper).

When I pasted in the homepage URL, part of what it gave me was a breakdown of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives I was using, which is a great start to playing with different headline options.

Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Analysis

Try Headline Builder

Appeal Builder

This app ties into Micro Yes #5 (Yes, I want this now).

If you want a new message crafted, provide it details about your product or service.

If you want an existing message analyzed, share the current message along with specific objectives or concerns.

Here’s a sentence I liked from what Appeal Builder gave me, “Unearth practical case studies, research, and training designed not just to inform but to transform.”

Try Appeal Builder

Conversion Index Analyzer

Just paste in a landing page or homepage URL, and this app will use Meclabs well-known Conversion Sequence Heuristic – C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a – to provide an analysis.

For example, when I pasted in the MarketingSherpa homepage URL, I like how it summed up what we’re trying to do to tap into the motivation of our visitors – “The homepage of MarketingSherpa offers a broad scope of resources, including articles, videos, podcasts, and free resources, that align well with the intrinsic motivations of marketers seeking research-based insights and actionable marketing strategies.”

Conversion Index Analyzer

Article Analyzer

When I posted in the URL for a recent MarketingSherpa article – Strategic Foundations of Niche Launch Success: B2C marketing examples with results – It has this nice summary in the FAQ…

1. What is the main advice for competing against big brands in a niche market?
   • The main advice is to focus on smaller, overlooked opportunities where larger brands might not be active, leveraging SEO, and using AI for content creation to establish a presence in niche markets.

Article Analyzer

Video Transcripts Analyzer

When I pasted in the transcript from the most recent episode of How I Made It In Marketing – an interview with Nicole Sumner, Brand Director, Ollie – it produced an FAQ that included this key hard-won lesson from Sumner’s career journey:

Q: What was a key takeaway from Nicole’s missed job opportunity?
A: The key takeaway is the importance of explicitly communicating your career ambitions and interests to be considered for opportunities.

So even though this app is called Video Transcripts Analyzer, it works with audio-only content like our podcast as well.

Video Transcripts Analyzer

Related resources

Customer-First Objectives: Discover a 3-part formula for focusing your webpage message

Website Wireframes: 8 psychological elements that impact marketing conversion rates

Website Wireframes: See real webpages optimized for marketing conversion

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.

A beneficial button is a call-to-action (CTA) button that explains a benefit the customer will receive by clicking on it. In other words, the button has a process-level value proposition.

This may sound obvious when you read the above sentences. If you’re asking the customer to take an action, of course, the button should have a benefit. However, I challenge you to navigate around the web right now and see how many buttons are truly beneficial.

Three categories of CTA buttons

There are three categories of CTA buttons:

• Value-neutral buttons – These buttons don’t have a positive or negative value. For example, using the word “Submit” or “Go.”
• Value-negative buttons – These buttons have a higher cost than value. For example, “Buy Now.”
• Value-positive buttons – These are beneficial buttons. They show the customer the benefit of taking action. For example, “Download My Template.” By filling out the form and clicking the button, you will get the value of a template download.

You can see the full landing page yourself: Free Template to Help You Win Approval for Proposed Projects, Campaigns and Ideas

How to categorize your CTA buttons

Two marketers can see the same button and disagree on whether it’s a beneficial button.

For example, Kodak considered a “Subscribe” button to be a beneficial button for its email registration page while a “Submit” button was not. (From the case study List Growth Tactics: How Kodak added 33% more email subscribers and 53% more YouTube followers).

Read more…

Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states that an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by a net external force.

It’s a good reminder when we discuss the call-to-action. The customer’s natural state is inertia. They don’t care about our products or services without a clear, compelling reason.

The only reason they move is because the perceived value of the product (shaped by previous experiences, word of mouth, press mentions and especially your marketing) begins to pull them into motion. And usually the final piece that tips them from being at rest to in action is the aptly named call-to-action.

Which is why it’s surprising that so many calls-to-action don’t really live up to the name. CTAs like “submit” and “request a quote” give your customers very little reason to act.

Oh, let’s take a quick break for our own mid-blog post CTA:

This blog post was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

OK, we’re back. While the above call-to-action is not value-laced per se, our hope is that it’s surrounded by value. If you find this blog post helpful, and you would like to receive more helpful content like it in your email inbox, then making you aware of the email newsletter’s existence will encourage you to overcome inertia and act.

The quest for the perfect CTA

Now that we’ve talked about the bad, let’s talk about the good. We’ve been asked about the perfect CTA. What should the words say? What color should the button be? Friends, we can’t help you find the perfect call-to-action. It doesn’t exist.

Because CTAs are very context-dependent. The best thing you can do to improve your CTA is to understand your unique customers’ psychology as well as your own.

To help simplify that for you, we’ve created a nifty PDF download of checklists you and your team can go through as you seek to optimize the conversion rate of your CTAs. You can download it for free here: The Call to Action: Six quick checklists to help the busy marketer improve conversion rates.

I’ll walk through one of the checklists with you in this blog post, and you can get more background on the checklists along with a deeper understanding of how to improve your calls-to-action in 150 Experiments on the Call-to-Action: Six psychological conditions that hinder our results.

Read more…

Habits are strong, and the biggest part of their hold over us is that we don’t often recognize them. Sometimes, our worst habits need to be pointed out in order for us to summon up the will to actually change them.

Email marketers have a lot of these small habits that have built up over the years. We use so-called “best practices” so often that we run them into the ground, forgetting to actually test to see if these habits are helpful or harmful.

Read below to see if these three habits are ones that you need to break.

Habit #1. Tricky subject lines

Every marketer is looking for that new hook that is going to catch a subscriber’s attention the second before your carefully crafted email is tossed into the trash.

That can get old for subscribers though. When you’re constantly changing up your subject-line strategy to find that hook, what you usually end up losing is clarity.

There’s something to be said for people knowing what they’re going to get when they open up your email. I’ve fallen prey to my fair share of tricky or “clever” subject lines, and when I realize what has happened, I feel … well, tricked.

For example, once I got onto the list for an online wine club, which was essentially a millennial twist on a wine-of-the-month club.

I never actually signed up or ordered anything, but about once every two weeks, I would get an email letting me know I had some kind of free something-or-other waiting for me; I’ve unlocked some fantastic new deal.

It always came “directly” from a person (we’re all email marketing friends here; we know that the chances that person actually, totally wrote that email are at best 50/50 — it’s a friendly trick to make you forget it’s a company) and their name would rotate between about three different senders.

The subject lines were always wildly different, and clearly they were experimenting to see what would finally grab my latent attention.

That’s fine. And actually, it’s not a bad tactic to test and see what works on unmotivated subscribers, especially if, like this company, you’re sending an email about the same thing over and over again.

Then one day, I got this email in my inbox — it grabbed my attention, and without thinking, I actually clicked.

Read more…

On the afternoon of the first day of the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver, attendees had the chance to interact with ten expert practitioners in a roundtable format.

Event participants were able to choose an expert, sit at the table for a quick presentation, and ask questions and interact with each other on the topic at hand for 15 minutes before switching to a new table and a new subject.

Topics at the different tables ranged from optimizing social media to high-impact call-to-action button copy that converts.

I wanted to provide SherpaBlog readers with a sample of some of the high-impact material the experts shared during this roundtable session. These examples of roundtable content illustrate the wide variety of advice Optimization Summit attendees were presented during the session.

 Here are some key takeaways from several of the roundtable experts:

  Read more…

The Boston Globe has been in the content business for a long time. The newspaper published its first edition on March 4, 1872. Now in the digital age, it offers a free online version. At the end of last year, the company decided to include a premium, subscription-based digital version as well.

This blog post reveals an early, inside look at the approach The Boston Globe is taking to launch a paywall, complete with an honest look at a few bumps the marketing team hit along the way.

Peter Doucette, executive director of circulation, sales and marketing, The Boston Globe, will present further information about the newspaper’s marketing efforts at the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Denver, June 11-14.

THE CHALLENGE

The marketing challenge for The Boston Globe is maintaining two Internet offerings, one free and one paid.

Peter says the issue is to grow digital consumer revenue while at the same time maintain and grow digital advertising revenue.

“In the end, how do you take a prospect and turn them into a customer?” he asks.

  Read more…

A successful email campaign is not the result of a single tactic or dumb luck. There are dozens of factors — everything from your list, to your timing. Knowing which factors matter most can greatly improve your “luck.”

Three factors are critical to successful email campaigns, says John Murphy, President, ReachMail:

Factor #1. Offer

Factor #2. Audience

Factor #3. Design

Murphy mentioned this in an interview for our latest article on email design. His comment got me thinking about how email marketers can improve in these areas.

Read more…

You test subject lines. I know you do. Nearly every email marketer I ask tests subject lines. You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve heard: “Yes, we test our emails. We test the subject lines every week.”

The fact is the subject line is only a tiny fraction of what you can test. It reaps only a tiny fraction of what you can achieve. There is so much more. Let’s look at the five most effective variables you can test in email campaigns, pulled from a chart in our brand-spankin’-new 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

The solution's complexity also affects the business buying cycle

One way to look at the Business Buying Cycle is to break it down into stages. There are lots of potential stages and we can talk about those stages later but let’s keep it simple for now and just use these five:

1. Connect Stage: for generating demand by helping a prospect connect a business problem or goal with the possibility of a solution
2. Validation Stage: for validating the worthiness of that expression of interest into a priority project
3. Investigation Stage: for doing a deep dive on one or more solutions in order to figure out what to do
4. Purchase Stage: for picking the right solution and negotiating the right deal and terms
5. Operational Stage: for implementing or using the solution

Calls-to-action in the form of particular pieces of content should align with these stages. In other words, you need a hypothesis of the stages of the buying cycle and a hypothesis of the content that maps to each stage.  If someone responds to content in a stage, marketing can use the interest in that content to score the level of interest higher.

By using this approach, B2B companies can use a call-to-action that is appropriate within the overall content marketing effort and extrapolates interest in the offer based on the stage of the buying cycle, testing and iterating to a more efficient demand generation and lead nurturing strategy

In this blog post, I will focus on four of these stages.

Connect Stage

When generating demand early in the connect stage, companies should use credible (often third-party) information about the business problem solved by their particular solution.

For example, research might reveal that problems with sales forecasting drive purchase decisions for sales force automation (SFA) software. To take advantage of this information, an SFA vendor might contract with a company with an industry reputation for providing credible information on sales forecasting best practices to write a white paper on sales forecasting, perhaps based upon field research.

On the other hand, if research revealed that chief financial officers (CFOs) were the individuals feeling the pain of faulty forecasts, perhaps a paper by a brand more familiar to CFOs would be more effective. In other words, B2B companies should keep in mind the target community when developing the call-to-action offer strategy.

Validation Stage

In the Validation stage, the offers need to perform a slightly different job. In this case, the responder has expressed an interest in the problem.  Now the offers need to validate the worthiness of the solution so that it becomes a priority:

• A case study
• An exercise to assess the potential return on investment
• A webinar that features a current customer with a well-known brand
• A report by an industry analyst (e.g., the Gartner Group in the computer industry)

Response to each of these offers indicates a higher probability of purchase than the initial response to an offer about the business problem.  In other words, it’s predictive of purchase intent. Again, interest in these content offers would result in a higher lead score.

Investigation  Stage

In the Investigation stage of the buying cycle, customers are generally ready to speak to sales.  Offers in this stage can identify those customers and prospects.  For example, a prospect may want to develop a request for proposal (RFP) to send out to a short list of vendors under consideration. As such, an RFP template (biased to the solution of the vendor) might be very useful to the prospect and even highly predictive of an increased likelihood of purchase.

Likewise these calls-to-action will also indicate the customer is prepared to speak with a sales representative:

• Implementation guides
• Technical white papers
• Competitive guides
• Evaluation software
• Total cost of ownership exercises
• Other similar content

All of these relate to the concerns of customers and prospects entering into a deeper investigation of a particular solution.

Purchase Stage

Once the buying cycle has reached the purchase stage, the sales channels should primarily deliver call-to-action offers. Purchase stage offers include discounts on a product or a service, and sales representatives can use these types of offers to win deals and to expedite the purchase process. These offers should be left to the judgment of salespeople and their managers in order to avoid unnecessary discounts.

Across the entire Business Buying Cycle, vendors can also include generic offers such as sweepstakes or free merchandise to generate demand, and move prospects toward a decision. One thing to keep in mind, is unlike the more targeted calls-to-action, these offers are not as predictive of future purchase behavior.

Related Resources

Free Web clinic, March 30th — Converting Leads to Sales: How one B2B company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months

B2B Marketing: The FUEL methodology outlined

MECLABS

How and When to Use Content in the B2B Sales Process (Members library)

B2B Marketing: Relevant content must move beyond “glitz” and tell a properly sequenced story

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog