The Complete 2022 Marketing MASTERCLASS for Startups and Leaders

1. Introduction: Welcome to Session 1, where we will be looking at building out your own model. Now, as you may know, more and more marketers and really marketing in general are constantly under pressure to justify their marketing effectiveness, prove ROI, and create efficiencies at scale. Does any of this sound familiar? Well, to do this well, many organizations and really every organization should have a model for how they track consumers from anonymous visitor all the way to loyal customer and promoter. Now the goal of building a model is to ensure that you have a way to track and measure every primary step a consumer takes during the buying journey. The benefit of having multiple models of historical numbers is that then you are able to build out future scenarios by which you can more accurately gauge ROI, create the efficiency at scale, and identify opportunities for marketing activities on each channel. I look forward to building out your model with you in the coming. 2. Introduction to Building Your Model: Hello and welcome to the marketing course for leaders, or really anyone who wants to be a leader in the marketing and business field. I am Brian Bosworth. I will be your instructor over the next six sessions. Now I want to address this point at the very beginning. There are a number of great courses out there that teach you how to do marketing activities, such as writing a blog post, installing Google Analytics post to Linkedin, or create an ad on Google AdWords. However, I have rarely come across practical marketing knowledge specifically designed for leaders that teaches much more than just the how of marketing, but addresses important leadership questions like when or why. When you aggressively target PPC and spend a lot of money on that channel, why do you write one content article versus another? Which channel is most important in order of priority? It's being able to answer questions like these that make both in organization and the leader successful. Now personally, I have worked as a founder of startups and in strategic marketing leadership roles for over 20 years. As a lover of early stage companies, I have my share of experience in digital and marketing, UX design technology, SEO, CRO development, project management. You name it. In both the profit and non-profit sectors. Meaning, I have seen lots of approaches to marketing and businesses both successful and not so successful. But I've also had the opportunity to help numerous start-ups on almost every continent, as well as overseeing global marketing teams, optimizing digital channels with millions of monthly visitors down to completely new startups. The point being, I have had a ton of experience on a global scale and that's what I want to share with you during this course. Because I continue to run into the same questions, concerns, and challenges and companies of every size across the globe that you most likely face yourself. It's not enough to know how to post. There is a science behind the most successful marketing teams and campaigns. So this course is an aggregation of the most useful knowledge that I have gleaned and shared with marketing and business leaders in order to improve their marketing efforts while staying ahead of the competition. Now, let's start with the most important and fundamental question when it comes to marketing. And that is, are you clear on the relative importance of demand gen, that is generating demand for your business or your product. Now whether you're in B2B or B2C environment, chances are you desire to increase the demand for your product or service. The reason this question is important is because there's no cookie cutter pattern to business development and marketing. It varies for every business. So do you know for your business, your product? The importance of DemandGen, also important to note, is depending upon your ACV or average customer value. Some organizations will have sale lead motions, while others will have a marketing lead motion. Now in my experience and from what I continue to hear in the industry is that if your ACV is under 45 k, then you will be a marketing lead organization. It doesn't pan out otherwise. That is if you do the numbers, it is not cost-effective to be a sales lead. Org, if you're ACV is only a few thousand dollars, you simply cannot support and outbound sales team. Now some will drop that number down to even 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, but that's still wraps up most small B2B companies. Secondly, does your product or service meet the minimum lifetime value? Aaron Ross, who's at guru in the SDR space, said the LTV usually needs to be at least $10 thousand, otherwise it won't be profitable. So coming back to the original question, knowing your ACV and really your CAC, your customer acquisition cost. We'll determine if you are a marketing or sales lead org. Now we'll walk through all of these numbers and logic in detail in just a bit. But the point is it is still possible to introduce a logical and thorough process into your business and marketing efforts in order to make wise decisions based on a defined ROI. That's the purpose of this course. And so I look forward to diving much deeper into topics like this in the coming sessions. 3. Role of Marketing: I started this session by asking you if you are clear on the relative importance of DemandGen for your business. If so, where do you start? Let me present a scenario that you have most likely faces some point in your career. Let's say you're tasked with marketing a new product. Where do you start? Do you pull the trigger on paid search spent thousands of dollars and just hope it pays off it. So when do you stop and try something else? Do you build a website and start generating daily blog posts? How about social? These are challenges are real dilemmas that employees from many companies of all sizes fate, which is why season Fortune 500 companies have a deep understanding and appreciation for both the role and challenges of marketing. Let's take a look at some global giants in the business world. Nike, Apple, and Coca-Cola brands we're all familiar with. These companies may already be some of the most recognized brands in the world, but they nevertheless spend billions of dollars every year on their marketing efforts. And you can bet they're not doing it on a whim. They know exactly what those dollars will bring them in return. They have analyzed, aggregated, and researched their respective markets in order to know very closely their ROI. So here's a question. How much do you think each company spends on marketing alone? Well, Nike in fiscal year 2015, spent more than $3.2 billion in demand creation expenses, think of advertising, endorsements, events, etc. Tens of billions of dollars have gone into building its brand. This should leave no question in your mind as to the importance of demand generation. And yet, they are already one of the most recognized brands globally. How about apple? Although Apple chose not to disclose his advertising budget in 2016, the decision though, comes after Apple did state that they're advertising expenses rose 50% to a record 1.8 billion in 2015. Keep in mind, Apple is one of the top three most recognized global brands. And then of course there's Coca-Cola. Now I've had the opportunity to travel the globe, living in and visiting nearly 50 countries, many of which are third-world countries. In my non-scientific research, I am stunned to see how far reaching Coca Cola's marketing and branding exists. You can be walking down a jungle trail in Central Asia and come across a large plastic Coca-Cola sign with vines in the rest of the jungle trying to swallow it up. Now, scientifically, according to Interbrand, they are the most recognized brand and the world, almost every year, year after year, they are at the top spot. And yet despite Coca-Cola stronghold in the soft drink industry with 44 percent market share and being the most recognized brand in the world. And their vast global reach. The company has sequentially improved as marketing spend every year. In 2015, Coca-Cola spent looking at almost $4 billion on its marketing efforts. Now let me ask this question. What about RC Cola? And you may ask RC who? Exactly? Now you may remember if you've ever taken marketing classes about this prolonged marketing battle that began in the seventies and the soft drink industry and, and saw the beloved major brands duke it out via celebrity endorsements, wards, promotions and onslaught of advertisements and even erase into space. And yet RC Cola during this entire competition of branding, remain on the sidelines. This kinda quiet blue and red cabinet seemed content simply to be. Today our SQL is simply that a middle of the line, so to brand. But did you know at 1 in history, RC Cola gave Coke and Pepsi a run for their money. Believe it or not, Royal Crown Cola, RC Cole used to be one of the most innovative companies in the beverage industry. It was the first to come out with canned soda, the first caffeine free soda, and the first 16 ounce soda. It was the first to take diet cola mainstream in the first day take nationwide taste tests. What happened to this cutting edge soda brand? Well, in 1980 for a guy by the name of Victor Posner, a billionaire businessman who specialized in corporate takeovers. Well, they acquired royal crown, which owned about 10 percent of the market share, not dominating, right, but still a key player. In the nine years, Posner owned royal crown. He's slashed the company's marketing budget and battled executives over the company's direction. Three years later in 1987, the government convicted them on tax evasion charges and soon after investigated and for insider trading. However, while royal crown was busy cutting marketing costs and dealing with internal turmoil, Coca-Cola and Pepsi were dumping millions into unprecedented marketing's arms race. What you had were only two colas, Pepsi and Coca-Cola. With its limited ad budget, RC came out with some standard issue TV spots showing people chugging from a bottle before pausing the smell of the camera. But to most people though. More than 100 year-old brand was largely invisible. Invisible because they had not invested in getting their name out there, their brand out there and constantly being on the cutting edge. There's no question brands like Nike and Apple and Coca-Cola, even with their incredible brand awareness, do not underestimate this necessity of marketing. Now I know that these are major global brands. But on the other side of the spectrum, startups in microbusinesses often view marketing as a matter of survival, not theory. That is, their business will disappear if they don't invest in it. So both the major global brands and the startups and microbusinesses they understand marketing is important. I have to do this. However, between those two extremes, an interesting thing often happens. Companies forget about marketing and generating demand. You see what I have found is that once a company starts to earn some customers and revenue, it's tempting to let things slide, just like RC Cola. Some of these companies stop marketing altogether or put it on a back burner and just turn out some blogs and emails and social posts with maybe an occasional webinar and they call that marketing. This kind of marketing is the quick fix mentality that is simply undertaken when something is wrong. Not enough. Customers need more revenue, good, right? Some blog posts and do some marketing, and that should fix everything, right? This is dangerous thinking. And it's one of the reasons so many otherwise successful businesses wind up failing. They get used to feeling busy, thinking successful marketing is just being busy producing lots of marketing material until they realize it's too late to start with, they should have been doing all along. This is what I want you to catch. Demand generation and other marketing efforts should be the regular and sustained business activity that gets your business where you want it and keeps it there. But it should not be done on a whim nor as a last resort because this is the best way to throw away your money in this course. And during this session we're going to look at the smart way to market. What are the most important marketing motions to get the biggest bang for your buck, the highest ROI? If you can answer that question, then you are no longer guessing at your marketing campaigns and efforts. But you will start to logically and calculating Lee, nowhere to spend your dollars. Peter Drucker put it this way. Because the purpose of business is to create a customer. The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions. Marketing and innovation. Marketing innovation produce results. All the rest are costs. I love this. This is something that the most successful brands and organizations of all sizes understand. That is this mentality should stretch across the entire business. He also went on to say, marketing is not only much broader than selling. It is not a specialized activity. All it encompasses the entire business is the whole business seemed from the point of view of its final result. That is from the customer's point of view, concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise. This perspective that Peter Drucker talks about is what keeps Fortune 500 companies so intense about sustained, well-funded marketing, even when they're already successful by any measure. While on the other hand, inexperienced businesses wait until they're hurting before addressing the marketing needs. My goal is to walk you through the mindset and strategy of smart marketing leaders. So you can avoid some of these same mistakes. 4. Importance of Modern Marketing: So let's address some pain points are common threads that we have found among early stage companies. Specifically, number one, there's a belief that marketing needs to be an important part of the revenue engine. This is often well understood, but this is where understanding tapers off because secondly, companies are often not sure what to do. So they don't do much of anything or too much of everything. Marketing becomes this diversity of activities that can appear daunting to the inexperience under funded or even the overwhelm. Do you invest in organic e-mail nurturing website paid social Partnerships, webinar, trade show, etc. Where do we spend? I don't know. And so three, there was this kind of lack of confidence that they're heading in the right direction with their marketing efforts. It's this lack of understanding and confidence. I would like to address with a couple of questions. And these two questions should actually give every company of every size pause. Number one, where should I invest marketing dollars, right? There's lots of places in lot of people who want to take your money. What channel, what activity, how many personnel? And secondly, if I make this investment, what should I expect to see in return? More importantly, is it possible to measure the return before the investment? In this session, we are going to build a model to answer these two questions. Here's a clip from Moneyball. It's a movie. It's a true story about how data analysis was introduced into the sport of baseball. For this reason, this equation in the upper left, right here, I'm projecting that we enjoy with 99 games in order to negative process and we need to score at least 814 runs in order to win those games and allow no more than 6455. What's the code that I've written for a year to year projections. This is building in all the intelligence that we have to project players. It's about getting things down to one number, using stats away, reread them, were fine. Players that nobody else can see. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James in mathematics cut straight through that. And only 20000 notable players for us to consider. I believe that there's a championship team of 25 people that we could afford it because everyone else in baseball under values and like an island of misfit toys. Did you hear that quote in there? It's all about getting things down to one number. That's the purpose of the model that we keep talking about. Because there are so many numbers in a typical business that's easy to lose sight of the goal in the face of a sea of information. Because going back to the two questions we just proposed, most brands, can it tell you exactly where they should be spending marketing dollars? And secondly, if they make the investment in a specific channel, they don't know what kind of return they can expect because they don't know how to measure it. Again, this underscores the absolute necessity of building your model before you do anything else. 5. Framework for Building Your Marketing Model: First off, when trying to determine marketing activities and targets, where do we start? Well, first things first, and this should be true of most of your business number 1, know your numbers. You need the data, the historical data in order to build a smart marketing models. Secondly, the user journey. Do you know the steps a user takes to become a customer? Will pull together the detailed metrics concerning the user journey. Thirdly, you've gotta know your conversion rates. Once you are able to measure and gathered the metrics, the steps for the various stages of buyers journey. Now you can start to calculate conversion rates. Fourthly, build your model. Fill in all your numbers so that you have a historical model that you can reference. And fifthly, this is where it gets fun. You build your scenarios. This is a scenario is a hypothesis or an educated guess based on historical metrics of how much it will cost to earn a lead from specific channels and marketing campaigns. You're ready, excited. All right, let's dive in. 6. Step 1: Know Your Numbers: So step one to building a smart marketing model is understand the expected value of a specific marketing effort. Marketing efforts have many names, campaigns, scenarios, motions. Choose the name that works for your company. Let's start with a couple of questions concerning your numbers. As you see here. Number one, are you measuring them? And secondly, do you know how to measure them? Now, usually when I ask the second question, I get one of two responses. Number one, it's just blank stares. Secondly, sometimes I'll get this lengthy discussion about scorecard metrics displayed generally in and less Excel tables copied and pasted week after week by some intern and AD are then translated into PowerPoint templates. Scorecard metrics are numbers that represent how you did overall in the past concerning revenue, demos, leads, et cetera. But they give very little advice on how to specifically improve and where to invest marketing dollars. If all you're doing is scorecard metrics, well at least everyone will get their bonus based on the numbers, but you will have very little idea how to get better. Which is why we start with the most important first step. And that is you must know your numbers. Let's run through a few high-level examples of numbers you should know. First off, do you know your revenue targets, your goals? What's the end game plan for your organization this year? And what product and pricing mix will get you to your revenue goals. Secondly, how much does this site visitor worth to you? From social e-mail paid organic? Remember, each channel holds a different value. How about a new leader and Inbound Query? Can you put a dollar amount to each visitor from each channel and each engagement? How about a social click? How, how much should you logically, statistically pay? Phrase social click. How about a demo or free trial? What is the actual dollar value of a demo to you and your organization? Are you purchasing email lists? Can you define the value of equality, e-mail address? How about the value of a subscriber to your blog or newsletter? How do you even define your kinda basic KPIs are your key metrics that you are trying to measure along the buyer's journey. And if so, are they the right ones? As we start to discuss data and data points that should be measured, let's define a few important concepts first. So we are using the same terms of measuring the same metrics. First off, let's ask the question, what is the lead? In marketing terms of lead is any person or entity, such as in a business that is potentially interested in purchasing your product or service. Some leaves are going to be better than others. A hot lead might be more qualified, that is more ready to buy than say, a cold lead that needs more convincing before pulling the trigger. For this reason, a hot or warm lead would be understandably more valuable to you than a cold lead. But how much more is the important question which leads us to the second item we need to define and understand, which is what is the value of a lead. This should be based upon historical numbers. The value of something is what it is worth to you. If you sell Windows, Let's say at an average price of 5000 dollars per house and you turn a lead into a sale, then that lead is worth $5 thousand to you. However, we know that not every lead you get will end in a sale. In reality, you might only turn two out of 10 in queries into a sale. That would make your conversion rate 20 percent, right? Two out of ten. That means you can expect to generate about $10 thousand from 10 leads to sales out of 10 leads at $5 thousand each. That's because we know on average you're closing two out of ten sales. This means that the value of one lead is actually $100, right? Ten leads 10000 dollars. Here's the formula as you see here. Lead value equals value of sale, $10 thousand divided by number of leads, 10 leads. This example is obviously a bit simplistic and you can get much deeper with this stuff and we will. But as we discussed earlier, some leads will be more qualified than others. And we will also want to look at what the actual profit is, not just the revenue. More on that in a minute though. Third thing we need to define is CAC or customer acquisition cost. Do you know your customer acquisition cost? That is, how much does it cost to acquire a customer? Now we're getting into business costs which rightfully introduce more numbers. Traditionally, a company had to engage in shock done style advertising and find methods to track consumers through the decision-making process, right? Think of marketing mediums like billboards, print, magazine, newspapers, TV, and radio. It is difficult to track the exact ROI for those marketing motions. Obviously. However, today in the age of digital transformation, where most of marketing is done digitally, many companies can engage in highly targeted campaigns and track consumers as they progress from interested leads to long lasting, loyal customers. In this environment that CAC metric is used by both companies and investors. This is how it works. Add up all your marketing expenses including salaries and overhead, and divide by how many new customers were acquired in a given time period. Now using our previous example, if you spent 10 thousand marketing dollars in a month and added 10 customers, then your customer acquisition cost is $100. From here you'll be able to tell how effective your marketing really is. Now obviously, there are caveats about using this metric that you should be aware of when applying it. For instance, a company may have made investments on marketing in a new region or early-stage SEO that it does not expect to see results from until later period, right? These instances are rare. It may cloud the relationship when calculating the CAC. Just take that into consideration. It is suggested that you perform multiple variations to account for situations like that. So the formula is simple. Cac equals dollar spent divided by customers earned. You can take it one step further by identifying your channel, customer acquisition cost. Your customer acquisition cost per channel is how much you spent to acquire a customer from Facebook versus let's say a trade show, a webinar paid organic. The same general formula applies. Now knowing the CAC for each of your marketing channels is what most marketers want and need to know. If you know which channels have the lowest CAC, you know where to double down on your marketing spend. The more you can allocate your marketing budget into lower CAC channel is the more customers you can obtain for a fixed budget amount. The simple approach is to break out your spreadsheet and gather all your marketing receipts for the year, quarter or month, however you want to do it, and add up those amounts by channel. For example, how much do you spend on Google AdWords and Facebook advertising? In this case, you might want to put this in a column called PPC or paperclip. How much did you spend on SEO and blogging? This might go into a column called inbound marketing costs. Now that you know how much you spent on each channel, you can imply a simplistic formula and assume each channel worked get the same amount of customers as the next channel. This would be an averaging method. It's not perfect. The only issue is that it can be difficult to know which channel is responsible for which customers. You can easily see where this approach becomes futile. Say you only ran one PVC advertisement on one day just as a test, you spent $10 and that's all. When you look at your spreadsheet, it will appear PPC would be the best marketing channel because of its extremely low CAC, it would be unwise to double down, obviously on pay-per-click because, you know, you really didn't utilize it all for that period of time. For e-commerce companies that sell physical products, easy to know what pay-per-click advertisements lead to direct sales because of the conversion tracking the advertising platform provides. In this case, you can determine that value and note this in your spreadsheet. This will give you a better idea of how your PPC campaigns are doing relative to the rest of your marketing spend. Now I want you to note that this is provided in only some B2B situations like HubSpot or bright funnel, Kissmetrics or some third party software that utilizes APIs. But many other marketing automation platforms fail miserably at attaching top of the funnel marketing efforts. With bottom of the funnel customer acquisitions, not lead customer acquisitions and the dollars associated with that customer. It's also worth noting that some tools trace paying customers back to their last touch, first touch, or even multi-touch attribution source. For example, this means you can see the last channel the customer visited before doing their final sales with your business. Now if a customer came from organic search results, you would know that SEO would be responsible for that customer acquisition if you're measuring last touch. Now this is where marketing gets philosophical. Now one school of thought is that each marketing channel supports the next channel. It's a combined effort. You've heard of integrated marketing communication or IMC. As you can see in this graphic. For instance, your blog posts reinforce your pay-per-click ads in all channels work together harmoniously to bring in customers. This is a common notion in outdoor advertising. Billboards reinforce TV campaigns which reinforce radio spot and so on. Ultimately, it comes down to your own company's philosophy on how to attribute customer acquisition. If you feel that last touches good enough, you can use that model for your calculations. There are other multi-touch models that split it out evenly that I personally prefer to last touch your first touch, but choose your own calculations that makes sense for your marketing efforts. The idea is that you want to get more detailed in your understanding of customer acquisition costs channel. Instead of just as a whole, if you know your customer lifetime value, then you can divide your CLV, your customer life time value by your CAC. Now if you know your customer lifetime value, then you can divide your CLV by your CAC. Now the ratio of your CLV to cost of customer acquisition is a very important metric as it gives you a sense of your business sustainability. You should be focused on finding ways to increase that ratio by increasing your CLV and or decreasing your CAC. Knowing this will help you know how much you are able to earn per year based upon the number of customers you have and customers you acquire. This will then help outline your yearly business expenses. Point is simple. No, your current metrics set the targets, then develop the appropriate marketing plan. This answers the all important question. Ultimately, how much am I comfortable spending to acquire a site visitor, get a demo, a trial, or lead. This starts to build the foundation of your marketing strategy. As Kurt ruler put it. Without a strategy, marketing is just stuff. The world has enough stuff. So be intentional. Well said, let's start by being intentional by taking a very simple high-level approach. In the homework section. 7. Homework 1: Know Your Numbers: All right, and now we come to the homework section of this course. Now the homework section is one of the most important parts of the course because this is where we actually begin to apply what you have already learned. As you can see, we are using Google Sheets primarily because it's easy to distribute and it's easy to update that way you guys are always getting the latest knowledge of the latest information. And so we can constantly be improving the homework section of the course. So on this first tab called your numbers, we have homework for you to fill out and this is called know your numbers. Now as you can see in this first channel, most organizations have this data. It's very generic, it's very overall, but it's still valuable for an organization. Understand what our goal is is to get you to start thinking along different channels. So again, this is very high level. It's very simplistic. But we want you to start thinking of at least these four numbers. See if you can't gather these four numbers such as dollar spent, total revenue, number of leads and customers earned for each of these channels. Now, obviously feel free to copy and paste into other columns here as it suits your own business. Now, down below here, these are just simple calculations that give you these three primary metrics that we just went through in the session and the course. And so the idea is try to fill out these columns. Start pulling in these numbers right here, these primary metrics, because we are going to be using these later on in the course. Now I put in a blog link here because I found this really valuable. It's an infographic showing you how to calculate lifetime value from Kissmetrics. The CLV is often calculated differently depending upon your industry or your market. And so take a look at this. There's obviously different ways to calculate CLV. Finally, formula that works for you, and then you can add that number in as well. So again, the idea is just to get you to start thinking of these four primary numbers here. See if you can't gather them along these different channels so that you can get these primary metrics. Again, it's very simplistic, very high level, but we're going to dive deeper as we go in through session one. 8. Step 2: How to Measure the Right Numbers: All right, moving on to step 2. Now that you know a few high-level numbers and some important metrics that you can start measuring if you're not already. Let's move into some more detailed metrics concerning the user journey. And now let's start by asking the all-important marketing question. How do your prospects become customers? And let me follow that up with another question. Do you even know? Do you measure this journey? Do you know the primary steps the bulk of your prospects took to become a customer. Now before we get too lost in this lengthy discussion, we should define various methods of measuring buyer's journeys. Now, just a quick side note, there are lots of names for what we're about to discuss that tackle this topic slightly differently. You'll hear names like the sales and marketing funnel. This is a very popular model, if not the most popular. There's experience mapping for the UX initiated or even the buying process for the more modern marketer. Now, although we will take a much deeper look at these in Session 3, Let's take a brief look now at the three examples and the benefits of each. Let's start with funnels. If you've spent any time around sales and marketing analytics, you've probably come across the term funnels. What are funnels? Well, by definition, a sales or marketing funnel is simply a tool for visualizing where your prospects are in the process of making a buying decision. A sales funnel, as you can see as white at the top. Because prospects with all levels of engagement enter. And eventually the most engaged ones are channeled to the bottom of the funnel to be turned into sales and repeat customers. The question is, why is this set of steps to conversion called a funnel? Well, because at the beginning of the process there are obviously lots of people who take the first step. Then as the people continue along and take the next steps in the journey, some of them dropout and the size of the crowd thins or narrows. And even further along in the process, your sales team gets involved to help close the deal. Sometimes though it's easier to visualize the funnel stages by looking at an actual sales funnel chart. For this purpose, we can agree that you undoubtably want visitors on your website to take certain actions. Maybe you want them to make a purchase, sign-up, or fill out a form. When someone does something you want them to do what's known as a conversion. In other words, the visitor converts from browsing to taking the action you want them to take. The funnel is simply the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach the conversion. For illustration simplicity. Think about a generic Amazon B2C purchase funnel. There are a few steps a visitor has to go through before they can purchase a product. Here's how that journey would look. A user visits Amazon.com, they view a product or product page. They add a product to their shopping cart and then they purchase. Now these steps can be defined as must-haves. That is, a prospect must go through each of these steps during the checkout process. Now I understand that there's by now buttons and people search Amazon products via search engines. But for illustration purposes, let's agree to these four must have steps in the Amazon B2C buyer's journey. There are additional steps and actions that can be taken in between each of these steps, but they do not matter in the purchase funnel. For example, a visitor may view multiple Amazon category pages or the blog or a contact page or careers page. But we don't need a count these in the funnel because they are not necessary steps. However, these are often important to study in order to find out if there are valuable pages that a prospect at different stages of the buying process finds useful. So to sum up, these are the three primary characteristics of a funnel. First off is the inflow. Think of the top of the funnel is where everyone goes in such as visiting your website. So when you hear people say, let's widen the funnel. This is what they are referring to. They want to cast a larger net by advertising to new audiences, increasing their brand awareness or adding inbound marketing, etc. In order to drive more people to their website, thus widening the top of their funnel. The more people there are in the funnel, the wider it is. And this is good, especially if the audiences full of your target market. Secondly, only the most interested buyers will move further down. Funnel, that is completing actions that you deem important enough to be measured as a conversion. Thirdly, steps and conversions are what drive a visitor further down the funnel. For instance, a website visitor may be at the top of the funnel. But if they subscribed to your blog or newsletter, that is counted as a conversion. If they download a white paper or case study, that may be a another conversion. Ultimately requesting a demo or free trial or even purchasing a product is the final or macro conversion or really the goal. Now it's important to note, you aren't limited to using your funnel strictly for signing up and purchasing. As if that is the only goal you have, you can put funnels all over your website to simply see how visitors move through a specific website flow. For instance, you may want to track a newsletter sign-up. So the phenyl would look like the one on the left. A visitor views the newsletter sign-up form. They submit the form and then they confirm the email, right. That's the macro goal is confirmed in an e-mail. Or how about a simple page conversion? The funnel would look like the one on the right. A visitor comes from a certain channel. So there's the channel source. They view a sign-up page and then they submit the sign-up form. That's the macro goal is submitting the sign-up form. The point is this figured out what your macro and micro goals are and what you want visitors to do on your website. And then you can create a funnel for it. Once you start to outline the steps and gather the data, then you'll be able to see where roadblocks are and how to start to optimize your funnel. Let's quickly dig a little deeper into this idea. Here's an example of two more funnels that occur every day with consumers. Let's look at the funnel process for a retail store and then see the corresponding steps in, in e-commerce store. So for instance, the retail store, the customer walks into the store. Step 1, the customer looks at products, they grab the items and put them into her cart. The customer walks to the checkout and the customer completes the purchase with the store clerk. Now for the e-commerce funnel, you'll notice that it's very, very similar. The customer visits the e-commerce website, that customer views of product page or pages that customer adds the item to her cart. Customer enters the checkout process and then finishes the checkout process and clicks purchase. Now, the e-commerce store has the fortune of actually being able to see a funnel. That is, we can attach data points to every one of those steps and we can measure this user journey from the start of the funnel all the way down to the macro goal. And so with a funnel report, you can see where you are starting to lose customers. That is where customers are starting to drop off. As you can see, the benefit of funnels on digital channels is that you can use software tools to keep accurate numbers while tracking customers through the funnel. Let's look at a funnel for a SaaS product that may hit a little closer to home for many of you. In this example, a user visits a website, they sign up for a free trial. The user trials that product and then upgrades to paint subscriber. You can see that we can start to add exact numbers to each step of the funnel because this is a digital channel. Now, obviously you got to ask the question, do people have to travel a SaaS product before pain? Generally, no. But it's a good idea to track it so you can see if it's a roadblock for them. This is how that funnel would look with both numbers and conversion rates. Do you see by looking at this funnel, any obvious opportunities, possibly such as between used product and build. In this example, the business manages to get a 150 people to use a product, but only 11 people convert to build. That's less than 0.4% of all visitors. Now I understand there are opportunities for improvement at every step of the funnel. But it's important to first work on the areas that need the most attention. The more people they can convert to build, the more revenue they'll have. This should be the first area of the funnel to optimize. Again, we'll look at this more in session three, but I want you to start to see the whole picture before we dive into deep. All right, up next we'll dive into the experience mapping, which those of you familiar with UX and design may have had some experience with. 9. The Art of Experience Mapping: So we've just looked at the common sales and marketing funnel. Now let's take a look at experience mapping or the customer journey map, which adds another layer to a typical funnel to make it personal and real. Hence, the experience part of it. You see a customer journey map or an experience map is an illustration that shows all the different steps at your customers go through as they do business with you over time. In addition to showing just what they do, as in a typical funnel model, as we just saw. It also shows customers thoughts, their feelings, and emotions. Now the goal of the customer journey map is to get a holistic view of what the customers going through from their point of view. And really what it's like for them on a personal level, the human level. Now, quick side note, this means you will actually have to start talking to customers and prospects. I understand most marketers like the high beyond the computer screen and just look at the data. But this too is data, very valuable qualitative data. Every year I'm becoming more and more convinced of the necessity of this kind of customer journey map. Because without an understanding of how consumerism is evolving, without a true sense of customer centricity, businesses will continue to sell market and serve customers from a position of assumption rather than purpose. You see the future of customer relationships and business in general lies in experience architecture. This means that businesses must assess what the true experiences related to their brand products and people. Not solely in the blur of metrics and endless Excel tables that do not measure users feelings, opinions, and frustrations. Let's take a look at another experience map. As you can see from this experience map, there are a variety of styles to each one, but the benefits and the goals are the same. For instance, you're able to identify crucial touchpoints that had the biggest impact on customer satisfaction. It also helps you focus your website towards the user, not yourself, not the business, into something more called the user-centered design. You're also able to better identify the users potential needs and wants before they're even able to express it. It can also provide you with a clear presentation of the whole process. The holistic process carried out by the user, which can eventually help with client presentations and pitches similar to storyboarding. It can also summarize the information that you already have about users and their behavior. And lastly, it helps you locate additional UX improvement opportunities, as well as the areas where there's a risk of dissatisfying the user. So if you were to ask me what is the point of experience mapping, I would identify at least these four areas and this is why I use experienced maps. First off, it uncovers the truth. You begin to understand the real touch points, the pain points of your users. What parts to customers touch and do not touch? How did they feel when they interact with certain elements and engage with other pages. Secondly, it helps you chart the course. You're able to collaborate to synthesize key insights into a customer journey model. Thirdly, it tells a story so you can have empathy and understanding into what the user is going through. And lastly, I would say the point of experience mapping is to use the map so you can create new ideas and better customer experiences. This isn't to go through an entire exercise. So you have a really neat display of a user journey notes so that you can learn from it and then integrate it into your business and design and marketing processes in the future. Now we'll talk more about this in the next section when we address building persona's and the belief framework. But I want you to be at least a little bit aware of what a buyer's journey looks like. So you can start to identify the different touch points at various groups of buyers in your buyer journey. Finally, in the next video, we're going to take a look at the buying process. 10. The Buying Process: So far we've taken a look at the sales and marketing funnel, which is the most popular model by far out there. Secondly, we took a look at the experienced mapping model, which is far less popular but has gained traction in UX design as it allows insight into what the customer is actually feeling during the buying journey. And thirdly, we're going to be taking a look at the buying process. The buying process is just another way to look at the buying journey. This specifically, what you see on the screen here is an example of HubSpot inbound marketing methodology. As you can see, this is basically the funnel turned on its side. But for argument's sake, let's focus on the differences. As we go through this though, keep in mind, buyers don't want to be prospecting or demoed or closed. These steps, add 0 value to the buyer. Buyers are looking for additional information about your product that can't be found online. Remember, this is helpful for you, not the buyer. So you can personalize your sales and marketing process to the buyers context by understanding the buying journey. What is the buyer's process? Well, the buyers process is similar to the buyer's journey and a funnel, but it's more general. It refers to the overarching states that a buyer goes through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service. At its core, this journey is a three-step process. The awareness stage is when the buyer realizes they have a problem. The consideration stage is when the buyer defines their problem and starts to research options to solve it. And thirdly, is the decision stage, and this is where the buyer eventually chooses a solution. Now, obviously there's more stages than just these three that can and have been added to other buyer's journeys. But this is the most basic example. Now let's take a look at each stage identified by HubSpot and ask some important questions that will help you put together the buyer's journey for your company. The first stage is the awareness stage. And during the awareness stage, buyers identify their challenge or an opportunity they want to pursue. They also decide whether or not the goal or challenge should be a priority. In order to fully understand the awareness stage for your buyer, you got to ask yourself a few questions. First off, how did buyers described their goals are challenges. That is, what do they hope to achieve and what is keeping them from achieving these goals? Secondly, how do buyers educate themselves on these goals are challenges. Where do they go and what do they consider valuable? And then you should be able to prioritize that list. Thirdly, what are the consequences of inaction by the buyer? More than just not making their numbers. What about frustration, embarrassment, confusion, maybe their job depends upon it. You gotta be able to identify that. Fourthly, are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing their specific goal or challenge? It's like the old adage. You don't know what you don't know. As an example, I worked with an organization who informed me that if their prospects don't use their service or a service similar to theirs, then that prospect would be breaking the law in their industry. Now obviously, a lot of them don't know it. And so this organization that I work with spends a great amount of time in their marketing messages and content material, educating and informing their prospects of a galaxy of using a service like theirs. This is where you have an opportunity as well to educate people during the awareness stage. And fifthly, how do buyer decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized? That is, what are the pressures that makes them decide one goal or challenge over the other? You can see how knowing these questions will start to direct you into creating the right content. The second stage of the buying journey is the consideration stage. And during this stage, buyers have clearly defined that goal or challenge that they personally have. And now they're committed to addressing it. They evaluate the different approaches or methods available to pursue the goal and solve that challenge. So you've got to ask yourself at least these four questions. First off, what categories of solutions do buyers investigate? Have you or can you categorize the different solutions? Secondly, how to buyers educate themselves on the various categories? Is it obvious to them that there are different categories or do they lump every option in your industry together? Thirdly, had a buyer's perceived the pros and cons of each category. How important are the pros and cons? Can they be prioritized as well? And fourthly, how do buyers decide which categories right for them? Are there lists of features and benefits that a buyer can relate to? These are important questions to ask and understand because these are the actions that common buyers take when they are starting to consider solving their challenge or pursuing their goal. The final stage of the buying process is the decision stage. This is the stage where buyers have already decided on a solution category. As an example, let's use one of our favorite topics, filing taxes. In category one. You can do it on your own from files you have printed off from online. And I probably wouldn't suggest this route, but this is a category nonetheless. Secondly, you could use an online service or software like QuickBooks or TurboTax. Thirdly, you could use an accountant, right? These are different solution categories. Well, at the decision stage, a user has already generally decided on a solution category that is right for them. So now they begin to look at competition within that specific category. So here's five questions you should ask yourself to define the decision stage. First off, what criteria do buyers used to evaluate the available offerings within that solution category is a price, is equalities that availability support. You've got to be able to understand and prioritize the top criteria and then own it. Secondly, when buyers investigate your company's offerings, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? Competitors? What concerns they have with your specific offering? You should be able to develop a pros and cons, a likes and dislikes list. And then you should enhance and promote the legs while being honest and fixing the dislikes. Thirdly, who needs to be involved in the decision-making process? Who are the stakeholders? Have you identify these people for each person involved? How does their perspective on the decision differ? Now we're going to look at this later when we develop persona's and start to tailor content for each of the stakeholders. But it is still important for you to be able to identify who the stakeholders are. Fourthly, do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it, such as a 14 day free trial or freemium content or a live demo. What does your market need? And what can you support, or do you need to support? Fifthly, outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparation such as implementation plans are training strategies? Do you have these steps clearly outlined to reduce on-boarding concerns or costs? Now the answers to these questions will provide a robust foundation for your buyer's journey. So let me ask you, how do you define your companies buying journey? If you don't have an intimate understanding of your buyers and are able to answer these questions quickly and clearly. Then just start conducting a few interviews with customers and prospects or other sales people at your company to get a sense of the buyer's journey and the struggles they face and the questions they have. 11. HOMEWORK 1: BUYER JOURNEY QUESTIONS: The second tab for session when homework in Google Sheets is called questions. And really it's identifying the buyer's journey questions. So we have built out this very simple matrix for you to start inputting the data. We just went over it in the video series for you and your team, or just for you to gain a better understanding of your target market and the process. They go through. The ideas that you formulate in your mind and put it down in this Google sheet in a tangible form. The various wants, needs, and pain points of each buyer persona. So for instance, what are the goals and challenges of persona one? That is, what do they hope to achieve and what is keeping them from achieving those goals? How about education? How do buyers educate themselves on these goals and challenges? So to the consequences, what are the consequences of inaction by the buyer? Now, fill out this Google Sheet in conjunction with watching the videos, you may wanna go back and re-watch them. As I walk through each one of these primary points. Again, the goal is just for you to formulate in your own mind and put it down in this Google Sheet. The various wants, needs, and pain points at each buyer based upon each one of these topics in the awareness stage, that consideration stage, and of course down in the decision stage. Now, I've put in here three personas to start off with. You can obviously replace this with whatever persona you have. A, you don't have to fill out all three persona's. Start with one, make it very simple, high level. And over time you can improve this chart. But the idea is you have one place that you can constantly go. And so that you and your team can say what are the goals and challenges for Persona one? Well, we have already defined them. And again, over time this is going to evolve, it's going to improve, it's going to grow. But there needs to be a central location where you always go and you come back to and you work on and think through and you wrestle with not just with yourself, but with your team as well. Each one of these factors. And again, don't be limited to just these five factors for the awareness stage. You can add to this, you can take some away, find out what is meaningful to you and your target market, and then build out your own buyers journey questions. 12. Step 3: Conversion Rates: Welcome back to step three in building out your model. Now we've already taken a look at the first two steps of this process of building out your model, which is number one. You've got to know your numbers. That is, you must be measuring the right metrics. And secondly, defining the user journey, which includes both conversions of steps and primary goals. And now we come to step three, and that is knowing your conversion rates. Once you're able to measure and gather the right metrics for the various stages or steps of a buyer's journey. Now you can start to calculate conversion rate. Now I want you to note, we will talk about this a lot more during Session 3 with CRO. But for now, we will walk through a quick high-level overview of the basics in light of the entire funnel. But first, let's define some basic terms concerning conversions to make sure we are saying the same thing. Let's start with the most basic term, conversion. What is a conversion? Now we're going to spend an entire section on conversion rate optimization, as I just said, where we will look at this topic from every angle. So for the purpose of this discussion, let's get a quick and simple definition. In order to agree on a metric that should be measured, a conversion is any desired action on the user will half that you define. It could be a purchase, an old fashioned phone call, contact form, submission or a newsletter sign-up, a social share, a specific length of time a visitor spends on a webpage plane, a video downloading content, really, any action that you define as a conversion. You may be a rock star at this already, but many of the small businesses that I need only have a gut sense of where their new business comes from because they haven't been identifying or tracking their conversion through any process or funnel. I've even found this with larger organizations worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, all those, this may seem basic. I will continue to repeat myself until companies grasp this and begin affectively tracking conversions. Because knowing your conversion rate or conversion rates is the first step in understanding how your marketing and sales funnel is performing and what marketing and avenues are giving the greatest return on investment. So the most important next question is, what is a conversion rate? If you're engaged in B2B Lead Generation focused marketing. And you've got a limited marketing budget. You're probably trying to decide how to allocate your funds that you can get the most qualified leads, right? Well, one of the main criteria for making this decision is the conversion rate for each marketing channel you have under consideration. So we come back to the question, what is the conversion rate? Well, the conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action. And digital marketing and conversion rate is usually the rate at which a website visitor becomes a lead. Essentially by filling out a form, for instance, to share their contact information with the understanding that you will continue to market to them. Conversion rate can also mean the rate at which leads, leads become marketing qualified leads, then sales leads. And finally, customers are really perform any action that you have identified. In essence, conversion rate is just a generic term that tries to describe the rate at which customers take the actions you want them to take in order to progress from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next. Now let's take a look at the marketing funnel once more to make this clear. Alright, this funnel should look familiar. We have just taken a look at it a few videos ago. When someone on your website does something you want them to do, such as a sign-up, make a purchase for a lot of form, et cetera. It's known as a conversion or a primary conversion. This is usually identified at the bottom or the last step of the funnel. Now as you remember, a funnel is used to track the steps that lead up to that conversion. For example, e-commerce companies want people to purchase products on their website, right? That's the primary conversion is purchasing products. So their funnel would have steps like visited site number one. Secondly, viewed product, plays products and cart and then purchased. Using a funnel report, you can see where people are beginning to drop off in the path to conversion and where conversions are low, which is why it is important to find a software that provides the right metrics and automation for your organization. But to sum up for now, conversion rates are simple math calculations based on the numbers from the different stages of your buying journey. So for example, let's say you have 1000 website visitors per month and 30 of them purchase a product, you've got a conversion rate of 3%, 30 out of 1000, right? To shift to a B2B example, the calculation for a lead conversion rate would look like this. Now I know lead conversion rate is a narrow focus at just one stage of the buyer's journey. But this is often the most popular and most measured stage of that conversion process. Probably due to this stage bringing in the dollar. Now what I want you to note as before, you can calculate these rates, you need to define what type of action defines lead conversion in a particular campaign. More often than not, lead conversion is defined as being accomplished when the lead becomes a paying customer, all right? But converging in itself can mean any other customer behaviors such as becoming a newsletter subscriber, downloading your white paper offer, signing up for an online seminar, sharing content on social media or a specific length of time spent on your homepage. Once you've clearly defined what a conversion is, you now know what to measure and how to compute your lead conversion rate using this formula. Now if your conversion is defined as leads who become new customers, then the formula should look like this. Lead conversion rate equals number of customers divided by number of leads. Conversion rates are equal to the total number of conversions divided by the total number of leads and multiply by a 100 to get the percentage. So if you had a 100 leads and 20 of them became new customers, your lead conversion rate is 20 percent simple, right? But that's just a start. Before moving on, here's a quick word of advice. There are limits to conversion rates. It's important to remember a marketing channels conversion rate is not the be-all, end-all when it comes to deciding where to allocate your marketing budget. Other factors such as cost per lead, lead volume and lead quality, definitely need to be a part of the decision-making process. And we will take a look at these in much more detail during the CRO session. For instance, a attending a trade show is usually a costly endeavor and doesn't yield a huge number of potential leads compared to the cost, right? If you're experienced with trade shows, you would be nodding your head right now. So while contacts made it a tracheal may have a high conversion rate when it comes to turning them into leads. Prospects yielded by treads, your activity will likely end up with a high cost per lead because you spend so much money getting into a trade show. On the other hand, well, social media advertising may have a relatively low conversion rate. It is also much less expensive than mounting a trade show and has a much larger reach, meaning that it has the potential to deliver more leads for a lower cost. However, when it comes to looking at your digital marketing mix, we're all marketing activities are relatively inexpensive and conversion rate data is abundant. Comparing channel conversion rates can be an effective way to decide which channels you want to emphasize. All right, that was just a quick word to the wise. As we look at conversion rates, it's important to know what a good conversion rate is. And so we'll take a look at that in the next video. 13. Do You Know Your Industry Averages?: Let me start this section by asking a question. Do you know what the average conversion rate for your industry is? There's nothing worse than an employer boss coming in and telling you that the average conversion rates globally are 5% and therefore we should be at 5%. What they failed to take an account with these generic statistics is that there are variances that can and do occur across industries and markets and regions. And time of year, right? Seasonality is a huge factor in conversion rates. Because conversion rate averages will vary depending on all these factors, including what industry you belong to. You need to be aware of these figures on this chart to accurately gauge if your lead generation campaign is a success or if there's room for improvement. Now, recently Marketing Sherpa did this study to determine the average website conversion rates by industry. Again, take this somewhat with a grain of sand simply because your seasonality, your industry, your market, it's all going to fluctuate. And so your historical metrics are extremely important when you come to finding out your average conversion rates. Nevertheless, this study by Marketing Sherpa found that the average conversion rate for a website in the manufacturing industry, for instance, the rate at which an anonymous visitor fills out a form to identify themselves is 4%. This is in contrast to say, the financial service sector, which converts at 10 percent. But I put this up here as well to point out something that the study underscores and that is, a lot depends on the definition of conversion in these industries. Perhaps a conversion for the financial service sector is just an email address. Well, for retail, it's everything from name and address to bind preferences. That is why it's important to get more granular and actually start to take a look at conversion rates down the funnel. Here's an example from kept Tara for just the software industry alone. Now this example breaks down the funnel or buyer's journey into four stages, allowing for three conversion rates. Where visitor becomes a lead, a lead becomes a qualified opportunity, and qualified opportunity becomes a sale. As you can see according to cap Tara, the conversion rate average for lead generation, that the first column in the software industry hovers between five to 10 percent. An important part of tracking performance, as seen here, is looking at conversion rates at each stage of the sales process. When we are talking about conversion rates, MQM, these are marketing qualified leads and SQLs, sales qualified leads. Those are the two columns on the right. They provide bigger opportunities because they have been identified as leads who want to hear from you and learn more about your product. On average, SQL conversion rates are higher than MQM conversion rates because these are leads that have been identified as those who are interested in your product and therefore have a higher propensity to buy. For this reason, not surprisingly, it's much harder to convert top of funnel visitors compared to those farther along in the sales funnel. That's evidence in this chart by the fact that 7% of web traffic was converted into a lead, compared to 36 percent of those leads that were qualified into a sales ready opportunity. But put it in perspective, once you get that crucial contact info and you're able to qualify them, you're working with someone who wants to hear from you and wants to learn more about your product. So moving a known prospect over to the sales team becomes a lot easier than convincing an unknown visitor to fill out a form, right? Common sense. Now a quick side note, while 7% is a good benchmark for a software website conversion rate, that number can differ dramatically depending on the Add channel. For example, word stream did an analysis of B2B conversion rates on thousands of Google AdWords accounts. And they found that the average conversion rate for B2B advertisers with just 2.23%, with a top-performing accounts reaching up to 11.7%. Of course, two to 11.7% is a pretty big range of performance. But most of the disparity comes from the difference in Add channel and quality of traffic that comes from an AdWord campaign versus any visitor to a software website. So if you're getting lots of clicks but no conversions, you probably need to make some changes to increase conversions with your landing page. Does the landing page provide the info they were expecting based on the ad copy and the keyword they searched is our strong offer that they'd be willing to submit their contact info for, or is it super generic and bland? The important thing to take away from this data is to not just compare your numbers against the averages or of another industry because your lead gen, goals may differ. Ideally. We take it one step further by measuring the average conversion rates by channel for our industry market. Oh, the B2B marketing automation platform. Did conduct such a study by analyzing over 4 thousand of its users account data. Now while this information isn't specific to any industry, it does provide some instructive information about which channels perform the best when it comes to conversion rates. Now you should have a chart similar to this. If not, you should start measuring as much as possible and gathering your own data and averages that you can benchmark and bullae from. Now we can see here that inbound strategies, including on-site and off-site SEO and blogging, yielded an average rate of 3.82%. Paid marketing or online advertising such as search pay-per-click campaigns. That resulted in 2.98% conversion rate on average, social media clocked in at 1 95 percent. Now, this study by Marketo also includes conversion rates for offline lead generation strategies such as sales prospecting. So what does, what does this data tells us as markers? Now looking at the result, Here's what should stand out to you if you want to start taking a look at potential channels that have higher conversion rates. First off, I see referral. The power of word to mouth referral is by far the highest acquisition channel for conversion rates, almost four times the average. In fact, some of the largest, fastest adoptions, things like Gmail or Dropbox or Zappos. They can be credited directly to word of mouth. So what's the takeaway? Build a great product and build a great experience. Tell the world, Azure customers to tell the world and maybe even reward them to do so. And you'll profit. Referral is a powerful channel. Secondly, I noticed inbound. Now content is king. If you've been around any sort of marketing seminars or conferences or a marketer period, you would have heard the term content is king. Now, Bill Gates predicted an article written in 1996. He said this and I'll read it to you. Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet. There's 1996, he said that now over 20 years later, this couldn't be more true, especially in the digital marketing era, were choice of content is in the hands of the consumer. Imagine a pop-up ad, such as an outbound marketing channel versus a funny infographic you chose to look at that's inbound. Data clearly shows that people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher, evidently is 28 percent more than paid marketing. What are you doing to build content to support your customers journey and engagement? And other thing I see here is sales prospecting as mining for leads. Now, to be honest, this one is a bit surprising. Lead source from prospecting convert at a third of overall average. But this goes to show you how old fashion prospecting, such as door-to-door or cold calling just doesn't work well compared to other sources. It isn't uncommon these days for me to hear about. Companies was 60 to 80% of their lead source from marketing. It's much more efficient. Have sales, do what they do. Best selling, not cold calling. Again, know your industry, you know your market, study the numbers and make your own conclusions based on the data. Finally, I want to point out email and nurture. E-mails have the lowest conversion rate. Because you see that there's that shock you at all. Now, obviously don't fire your marketing team. E-mail marketing team, I should say this is just showing conversion rate by acquisition channel. Which means if your lead source came from e-mails and nurture, you're doing something wrong, or you've just desperate, or you're a spammer, which also explains the bad conversion rate. It is important to note that e-mails and nurture both have an amazing ROI for multi-touch attribution after you've acquired that lead. Now, these statistics, though, are just for top of funnel conversions. Email and nurture campaigns, of course, are designed to assure already identified prospects down the lead conversion funnel towards sales. In other words, e-mail and nurturing our middle of the funnel marketing techniques that no business should rely on to fill the top of their funnel. Alright, let's take a look at one last chart to wrap up this section. Now this chart shows the lead quality by channel. That is the number of leads and conversion rate by channel are good numbers to measure a no. But how good are these leads? That is, you can get a tremendous number of leads from one specific channel. But are they good? How did they perform further down the funnel? Now, here's the results. This chart shows the results of if by phone study, the approval ratings from marketing channels that convert the highest quality leads. Now what I want you to note is that these are middle to bottom of the funnel conversion rates, right? When it comes to converting leads into sales. The marketing mix that helps make these sorts of conversions happen is substantially different than the top of the funnel techniques. Here's the takeaway. Based on these findings. How is your business performing? Now keep in mind, no matter where you fall in that range, there's always something that can be tweaked and improved. But what can you do to improve? And again, don't use these average conversion rates as the be-all end-all as though you have to be exactly here. I'm just using these as a reference. Meaning if your e-mail marketing conversion rate is 0.1% and you take a look at these conversion rates. Well, you might want to take a look at your e-mail marketing and say we are way off base compared to industry standard. Now, the purpose is not to depress you, but to empower you to measure and understand where you are compared to industry standards. If you're below, then you can improve. If you are at or above industry averages. Then you need to maintain and also constantly improved because you can bet your competitors are not sitting still. Alright, One final note before we move into the next section, and that is when you see all of these numbers that I just showed you, the average conversion rates, it's hard not to compare him, judge, your campaign's performance. The point of it is to make sure you're considering all of the factors that go into that conversion rate. For example, one company or one industry's average conversion rate can be higher than other channels due to a number of market factors. That doesn't mean your channel specific campaigns are performing poorly or perfectly in comparison, the traffic and leads are just different. So your data will reflect that. Judge the performance of your campaigns based on your success metrics and goals, not the industry averages and benchmarks. I provided this data to help you get an idea of what the landscape is like for similar campaigns. Not as a right or wrong answer for how your campaign is performing. So just make sure you're considering all of the factors that go into your conversion rates. 14. Step 4: Building Your Model: And now we come to step 4 of building out your model. We've already taken a look at the first few steps, and that is number one. You've got to know your numbers, right? You've gotta be measuring the right metrics. Secondly, you've gotta define the user journey, including both conversions of steps and goals. Thirdly, know that conversion rates just mathematics, which hopefully you've started to measure and analyze in the homework module previous to this video. And fourthly, we finally come to building out your model that is, now we can knowledge be put together, all that we have looked at into historical models. Again, I feel it's important to say if you're not building historical models for each channel and campaign type, then you're going to simply be guessing at what marketing activity will work for your future campaigns. In fact, underscore the need for building models. Let me show you a few typical hypotheses in the marketing world today. Do you happen to see a common thread here in many teams that have worked with the common answer to how to fix marketing deficiencies is more, we need more of everything, more blogs and more monthly webinars, more daily social posts. If we post once a day, we should post twice a day. How about a larger lead database so we can pummeled consumers with more of our emails. We have a 100 thousand leads in a database, we need 200 thousand leads. How about an e-book? I mean, do you know how much time and effort goes into an e-book, six weeks to people, a copywriter designer, maybe even the CMP will actually probably the CMO with his hands all over it and maybe a director too. And it will probably cost you about $50 thousand ones. All is said and done. You get the idea. The hypothesis in too many marketing departments today is very simple but common. We need more. However. What if we develop models, a plan, campaigns, scenarios based on research and experience that will actually move the needle. Let's start with a basic model example. Now I'm building out these models. I'm going to use the traditional sales and marketing funnel simply because it's easier to diagram. Now, in this example before, this is what we know, the historical conversion rates. We know the annual contract value of 2500 dollars, a target payback periods 12 months. Again, we're keeping it simple. And percentage of demos from a specific channel. These are historical numbers. This is something that you should be able to gather. Now in this case, assume we're referring to organic traffic. This will obviously work with most channels. Now that we have these numbers, we are able to answer two very important questions. Number 1, how many visitors do we need? In this example, it is visitors, but you can build backwards to any number, whether it's demos, leads descriptions or emails union Lead Database. Again, this can be done for any channel individually based on historical numbers. Second question. What are we willing to pay for each visitor? Now that we have this information, these historical numbers, let's plug it into a basic model. Let's start with the targets. Most companies have targets or goals for a quarter year, right? The purpose of building a model is to more accurately predict how to achieve your goals or your targets based on your current numbers and conversion rates. Therefore, we start with the target of the goal and move backwards. In other words, we're going to be building a reverse funnel. Now if our goal is 30 paints subscribers, then based on historical conversion rates, we would need if you track it all the way back, 7500 organic search visitors, again, based upon the conversion rates historically. Now the annual contract value is 2500 dollars. Then if you track that all the way back to organic traffic, we would be willing to pay $1 per organic visitor. Again, this is based upon historical conversion rates. Now since Organic is not something you pay for, You could relate this to how many visitors did a blog post bring compared to how much it cost to produce that blog post. Now again, this is very crude math, but bear with me for now. If you spent a $150 on a blog post and abroad and 300 web visitors in the last 12 months, then the assumption is that it paid off. This is also assuming there were no other benefits to having a blog article and visitors is the only measure of a blog post and value. Now there are true, but you can see how this starts to bring value when you build models for other channels like paid or social or partnership channels that you are actually spending a defined dollar amount on. Now again, this is just the starting point. So as a side note, numbers do fluctuate for seasonality. So it is best to measure 12 months in numbers as your baseline. And then compare the seasonality to a specific quarter a month that you'll be running your marketing campaigns. 15. Knowing the Value of a Lead: Let me start this section by asking a question. Why is it important to know the value of a visitor or lead from a specific channel? Well, when you know what the value of a lead is, you can determine how many leads you need each month to sustain your business and how much you should be paying for things like advertising or visitors per channel. Leads from partnerships or e-mail sent. All right, this is true whether you are using pay-per-click or really any channel for that matter, especially when you segment the value of a lead by channel. And so this formula that you see here really works. Conversions needed equals the desired revenue divided by lead value. Let's simply really quickly look at another example. Now in this example, let's say you need to generate $15 thousand of new revenue per month, a float your business. Now for each sale of $2 thousand actually costs you $100 to deliver. The profit on each sale is really 1, $1000. If two out of every 10 leads actually converted into a sale, then we could say the conversion rate is 20 percent to sales divided by 10 leads to back that up. Then each lead is actually worth $200. Therefore, the conclusion is if our goal is $15 thousand per month, then we wouldn't need 75 leads. Now it's worth noting most orgs will use a very simplistic example using revenue generated. A more accurate option would be to use the profit generated by sales as seen here, and not just the revenue. But many businesses have difficulty defining this number. So just use revenue as a guide. Even if you use revenue instead of actual profit. As long as you are constantly tracking these metrics, you will be able to make much more informed decisions and going off your gut. Now hopefully you can start to see the importance of taking a more scientific approach to understanding your sales funnel. It can help you determine things like the number of leads you need to get each month to float or improve your business. And we're How about how much you can safely spent on advertising without throwing your money away or what you can hope to expect and return based upon historical numbers. Now as someone asks you how you are going to achieve your goals, you can actually answer with a bit more confidence and clarity, especially when you start to build up models for your different channels. So let's look at a quick example. Here's an example that shows high level, the average lead value per channel. And we can see using basic analytics than number of leads, sales, the resulting conversion rate and ultimately the lead value. Now in this example, the question is, which one is better? Which one will help me reach my marketing and business goals? Before we dive into these and many more questions, a couple of things to note. First, in this, in the business world, things aren't always so simple. Not all sales are going to be equal to some sales will be a home run and others won't write. Also. Secondly, the conversion rates are going to be different depending on the traffic source. You may find that leads generated by page search convert better because you've been hyper-focused on your advertising or using keywords with extremely high commercial intent or are targeting customers that are very local to you. Lots of different reasons why there will be different conversion rates. This chart again, and really the point I want you to see is that the value of a lead may be different depending on the lead source. This you can see that elite generated from your paid search campaign is worth more to you than elite generated from organic search. Again, as a side note, if you have Google Analytics installed on your site and you should, you can determine the average lead value and enter this into your analytics goal. Then Google Analytics will do most of the hard work for you. However, if you just stuff the average revenue value into the goal value, you'll see highly inflated numbers that won't make sense as not every lead generated from the website will actually result in a sale. Just a side note about Google Analytics. But the point is this, using a realistic lead value as your goal will give you a clear insight into how your website is performing compared to other channels. And that's the benefit of building out these historical models. Because without the historical models, you can't build out future scenarios and determine ROI. And that's what we're going to be looking at next. 16. HOMEWORK 1: BUILD YOUR MODEL: Now we've come to the fun part. On the fourth tab, a session one homework, you will see build the model. And now some of this should be familiar to you based upon the third tab, where you actually build the top part of the funnel. In this build the model, you're actually going to carry it all the way through the funnel, both the sales and marketing funnel. And so this example is a B2B organic. I just simply filled out some of this information here where they visited the website, requested a demo and filled out request a demo form. This should be familiar from tab number three and cold funnel. But then we continue on down to all the way to paint subscribers. And again, the conversion rates pop up. Now, the reason this is so beneficial is we now begin to answer these two questions. And really we're jumping ahead of ourselves because this is the final stage of building out your model and that's really building future scenarios. And so you'll see more of this in the coming videos. But the idea is that if you have these historical values and these historical conversion rates, then you can start to answer these questions. How many do we need? How many of each of these do we need? And what are we, what are we willing to pay for each? Now, obviously, I just put in some random numbers here. But let's say, you said I need 15 new subscribers. So we put in 15. Yeah, all the numbers change based upon these conversion rates here. And now you can see as you work back up through the historical conversion rates, you're going to need 37,500 website visitors in order to get 15 pain subscribers. You'll also see here based upon the lifetime value or how much each subscriber is worth, how much you're willing to pay at the very max, right? This is at the very max. How much you're willing to pay for a website visit. Now, this doesn't obviously mean very much for the organic channel, but you can see how this is going to play an important role when you're talking about pay-per-click or social, or you're paying for ads on a partner website. Just again put in all the historical values. And now you can start building your scenarios. So have fun with this. Again, you can copy and paste this whole section and just start building out as many models as you want. Again, these two columns will be covered in future videos in this session. So it will help you understand these numbers a little bit better. But the idea is now you can start building out scenarios. So you take out the guesswork for future marketing campaigns. Again, these numbers aren't perfect, but it's going to be a lot better than just going off your gut or just kind of winging it. So have fun with this, enjoyed and let me know if you have any questions. 17. Step 5: Building Your Scenarios: And now we come to step five of building out your model. My favorite step, this is where all of our hard work finally pays off. Now we've taken a look at the first four steps already. First off, we have to know our numbers. We must be measuring the right metrics. Second, we needed to find the user journey include both conversions of steps and goals. Third, we need to know our conversion rates, simple mathematical calculations, which hopefully you have already worked out as well. And fourthly, something I hope you've also done is building out your historical models based upon historical data. Now we begin to build campaigns scenarios. Now let's define this first. A campaign scenario. You can read along is simply a hypothesis or an educated guess based on the metrics of how much it will cost to earn a leave from specific channels and marketing campaigns, right? This is based upon our historical models. This is the lowest hanging fruit. By doing this, you can begin to see which campaigns and channels are weak and other strong, or which ones need work or will be a success. In setting up campaigns scenarios. It is really a hypothesis on what will work for future marketing efforts based on historical data. Now we do this naturally all the time domain. For instance, let's say every time you visit a certain restaurant, you get sick, every time you learn after a while that you should avoid that restaurant, right? Future behavior based upon past, affects, past data. A really bad analogy, I know, but it illustrates what we're doing here. In other words, this is experience based on historical data that is being formulated into a model that lets you determine was some accuracy future ROI of your marketing efforts. Now compare this to traditional marketing departments. At this point of the discussion concerning future marketing efforts, that gloves come off in the conference room in business politics come to the forefront and generally, hippo wins, right? Highest paid person's opinion wins. However, with this model, we have now introduced a reality check. You can see, now, is it believable? Is this hypothesis really good? Inaccurate? Is the campaign going to pay off? We can start to see if an investment in a marketing campaign is really going to be worth it before we even start. So let's look at an example. Now here's the sample scenario with sampled numbers at the very bottom of the funnel from two separate channels, organic and social. Now let's say you have a decent organic presence. It could use a lot of help, but you are garnering some non-branded traffic. On the other hand, you have a very passionate and talented social media guru who was driving a ton of traffic through both legitimate campaigns and the fair share of clickbait. Now let me ask us, is traffic a good enough metric for success for many people and marketing departments? The answer is yes. When you look at this table though, social S3 times as much traffic as organic. Now obviously I'm using fake numbers to make a point, but I've seen this philosophy on a regular basis. The common result. The common conclusion is that social is better than organic. Just look at the traffic. However, just a cursory high level overview of the leaves. Sales conversion rates, average lead value and revenue starts to tell a different story. Right off, you can see that social visitors convert at a much lower rate, leads to sales, for instance, is 50 percent versus just 9%. Again, exaggerated numbers to make a point. Social visitors also purchase less, right? And hence a lower average lead value. And we see the end result of revenue, the most important number for any business being dramatically different. Although social was pointed far more traffic, the conversion rates leaned in favor of organic, hence the much higher revenue. Again, this is a very simplistic example. But I want to underscore why metrics are important by looking at goals and targets. Let's say your goal is to earn an extra $10 thousand. You can see right off that once you start to look at the numbers, it is difficult to justify achieving your revenue goals. By targeting justice social, you would need 15 new sales and a 170 new leads based upon your historical metrics and conversion rates. Now this doesn't mean you neglect social campaigns entirely, but you are now able to place the proper priority on right, channels and campaigns. Let's look at this sample scenario in a funnel format. Again, the purpose of doing this is to do a reality check. Do the numbers add up. Let me set up the scenario. Again. Your goal is an extra $10 thousand, right? So new sales from organic would be eight, new sales from social would be 15. This funnel shows a 50 percent close rate from SQL accounts for organic and 9% for social. So the new leads would be 16 for organic versus a 170 for social. Now let's say both organic and social convert MQ all the SQL at 80%. This is normally a very high percentage. Let's also say that 20 percent of prospects convert to MQ tools for both channels. Again, we'll keep we'll keep the conversion rates similar here and you would add in your own specific numbers. So the visitor to SQL lead would be point 66 percent conversion rate for organic and 51 percent conversion rate for social. Take my word for it right now, go back and do the numbers in a bit. But here's, here's the result. I just put in kind of the final numbers for you. We would need 3 thousand new organic visitors, which is an increase of 20 percent from 15 thousand to 18 thousand. That's doable, right? It's going to require a lot of work. But it is achievable. Achievable to grow by 20 percent. Social though, we would need to deliver over 40 thousand more visitors. That is nearly double the amount of social traffic that is already being generated. It's possible, but it is a long shot to meet your numbers by going the social route. Now obviously the conclusion should be obvious. Again, it doesn't mean you neglect social only for organic because social is still working. However, when choices have to be made concerning marketing dollars, you are now able to show a more predictable ROI for marketing spend. This is not going to be accurate a 100 percent, right? I think we can kind of understand that, but the point is, is you're going to be much more accurate than if you were just too. Take a blind stab in the dark. Now if the goal is don't work for any combination of funnels, then you have one of the few options. You either have to take another look at your goals, talk to your leadership and say we've got to reduce the numbers. Or you have to dramatically increase conversion rate, which is possible through CRO. Or you will need to identify how to place more visitors in the funnel through some other channel or method that's SEO and obviously optimizing other channels. The question still remains. What is the hypothesis on the source of best SQL's? Well, the answer is MQ else can come from anywhere. But we need to scientifically find the best source of ROI and identify weak areas we can work on. The point is simply this. Metrics can really help here. Now we're going to look later in session six on the value of UTM codes in order to improve your tracking throughout the entire funnel, something called full funnel reporting. But the goal here right now is we need to build enough funnels so that you can begin to see where your MQ walls are coming from and how to focus on the highest converting channels while improving the poorest performers. 18. HOMEWORK 1: BUILD YOUR FUNNEL: On tab three of the homework for session one, we can begin to now build out a very basic funnel in order to see conversion rates. And these historical conversion rates as we just went through, are extremely important when we get to the next stage of building up your model and ultimately building out future scenarios. Again, without these historical conversion rates, then you are simply guessing at how well a certain social or email campaign will do. However, empowered with these numbers, you have an opportunity to, to approach marketing activity with more accurate hypotheses in the results. And so what I've done for you as I built out a few just simple funnels here. This one is a B2C example. And Scott, four stages visit website, view the product, added product, a cart, and purchase products. Now these are the numbers you want to change right here in the black. These conversion rates, again, a very simple calculation. This chart is a little more complicated. Hence, this column over here, column n, you'll see the chart creator and it goes through some kind of fancy calculations that gives you more of them visualization. This is more for grins and good goals and just spices up a little bit. There is software that does this for you and it actually creates beautiful funnels. But for now this is the column we're really concerned about. Fill out column C, the values, and then take a look here at the conversion rates. This is where you want to see if there's any drop-offs. So again, very simple examples. You can build out a 100 of these based upon the primary conversion that you have already identified. In this case, the B2C example purchase product is the primary conversion. It's what you want people to do if you have a B2C website. Often in a B2B example, the primary conversion is filled out forms. So that's the macro conversion. And these are the steps that lead up to that macro primary conversion. And so again, just fill out the numbers. And now you start to see the conversion rates fill out. Another B2B example is now we start to have, we start to segment by channel, right here's organic cure social. Now, I would suggest not having many steps here because the purpose of the funnel is to identify the necessary steps that you are able to optimize. Therefore, I would avoid putting non necessary pages in these funnels. For instance, pages like the About page, our contact page, or even certain category pages may just be too narrowly focused and are not part of the conversion journey for most users. So the goal here is to create all the necessary funnels that are important for your website. So you can begin to identify if there are leaks in your conversion journey. Now we'll also explore this in more detail in session three. So have fun with this. And let me know if you have any questions. 19. Next Steps: Now at this point in the course, you should be asking yourself one of a few questions. How do I measure the important metrics? Or are all my analytics setup correctly? Or do I have full funnel reporting as we've been taking a look at? Or can I build my first funneling campaigns scenarios to start making educated decisions? Now I don't want you to miss the purpose of all this data and analytics. The goal is alignment. One of the key challenges in any organization is aligning different parts of your organization like product or sales and marketing and people within marketing on smart metrics and goals. Some key questions that ultimately need to be answered include, what are our revenue targets or what products are we going to sell? Who are we going to sell them to? Or where are we going to sell them, right? Tradeshows, online sales team, et cetera. And how many units of each product do we need to hit our numbers? You can imagine how detailed and complicated we can get with marketing models. For instance, so far we are simply assuming there's only one product. However, if you have multiple products, then you will need to answer the question, what product and pricing mix will get us to our revenue goal? Whether you have a simple or complicated product offering, the goal is still the same. It's alignment across the organization. Having metrics that show ROI, where you are at presently and how you'll get where you would like to be will help keep the delicate balance between various stake holders and apartments in organizations of any size. And once you have alignment, then you can move on to the how of marketing. Hopefully, at this point though, you have completed your most important funnels for all channels and started to draw conclusions on what is and is not working. Secondly, you have actually started to create a game plan for specific channels and numbers to measure and move. However, we realize we haven't gotten to the point of how to improve your marketing. We've simply laid out the groundwork for measuring and analyzing your funnel data. Although this is the most important first step for any marketer, the reality is that you still have to market and improve your marketing by understanding the how of marketing. And that is what we will discuss in detail in the future sessions. 20. Practical Campaign Models: So far in this session, we have approached building your model from a theoretical perspective. So I want to take a few minutes to take a practical look at building out real-world campaigns. Now to do so, I want to use several common examples that you probably use on a regular basis. Let's first take a look at a typical e-mail campaign. Now in this email example, let's say we are sending a webinar email. These numbers are all made up but not completely unreasonable. So remember, as we go through these practical examples, it's important for you to understand how we are modelling each campaign so you can input your own historical numbers. Now, in this example, 20000 emails were sent to a sample, the list announcing in an upcoming webinar. Of the 20 thousand emails, 20 percent of them were opened, equaling 4 thousand of those open the email, 25 percent of them clicked on the primary CTA to sign up for a webinar, which is the 1, 0, 0, 0, 0. Now after leaning on the landing page, 40% of these prospects ended up signing up for the webinar totally in 400. Now, after the webinar, depending upon who showed up in the engagement with sales and marketing. Let's say that there were about 50 opportunities created. Now, a quick and important side note, every organization has a different way of classifying an opportunity created. For some it's an SQL sales qualified lead, others it's an SAL, sales accepted lead. Or even in MQM marketing qualified lead or, or maybe it's even point-based. Just make sure you and your team are clear on how you define an opportunity. So of those 50 ops created in this example, 20 deals were closed at a 40 percent close rate, which again, isn't completely unreasonable because we want to track marketing campaigns all the way through the funnel. The total revenue earned is $4 thousand, meaning the average customer value, or ACV is $200, right? Twenty deals totalling $4 thousand is a $200 ACV. Now here's why building out a model like this is important. Let's say you run a monthly webinar. Now, month 1 and month 2 are relatively normal and average. There's not a lot of variance between the original email distribution lists, click-through rates, registrants, close rates in ACV, right? They all look fairly similar. Now it's important to note that nearly every organization is squarely focused on deals closed, and revenue. Now there's good reason for that, right, as these numbers keep the lights on and food on the table. So we have to be focused on dollar earned as well. This is called the full funnel. So again, in looking at this chart, I want you to notice that when we come to month 3, all of a sudden we see a huge drop in numbers across the board. Instead of around 20000 recipients, webinar three was only email to about half of that, which dramatically affected all the other numbers. Now, I chose this simple example because you think this would be obvious, right? We send the email to half of the number of people. Our numbers are going to be down. However, this is actually what happened to a client of mine. They were racking their brains trying to figure out why one of our webinars was underperforming. But once they built out their model for the webinar, it was very clear as to where the drop-off occurred. Now a chart like this will be very important when we focus on conversion rate optimization in Session 3. Because if we want to increase deals closed and revenue earned, we either have to widen the top of our funnel up in this section or improve the conversion rates throughout the buyer's journey. However, it may not always be this simple. Let's take a look at a little more complicated example. Now in this next example, we are looking at a common social campaign. Let's say for this social campaign, you boost a post that is promoting an e-book, right? This can easily be done on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. Now let's just keep it fairly simple. Your ad is served up 10 thousand times. That is, you have 10 thousand impressions. You have a 5% click-through rate totaling 500 clicks, 500 prospects who land on your e-book landing page. 100 of them downloaded your product e-book. Now since this was a hyper targeted social campaign, your sales team close 20 percent of the ops created equaling 20 closed one deals totalling 4000 dollars earned revenue, which is an ACV of $200. Again, your own numbers will make a lot more sense with a model like this. But the reason why building out a model is important is that not only do you see conversion links within your own model, but you can quickly compare successes and failures of this campaign with other campaigns. Take for instance, these three campaigns. The first campaign we just went through where there were 500 social cliques that ended up in 20 deals closed. The second campaign had twice that with 100 clicks, but still had only 20 deals closed. Notice though the 50000 impressions, but his campaign will get back to that in a bit. The third campaign has slightly more clicks at 700. They close 30 deals with the ACV of only 133. Now, without going into too much detail, you can quickly see how this is extremely valuable for a team. Because in one single screenshot, you're able to see where the leaks are in your conversion rate or where your ad collateral is simply not resonating with your audience. Again, the second campaign had collateral messaging or a CTA that evidently didn't resonate with the target audience, right? Look at these very poor conversion rates when compared with your other campaigns. And as you can see, $6 thousand was spent on this campaign but yielded only $4 thousand in revenue, right? This is not the business model that you want. However, although campaign 3 had normal social interaction, the engaged audience is simply not as valuable as the first campaign by the ACV. The goal here is to learn overtime what works and what doesn't work. You'll begin to see averages and are able to optimize your campaigns based on past feedback. However, without a complete model like this, you will be flying blind every time you post a social. Let's look at one last real-world example that just happened to one of my clients a couple of weeks ago. Now, like all campaigns and channels, Let's start with the basic model. In this case, we're looking at a paid ad campaign. Now a typical paid ad will look very similar to a social boost. So let's use the same numbers as in our last example. We have 10 thousand impressions, 500 clicks, 100 OPS created, 20 deals closed and $4 thousand earned. Remember though, when you're building out your own models, you will begin to develop your own averages, meaning you are able to determine how much a click is worth in dollars earned. For instance, 500 clicks earned us $4 thousand in this sample example, each click then is worth $8 to the brand. Therefore, your cost-per-click bid should be quite a bit less than $8 per-click. Knowing this number is important because it is part of what makes up the LTV to CAC ratio. That's the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio. Now because there are a number of different expenses that go into acquiring a customer. Knowing how much a paid ad click is worth in revenue is invaluable for your business. Before we look at this example, though, I feel is important to say that in a typical campaign, there are a number of moving parts. Thus, the more variations from one campaign to another, the more difficult it becomes to narrow down what worked and what didn't across your various campaigns. Making, developing averages that much more difficult. And that's exactly what happened to this one client in their paid ads. Here's some sample data that is similar to what we went through with the client. They were running a monthly webinar and one of their sources of traffic was paid at, hence the three different paid ads, one for each month. Now paid add 12 are almost identical since the ads and landing pages are very similar. There's not much difference between these two months. However, in month number 3, you will notice a huge drop-off in webinar sign-ups. With this model, we were able to quickly trace it back to the paid clicks and ultimately impressions write-off. We removed much of the mystery as to why the webinar sign-ups were under-performing because we were able to compare paid add three with other historical add numbers in averages. So for the client, we ended up walking through each paid ad, comparing messaging, CTAs, audience targeting, and the different settings for each paid ad. We finally located that the underperforming ad was accidentally limited to display only on mobile devices. Now, upon further sleuthing, we realized that the mobile device category was actually performing normally, but we had just excluded desktops and tablets for this one paid ad, hence resulting in very low impressions. Now, these are basic, simple examples, but you can quickly see how valuable building up your own historical models can become over time. Because as you do, you'll begin to see average click-through rates, average customer acquisition costs, and average customer value. Knowing these numbers will help you not only build better models and optimize campaigns, but it will help you make better business decisions because you will finally be able to clarify the ROI for your different marketing activities. Meaning you will know where to spend your dollars and Y1 channel is more valuable to you over another. However, without building out your own model for each channel, you are simply flying blind when it comes to your marketing efforts. 21. End of Session #1: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass. 22. Session 2: Welcome to session two, where we will look at building out your own belief framework. Now the belief framework is really the core, the foundation that pulls together all the other sessions within this course. Now in modern marketing, we must come to an understanding that different people have different beliefs at different stages of the buying process. Some beliefs need to be exposed, while other beliefs need to be nurtured or changed or directed because belief is one of the strongest motivators consumers have. Now at the completion of this session, you will have developed your own belief framework that you can immediately implement in your marketing efforts. I look forward to building out the foundation of your marketing with a belief framework in this session. 23. Introduction to the Belief Framework: We now come to the foundation of the marketing playbook, and that is the belief framework. In this section, we are seeking to define a primary element of marketing. And that is customer beliefs. That is, we're seeking to answer questions like, what beliefs do your prospects and customers currently have about your industry, your product category, maybe even you and your product. And secondly, what are the beliefs that you need to create at the different stages of the buyer's journey. Or who, that is, what personas hold these beliefs. And how do you change their beliefs in order for them to move closer to a purchase decision? And what would create these beliefs? Now as we start this discussion about beliefs, it's important to point out that beliefs are not the same thing as content. That is, you cannot just create content thinking you have identified and are able to challenge previously held beliefs. Content is simply a tool to help shape a consumer's beliefs, which is where the belief framework comes in. The belief framework is the foundation of how you engage with the consumer. Because without a framework that content has no defined purpose, no specific goal or objective. Therefore, creating the belief within the consumer whether or not to choose you and your product over your competitors, is the essence of marketing. Beliefs like, can I trust this brand? Can I respect this brand? Can this brand satisfy my needs? Will this brand and make my life better? Is this product worth the cost or the risk? These are just some of the beliefs that must exist in the consumer before they choose your brand, your product, or your service over our competitors. Now, if this idea of consumer belief is new to you, then let's start with a basic definition. Belief is trust, faith or confidence in someone or something. Now I like this definition. A belief is in assumed truth. If this is the case, then everything there's a belief including this very definition. You see, we create beliefs to anchor our understanding of the world around us. And so once we have formed a belief, we will tend to persevere with that belief. In fact, my world is smooth, everything is going nice when my beliefs are upheld and established. But my world can get a bit turned upside down when my beliefs are disrupted, which is probably why people like to hang around other people with similar beliefs. This is also why it is so hard to change my beliefs about certain products. Let's take a quick look at two examples. Here is an image of Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn. Now let me ask you, what is the belief that Under Armour is constantly trying to build in your mind, not just with this marketing message, but with all of their different campaigns. Well, probably they have the toughest products for the toughest competitors. And if your wimpy will go to the other brand, because this brand is only for the tough athletes, right? Under Armour appeals to our pride, our toughness, our passion. It's fairly straightforward. From the beginning. This is the image and believe they are propagating. However, what if you have to change or develop a consumer's belief about your brand. Well, that's what Chevy has spent a lot of time and money trying to do. Now if you grew up in the eighties in the US, then you may have a strong opinion about a number of Chevy cars. One of your strongest beliefs may be that they are unreliable or they make a lot of clicking noises or they fall apart or, or whatever that may be. Especially compared with the major Asian cars like Honda or Toyota, right? Because of these fairly strongly held beliefs, a lot probably from prior experience, Chevy has had the enviable task of trying to change the mass markets beliefs about Chevy cars. And they do so with ads like the one you see here. Now, if you have ever seen Chevys TV commercials, they're going the route of shocked and surprised, so-called real people that Chevy would win so many awards for their revolutionary vehicles. Now, if you've not seen it, then let me explain. As Chevy shows normal people all the JD Power Award that Chevy is one these very regular, not actors. Then jump and scream and laugh and express how cool those Chevy brand is these days, it's really uncomfortable to watch. And if you're in marketing or just a regular human at all. You've probably also wondered how regal these so-called not actors are, especially since their emotions and reactions often seem highly strange and unbelievable. Well, just for grins and giggles, you should try walking some of the Chevy award parodies on YouTube. I'll just, I'll leave it at that. The point is this, by association, the mass market should be equally shocked and impressed by chemise, great vehicles and all the wards, they have. One, whether you are creating a belief from the get-go like Under Armour, or trying to change the mass markets belief about your brand. You still have to ask the same fundamental question. And that question is, what might the person who will purchase and own the product need to believe? Now, as we will see later, each person in the buying process will have a different set of beliefs that we need to create or nurture in them. Nevertheless, the question still stands. What might that person who will own the product need to believe, or what do they already believe? And therefore, what beliefs need to be changed. What about the person's manager, the technical lead, the CFO financially, procurement. The point being, what is going to bring them to the point of saying, yes, I believe I need your product. Now, IT belief that you were the world's foremost authority on a given subject in your industry, that you one-year share of JD Power awards, even though I have no idea what JD Power Award is or or that you care about people in the environment first and foremost. Or that your customer service is always available friendly and helpful. Or they are constantly improving and iterating on your product, or that no one has a better product, right? Any utopian world, that is how it may work. Answer one question and you're good to go. Unfortunately, we do not live in a Utopian world. Sorry to burst your bubble. Like every major decision there is a process that must be taken, beliefs that must be created or nurtured. Take for example, marriage, a major decision, right? If it was not love at first sight and you are in Vegas, then there was a process to the relationship developing. There was investment, desire, questions, time spent, rings looked at and so on. How about buying your first car? If you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth than buying your first car with your own money was a really big deal. Lots of research questions, watching videos and so on. The point is that during all of these processes, your beliefs changed and developed. Eventually you got to the point where all the boxes were checked in your mind, your ducks lined up in a row and you were ready to make the purchase. You may have found out that although you really love Tesla cars, it was out of your price range. Within your price range, you may have created the belief that you like Honda's entry-level car more than Toyotas or Chevys, you would have maybe develop beliefs about certain features on the car or even what car lot you are going to buy it from. Or maybe you were just going to buy it online. These are all previously held beliefs that were changed, created, or nurtured due to external input. Here's one ad that is trying to develop, nurture, or even change your belief. Now what I love about this Tesla add are the beliefs. For instance, if you're a green, then you have to love us because we're all about being good to the environment and truly classy people are good to the environment. But there's also the belief that Tesla's can be affordable. Do you see that 35 k price tag? Now, that's not the typical six digit price we have come to expect from Tesla. Rather, Tesla is looking to change or established the belief that a luxury green cars like Tesla is also affordable. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm almost sold. So before we jump into the belief framework and start creating uniformed marketing campaigns like Tesla, I believe there's some necessary groundwork that needs to be laid concerning the topic of beliefs. Here are some general elements or fundamental guidelines that I have found to be true concerning the topic of belief in general. You can almost label these beliefs about belief. Now, when we use the word belief, this isn't just some fuzzy conversation about feelings and emotions. We are looking at what drives the purchase decision. I firmly believe actions do not drive purchases, nor do even family and friends primarily. Rather, there is a more primary motivation. Now, as we go through these elements of belief, these are things that I found to be true over decades and marketing. Now, this is not an exhaustive list by any means I get that nor is this rocket science. In fact, this shouldn't really be anything new. But it is laying the groundwork of right thinking for the belief framework. The purpose is to get you to understand how important it is to go beyond just looking at behaviors and actions and buttons and start to focus on what drives purchase behavior. And that is the consumer's belief. So let's quickly go through this list before we dive deeper in the following lessons. First off, everybody has a belief about every product. Now, your belief may be one of, I don't know about the product yet or I don't care, or I really liked that product. But we all have beliefs about every product and product category on different levels. The reason we put this front and center is to remind ourselves that no matter where a consumer lies on the spectrum, we are to be addressing their beliefs first, not behaviors. Number 2, belief is a strong motivator. For example, let me ask, which is a stronger motivator? Someone tells you to do something because you should and it's the right thing to do. Or you do something because you know, you should. And you know, it's the right thing to do, or at least so you believe and as you can see, believe is the stronger motivator there. Number 3, belief precedes behavior. That is, we act on as humans, on what we believe. Our actions are simply the result of what we believe to be true. Number for all beliefs can be developed. This is where we get into the marketing world. The reality is, as humans, we don't know everything. Therefore, it stands to reason that our beliefs can change about any number of topics based on new information, new research, or different input. And number 5, belief can be measured. Now hopefully you've just completed session number 1 at where we spelled out the basic framework for building your own scientific marketing model, where you can measure and analyze every step of the buyer's journey. Now as you develop your own belief framework, we will also show you how to measure and optimize each step. 24. Rule 1: Everybody has Beliefs: At its core, the belief framework says everybody has a belief about every product. But there's also an understanding that different people have different beliefs at different stages of the buying process. Now this is important understand, because some beliefs need to be established. That is, the bleeds simply isn't there yet because of unfamiliarity with a product. While other beliefs need to be nurtured or changed. Let's take a look at a quick example. Fly boarding. Have you ever even heard of flight boarding? I hadn't heard of it until a few years ago when my wife decided to surprise me what they birthday present. And so we ventured down to the local lake where I ended up strapping this very large contraption onto my ankles and my feet with this really large hose that looked very powerful, that was attached to a C do. And they said jump in the water and we'll start giving you power and force and thrust. And I thought, Are you kidding me? Because before this, I've never heard of flight boarding. I haven't even even researched fly boarding. And yet here on this cold September day, I was given the opportunity to fly board. Now, I was creatine beliefs during the entire experience of flight boarding. Now, this example underscores the reality that there are specific stages of beliefs from many flight boarding. Here is an example of the first stage known as the unknown stage. That is, you simply didn't know about this product or experienced before you saw just now. Now in the old three-step mental model of marketing, this would refer to the stimulus stage. That is, you're seeing it for the first time. You may not be at the unknown stage, but you may be a further stage down in your beliefs. And that says, I've heard about stuff like this before. Or you may even say, I have heard about this experience specifically, or even more in depth. Still, someone I know has done this or told me about their experience. Or I've watched videos on this before. Or you may even be at the stage where you are asking and researching. Where can I do this? Google would refer to that stage as the z mod, the 0 moment of truth. That is, you're actively researching. Or maybe you are at the stage where you are asking, how much will it cost because you want to do it and you're ready to pay for the experience, right? There are different beliefs at each stage. Some stages might say, Hey, I've been watching videos on this, but I really don't care and I'm not interested. That is a belief. And as markers we have to deal with that. Another belief at a different stage might say, I want to learn more. I'm watching these videos. I'm talking with people around me and I'm actually really interested in learning more about this. Is it safe and where it can I do this and do people do this around me? Or he may be holding the belief of I want to do this. And so you're actually researching, where can this be done and how soon can I do it, and how much is it going to cost? Or you may have the belief, When can I do this? Because it will make me look cool. Now, let's look at another example that we may be more familiar with. Luxury brands. Not luxury brands generally advocate beliefs to customers rather than simply rely on brand values. Beliefs skull further, right, they're more specific and consequently more segmenting. Unlike mass brands that you may find at your local supermarket or store, luxury brands should not strive to please everyone, but those customers whose belief align with their own. For instance, how does this add speak to your beliefs? What about if you own this $10 thousand hat? I'm making up a large number, but I'm probably not far off. You too can experience this luxurious setting and look this way. Do you notice belief does not have to measure up with reality. Most women who wear this hat may not look like this or go to this kind of setting, but that doesn't matter. As long as the belief is they're, well, as the old saying goes, your belief is your reality. Another good example of this is Ferrari's belief in high-performance. Now Ferrari as the brand, they rarely advertising mass media, but Ferrari doesn't invest significant amounts in Formula One events. The point should be obvious. It focuses on actions and experiences related to its belief to reinforce this tenant in consumers minds. That is, we are a high-performance luxury, fast vehicle. Its brand association, right? They are establishing belief simply by aligning themselves with previously held beliefs. Those previously held beliefs, our Formula One cars are high-tech, they're fast and they're the best. Therefore, Ferrari associates with this previously held belief, almost like jumping on the Formula One bandwagon. Another great example of this is Louisville tons belief and art. Over the years, louis Vuitton as teamed up with famous artists to collaborate on a limited edition of products because it is more than just a handbag that you're purchasing, right? It is art that you are wearing as such as this ad. Now, if I was to ask you, what belief does this add Create? Now for me as just a lay person who is not really that interested in wearing art around my city. For me, it may say, when stranded in a desert, walk precariously on your luggage with setting inappropriate attire and footwear. Clearly, I am not the target market. But how about her friend here with slightly more luggage? I suppose if you were stranded the top of your luggage PAL is the best place to sit. The point should be obvious, right? Louis Vuitton is not primarily about the practical. I am. Louis Vuitton is about the belief of luxury brand art in image. Now in mass market, brands distribute their investments across several efforts because they want to reach and please the broadest possible spectrum of customers, right? There's wisdom in that. On the other end of the spectrum, luxury brands investments are focused on the specific beliefs of the brand. Creating a very focused experience and belief for the right customer. Creating belief like this, that was not easy. It can be a rigorous scientific process of understanding your customer base, your target audience, how they think, what they value, and most importantly, how to change their beliefs. 25. Rule 2: Belief is a Strong Motivator: Secondly, belief is a strong motivator. I purposely do not say that belief is the strongest motivator because then someone will bring up the topic of love and then we will jump into an esoteric discussion. But for our purposes today, I just wanted to make the statement that belief is a strong motivator. Now, why is this important? Why are we talking about this? Why don't we just jump into crafting a stellar marketing message? Because we have to understand that humans are complicated beans. And there are many factors that go into the purchase decision. But these factors are often tainted by a person's perception. You may have heard it described this way. Your perception is your reality. That is what you perceive to be true, is true to you and you act based on that belief. No doubt we have all experienced this personally, whether it's a child or as an adult in a professional work experience. Have you ever had someone describe a situation that you were also a part of, but their view of the situation was completely different. You may go so far as to describe their perspective as incorrect or even wrong. It could be as lighthearted as a trip to the beach. Your friend may later complain about the sun and the sand in the wind and the temperature and how awful it was. While the whole time you were thinking about how great it was. You love the warm sun, the wind cool you down and though the ways and they were perfect. Or it can be a more serious example like a harsh disagreement with a coworker. You both sitting your boss's office telling two completely different versions of the same encounter. But for both of you, your version is the truth. And from your perspective, it may be true to you. Again, I don't want to delve too deep into philosophy here, but I simply want to make this point. Our perception is our reality. And our reality is based on what we take in through our eyes and our ears and our thoughts, our experiences. I like what Douglas Adams has to say about this topic. Everything you see or hear or experienced in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it. So everything in the university you perceive is specific to you. But this is where we as humans and marketers have to be careful because of this statement. When truth is blurred by lies and misinformation, as we all know, is becoming increasingly common today. Thank you. Internet perception becomes a reality and all is lost. That is why like breeds like the more we hang around with people like us, the more we are like the people we hang around with. And then our version of reality and truth becomes that much more solidified and narrow. Even if it's not true. This is one of the greatest challenges marketers face on two fronts. First, if we attempt to change people's beliefs based on opinion, motion, feeling, or half trues. We won't last long in today's business world. We won't just face legal issues, but customers speak to customers today. Integrity counts. So if you have access to certain truths about a product or product category or an industry based on legitimate research and statistics, then use it, use it to change and evolve in enhancing customer's model of reality. That's what we will get into what the belief framework. But secondly, preconceived perceptions whether they are true or not, can be exceptionally difficult to overcome. For example, someone may dismiss your solution outright because they have the perception that your product category is a waste of money. You will have the slight uphill battle then to change these preconceived perceptions. Take for instance, Campbell's Soup. Now if you grew up in the last century, you may have a strong set of beliefs concerning Campbell's Soup. Personally, I don't hold the belief that Campbell's is health-conscious. Andy Warhol may have helped that a little bit with his paintings of repetitious cans of process Sue ball bearing the same label. Because I think of Campbell's soup as an inexpensive condensed soup in a can. That's probably got a really long shelf life too, which is great if you're lost in the jungle, but not so great for the body. Well, Campbell's has or is trying to break into the organic soup industry and has done so by repackaging their organic product by using a box instead of a candle. I guess the boxes more organic. I don't know about you, but the carton over the canon is very convincing. Well, some companies like Campbell's is going to have this difficult time reframing beliefs, dispelling myths and changing perceptions, even if they bring in better packaging statistics and social proof. Why? Because I, like many have a strong perception and belief concerning Campbell soup that has defined my reality. So Campbell's rightfully so is targeting my fundamental belief in them as accompany first, trying to redefine their brand is thoughtful, organic, and healthy. Then once I associate Campbell's with a variety of different types of soups, quick and easy, as well as organic and delicious. Then the barriers to purchase Campbell's Soup have been decreased. Campbell's understands that belief is a strong and powerful motivator. Change a person's primary beliefs and their actions will follow. Let me use one more example that I've shared with teams and organizations many times. Take, for instance, two scenarios. Both take place in a crowded movie theater. You are enjoying the movie, you're eating your popcorn, life is good. Well, in scenario 1, the movie theaters hot, but you're enjoying the movie too much and you don't want to stand up in the middle of the movie and annoy everyone else while you make your way outside to cool off, there's not a lot of motivation, obviously to stand up and leave because you're just a little warm. So you decide a bare with the uncomfortable heat and watch the rest of the movie. Well, in scenario two, the movie theater is hot also. But this time you have more information. Your friend runs in and tells you the movie theaters on fire. That's why it's hot. At this point, several things go through your mind. First off, who cares about the movie? It no longer seems that important. And who cares if I annoy people by leaving? Because I'm going to warn everyone I can about the fire and I'm going to get out of here as fast as possible. Why? Because your belief changed. Scenario one, your belief was that it was hot and you're uncomfortable. Scenario 2, you were going to die. Now, although the situations where identical perception, belief, and hence reality changed. The point is this, none of us have all the facts or a perfect understanding of life, organizations, people, and products. Now as a brand, if we want to motivate consumers, we don't talk about how awesome we are. That's sure to be met with a lot of disinterest. Know we started with a consumer believes and see if there are errors or misconceptions or gaps in their understanding. Because if there are, then you'll be fighting an uphill battle until you address and overcome certain beliefs. Because as we said before, beliefs are a strong and powerful motivator. And that leads us right into belief element number 3. Belief precedes behavior. 26. Rule 3: Belief Precedes Behavior: Belief element number 3 is that belief precedes behavior. Another way to say this is that belief motivates behavior or convictions are a catalyst for conduct if you'd like to use C words, meaning, as we saw in the last lesson, if we want to change a person's behavior to any degree, then we must address their beliefs, not just their actions, because behaviors are a response to what we believe to be true. As an example, let's say someone tells you you should do something because it's the right thing to do versus you desire to do something because you know, it's the right thing to do. Which one has the greater drive, more motivation, and better chance of success, someone's opinion, or your belief. You see the mistake that too many companies make today is behavior modification or really behavior manipulation. For instance, your goal may be to increase sales or demo requests by 20 percent year over year according to your business goals are according to your job requirement. Therefore, you focus on the demo button. You change the color of the size, location, the text, all with the goal of getting more clicks. But what so many people fail to realize is that a customer who is not ready to make a decision will not be more ready because the button color changes. Now, button color and text does help guide a user, absolutely, but it doesn't change the buyers state and willingness to purchase. Now we're going to look at this more in more detail during the CRO session. But for now, these companies are failing to realize that our actions and behaviors, a response there an overflow to what we believe to be true. Let's use a quick lighthearted example. Candy. What if I gave you two seconds to select a lollipop from one of these three lollipops. Now, in the back of your mind, you will immediately conjure up what you already know to be true. Or so you think the green lollipop taste like line, the blue like blueberry and the red black cherry. And since you like cherry lollipops, based on your past experiences, you grab the red lollipop. Not a complicated decision, right? But a decision nonetheless, that invoked what you presently believed to be true about the flavors. That is, behavior was based on your belief. Now let's look at something a little more complicated and more realistic, purchasing a car. Now, it is important to know that the more risk involved in the decision, the stronger the belief that is required. You make a mistake with a cheap lollipop, no harm done, throw it away. You make a mistake purchasing one of these cars, well, harm is done and it will hurt. Now in the marketing world, this is something called involvement. To understand involvement, you must understand risks. There are generally five common types of risk associated with purchases. There's financial risk, potential for financial loss, performance risk the product won't perform as intended. Physical risk of physical harm, social risks, that is the potential for loss of social status. And then there's the psychological risk, which is the result in a loss of self-esteem. Now involvement is directly related to risk. If you suffer only a small psychosocial or financial loss, such as the case of a lollipop, then that purchase decision is known as low involvement. That is, there wasn't a lot of motivation to search for him from nation or engage in lengthy research. Basically, it wasn't involved. However, if the risks are perceived to be high, such as one of these vehicles, than that purchase decision is classified as high involvement, right? It should be basic because the purpose of involvement is to establish, evolve, or change our beliefs. I get heavily involved into a risky purchase decision because I want to be convinced that I am making the correct choice. I am trying to convince myself. So the more risk that is associated to a decision, the stronger our belief or conviction must be. This also, generally speaking, equates to a longer buyer's journey, which means more content. Answering more questions. Think about the difference between purchasing a new pair of shoes versus one of these cars. In both cases, you do some research, maybe a lot of research, but the length and depth of the process is simply different due to risk. The purpose of involvement is that if someone perceives a purchase to be risky, then they will engage in certain tactics, actions, and strategies in order to reduce the perceived risk until they're comfortable with their decision, is that consumer's perceptions of risk that drives such information search activities. Here's the result and why we're spending so much time discussing this. The result is that a consumer is increasing their knowledge and refining, or in some cases, changing their beliefs that will ultimately dictate their actions. So again, if you want to change a person's actions, you need to address their beliefs. 27. Rule 4: All Beliefs can be Developed: Belief element number four, all beliefs can be developed. Now, as we mentioned briefly in the last lesson, the reality is we don't know everything. Therefore, it stands to reason that our beliefs can change about any number of topics based upon new information, new research error, or different input. For instance, when my daughter was three, she believes she hated all of us. Then she tried one. Her belief changed based on her expanding and developing knowledge. Let me use a more practical example. Let's say you live in a cold environment. As such, you are accustomed to dealing with cold steering wheels. It just comes with the territory. Well, what if for the first time ever I was able to inform you that some cars now come with heated steering wheels. Yep. You turn it on and the whole thing heats up. You never have to have cold hands again when you drive. Notice what I did and what I didn't do, I identified and addressed a problem that many people in cold climates deal with? I did not create a need. I didn't make anything up. I simply found a very real problem and provided a practical solution. Now, at this point with your new found knowledge, you have one of two options. Either continue to slog through the challenges of holding onto a cold steering wheel or believe that there is a solution to your cold hands. Now, whether you can afford it or not, or even if you really need it, opens up another set of beliefs. But either way the seed is planted. Every time now you grab onto your cold steering wheel somewhere in the back of your mind, you will think it doesn't have to be this way. I could have a heated steering wheel. Again, I didn't create the need. I simply pointed it out and provided a solution. What I really did was create a want and the customer. But more on this later in the belief framework. For now, you can see how powerful knowledge and facts can be if you understand the users challenges and current beliefs. 28. Rule 5: Beliefs can be Measured: Belief element number 5, beliefs can and should be measured. This is just a brief point to make sure that we are thinking about belief correctly. Again, when we talk about beliefs, we are not talking about fuzzy, warm feelings and emotions. We're talking about a real part of our decision making process. If belief affects behavior, then by measuring behavior, we will be able to begin to understand beliefs. Now, going back to Session 1, building the model, the belief framework is a framework that fits within the marketing model that can be measured. Otherwise, our messaging would just be a mess of nice marketing sentiment, but with no real tangible, measurable structure. Even though belief can be an unknown, almost esoteric discussion, the behaviors that flow from belief can be measured. And it is these interactions and engagements that must be measured if we're going to properly addressed the consumer's needs and our own marketing bottlenecks. Let's take a look at a real life example. A couple of days ago, I wanted to understand the beliefs that visitors had on a client's website. More specifically, I wanted to understand the beliefs of those who did not engage. So based on qualitative data that we had gathered from marketing support and sales, I put a small pull from hot jar with a toaster action in the bottom-right corner of every page. Now, this poll had two questions on it, and I'm going to be just a bit vague for secrecy reasons here. First off, what do you know the state laws regarding this topic in question? Do you even know their state laws, right? Secondly, would you be interested in having a conversation about this topic? Now, right away we received dozens of responses. But I want you to note this. 100% of respondents did not know the state laws, didn't even know they existed. So right off, our assumptions were incorrect. We thought it would be kind of a more mixed response. Some people wouldn't know, some people didn't, but a 100 percent of people didn't even know there are state laws regarding the use of this software and their need for it. Now, we can make some immediate and fairly simple assumptions about these unengaged beliefs. First off, some people didn't know, it's completely new to them. They didn't know there were state laws. Secondly, we could assume that some people say, Well, I don't care, It's not really my jurisdiction or no one is going to sue me. I'm I'm too insignificant or too small of an organization. And thirdly, we can say maybe they could have heard about it, but we'd like to find out more. So it's somewhat important to them that's why they're there. Again, these are initial assumption. So at this stage we can test out these assumptions to their beliefs. What we could do is create three pieces of content to test out the three different potential beliefs. For those who don't know, we can create a very simple one pager or lead gen PDF or even a website that explains that there are actual state laws with legal ramifications. For those who really care, we could create a document about why you should care. In fact, every organization of every size should care your job an organization when faced legal issues otherwise. Or thirdly, for those who heard about it and are interested in learning more. Well, here's an e-book that details more about this topic and how we help. Now at this point, we can AB test which content receives the most clicks. Ultimately, we will begin to see which of the consumer's beliefs come to the surface. In reality, it could be all three beliefs since we have addressed three different beliefs with these three different pieces of content, even though the behavior was the same. Now as we get into the CRO session, which is the next session, you will see that true CRO and really understanding beliefs is a mixture of science and experience working hand in hand over time through multiple minor iterations and qualitative data, we will be able to perfect the content offering that meets the needs of the consumers. 29. The 5 Belief Framework Principles: All right, Now we come to the heart of the belief framework, as you can see here by these five guiding principles. Now, these principles of the belief framework underscore mindset, tone and voice, and the structure of the belief framework. Think of each of these principles as a ROM or a step in a ladder. Without each of these principles, the belief framework simply isn't possible. So my encouragement to you is to take your time, go through each principle, each video that we have, until it makes sense. Keep in mind, each principle will have its own homework associated with it. So I encourage you not to move to the next principle until you've completed the homework and understood the principle first. Now, as you can see here, there are five fundamental principles for creating your belief. Framework. Number one is act like a mentor. This principle underscores the consumer centricity of the belief framework. If we miss this principle, than all the other principles will be tainted by an unhealthy self-focus number to your customers human. Now this is an easy principle to forget in the face of deadlines, budgets, and annual goals, I get it. So we will walk through the importance and tactics for approaching your large audience group with more purpose and clarity. Number three, identify and establish the need. Without identifying a need that your product can fulfill, it is impossible to market in a way that resonates or carries any emotional meaning. Number four, you have the solution. Since you are marketing to a specific need that your product can fulfill, then don't be shy about declaring clearly and boldly that you had this solution for them personally, you must believe it before you tell it you have the solution to their defined need. And number five, people respond to direction. That is, since you have this solution, what do you want the consumer to do? Now in the noise and the crowded marketplace that most businesses compete. Clarity is key for this point. Now after we go through each principle in depth, we will have established the foundational elements that will help us create your very own belief framework. However, the belief framework is not the end-all in reality. It's simply forms this strategy for a content messaging framework that drives and measurable conversions and that we will complete in Session five. 30. Principle 1: Act Like a Mentor: Belief principle number one, the modern successful brand is one who thinks and acts like a mentor. Now, before you write this belief principal off, I want you to realize that every other principle in the belief framework that we're gonna go through. And in reality, everything you do as a brand should overflow from this one truth. Notice though, principle number one is act like a mentor. You will not necessarily be a mentor. But there are a number of aspects of mentorship that belong in an organization. For instance, like a mentor mentee relationship. If you look to lead, guide, and support your customers, and they see this quality in you. They will be able to trust you with their business. Now, several decades ago, it may have seemed like a good thing for the boss or the business, the brand, the corporation, to be in a distant entity, living in the ivory tower of success, untouchable by the common man. But gone and way gone are those days. Today's consumers are humans. And generally, and statistically speaking, they are looking for an organization to be human as well. In fact, recent research from cone and Wolf, which is a global communication agency, shows that consumers are looking for brands that had three primary qualities. They are to be number 1 reliable brands. That is, they deliver on promises about their goods and services, giving consumers exactly what they expect from their purchase. And always at a consistently high level, they're reliable. Number two, they would be respectful brands. Now, respectful brands are those that understand consumers are individuals who want and deserve thoughtful, careful, and attentive interactions that also protect consumers privacy and data. A trend, as you may know, has emerged across all the industries. Survey. Number 3, they need to be real brands. Now real branching can put quotes real in quotes, there are brands that set and achieve three customer satisfaction goals. They communicate honestly, they're genuine and real, they're not artificial. And number three, they act with integrity. Now, these aspects become even more important the younger the audience. Now before we assume that the younger age demographics, or just a small part of the market, millennials alone, who by the way, value highly such characteristics as reliable, respectful, and real. The millennials alone has over $200 billion US dollars in annual spending power. Now consumers studies show that less than 1% of millennials respond to or are influenced by these old traditional advertising methods that we have seen so popular over the decades. Rather, this modern consumer across all demographics are hyper-connected. They're socially informed today, they're knowledge-driven, and they are deeply suspicious of being sold to. The point being gone are the days when image was everything. Now, image is suspect. People assume it's Photoshopped are filtered or its stock photo messaging is crafted, it's scripted, It's meant to manipulate what today's consumers are looking for can be summed up in one phrase, authentic relationship. Now this idea of being real and authentic has become so central to today's marketing powers that it has led to the phrase, The Age of authenticity. So it's kind of become a little bit of a buzzword and lost its original meaning. But it is still nonetheless important because the modern consumer is looking for more than just price, quality and convenience. Now, no doubt these are still very important, but they clearly state that they want values and character above all else. Now to underscore this point, look at this research from Conan Wolf. Do you notice 87% of global consumers felt that it was important for brands to act with integrity at all times. Now, honestly, I would wonder about the other 13%. Is it okay to lie and deceive sometimes. But notice these other numbers. They rank authenticity even above innovation and above product uniqueness, 72 percent and 71% respectively. Now what's amazing about this research is authenticity and business beats product utility and innovation across all 12 markets they surveyed authentic characteristics such as communicating honestly about products and services. 91%. Environmental impact and sustainability measures 87%. That's a huge number. And these two things are more important to global consumers then. Product utility, 61%, brand appeal 60 percent, and popularity 39 percent. This is completely different than what we have seen or at least what I've been taught over the decades of marketing. Now, why am I spending so much time on this? Because I am surprised at how many companies I work with. Just do what they've always done even if they know better. Therefore, I hope you're getting the sense that the landscape has changed. And if you want to be relatable and profitable in the coming years, we have to think less like a distinct corporation, aloof and cold, and more like a mentor who was involved and cares about our customers. Now Conan Wolf concluded the research with this statement. Respectful and brands understand consumers are individuals who deserve thoughtful interactions while protecting consumers privacy and data. Now they would also point out that businesses with a proven track record for authenticity are much more likely to convert customers, build long-term relationships and even expand the employee pool and ultimately obviously help their bottom line. You see when we look at brand qualities that are desired by the modern consumer in both the B2C and B2B realms, the qualities look very similar to that of a mentor. 31. Principle 1: Act Like a Mentor: Now if you've been around the business world at all lately, then you know, mentor ship is becoming more of a buzzword and today's business leadership books. But it is still an idea that we should go over to make sure we're all on the same page. So let's just briefly step into this idea of mentor-ship. The word mentor comes from the character Mentor and Homer's epic tale, The Odyssey. Hence, this incredibly artistic graphic that is on your screen. Now, mentor was just a trusted friend of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. When Odysseus fought in the Trojan War, mentors served as a friend and counsel to Odysseus's son, Telemachus. Now, using this as an example, the dictionary defines a mentor as a wise and trusted teacher or counselor. Now, do you see the terms that are being repeated? Trusted friend, it implies a relationship. Counselor. It implies experience and authority. Teacher, it implies repetition, right? The act of mentoring is a series of ongoing and little successes taking them antique closer and closer to his or her goals. Now before we get too lost down this topic of mentor-ship, this section is not to be a thorough discussion on what a mentor is, but how we, representing brands can act more like a mentor in a trusted relationship than just a disinterested corporation looking at filling our pockets. But before we begin to apply this knowledge to us personally as brands, I want to start with this great infographic from Duke University. Now, notice all the qualities. My goal is for you to start thinking along these lines that you see here. That is, this is how you should start to view yourself. You cannot be a disengaged entity looking to make a buck off an unknown company or individual anymore, That's sort of business manipulation is a huge turn-off for today's consumers. Rather, mentoring is a relationship between two individuals based on a mutual desire for development towards defined goals and objectives. Notice some of these terms. They are experienced and is where you want to be. That is you're the authority. How about this one? Guide you to the answers or invested in your success. That means you're committed or is a great listener is available, respects you. The customer feels like you have made them the center of their own story. So building off the basic characteristics of a mentor, I want to take a look at five mentor like characteristics that the modern brand should seek to emulate. Now this is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it is a great framework nonetheless, of five mentor like characteristics that the modern business should seek to emulate in their relationship with consumers. A respectful modern brand will be number 1, other-centered. That is making the customer the center of their own story, of your relationship and your overall narrative. Secondly, there'll be authentic. Again, it's a buzzword in today's business world, but nonetheless, very important. The opposite of authentic as we're going to look at, is hypocrisy. Number three. They are empathetic. Empathetic is not sympathetic, but putting yourself in your customers shoes and letting them know that you understand that you know what they are going through. Number 4, authority, that is being relatable and authentic. It's good, but no one wants to follow a brand that is incompetent and competence does not sell, so you have to be an authority and number 5, committed. Just like a mentor mentee relationship, it takes time. So to consumer trust does not happen overnight. It takes time. If you've ever had a mentor, you know that there are several qualities that you really look for. And it's uncanny how these same qualities appear in the list of values the modern consumer is looking for in an organization. Now in the coming lessons, we will go through each one of these points one at a time. 32. Belief Framework: A Mentor is Other-Centered: First off, a mentor is other centered. A true mentor will always place the mentee as the center of the relationship that is focused on the mentee asking questions pursuing, seeking to understand. And yet, one of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is placing themselves at the center of this relationship. By center their marketing campaigns on them. That is, it's all about us, it's our product and how we're performing. And we can't wait to tell you about all of our features and how awesome we are. Improve ourselves to you in the world that we have arrived. Now, you do play an important role in the relationship, but it is secondary. That is, it's a secondary role as a trusted advisor, guide and mentor and authentic mentors, one that is other-focused, other-centered. Think about it. If you weren't being mentored, you want the mentor to help you lead, you, guide you, right? But if every time you are around your mentor, they talk about themselves and how awesome they are. You'll probably find another mental really quickly. Why? Because there are clearly more interested in themselves than helping and supporting you. And when accompany does this, it shows they're more interested in their product than you or your problem or their income versus helping you find the right solution. That is why this is point number one and why you can't miss this. We, as brands cannot be successfully focused on the consumer and build a solid belief framework until we get ourselves, our motives, and our pride out of the way. Because if we try to step through the belief framework with an incorrect view of ourselves in our role, then everything we do will be tainted with undertones of self-centeredness. That is why we must start here by understanding and defining our role. So we don't get in the way. I like how Nancy Duarte, you put this defer to them. That's your customers. Because if they don't engage in believing your message, you are the one who loses without their help, your idea will fail. Become the mentor in their story and whispered guidance in their ear. And empowering them to be the agents of change and achieve greatness, right? We can't miss this as brands. In today's business world, there is no such thing as a win, lose relationship. Because if you win and your customer loses, well, in today's world of the vocal online consumer, you will end up losing two. Or if, if your customer wins and you lose, then will he go out of business? It's got to be a win, win. A successful business in today's world can only be from a win-win relationship. It's only when you both win with, Will there be this lasting success. That's why you have to let the consumer be the center of their own story, as well as the narrative that you are crafting. 33. Belief Framework: A Mentor is Authentic: Secondly, a brand that chooses to take on the characteristics of a mentor is one that is authentic. Now, I understand that authenticity is a buzzword in today's marketing world, but as we've seen with the statistics, it remains one of the most desirable attributes in a brand in today's world with today's consumers. So what is authenticity? Well listed here is a quick and hopefully helpful list if you like checklists. Now, is it honesty, integrity, transparency? Yes. And more. Authenticity is, though is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a package of core values, absolutely. But it is also the degree to which a brand internalizes those values and integrates them into its mission, vision, daily operations and messaging. Again, think of a mentor. If a mentor gives sage advice from years of experience but never internalizes, applies or appropriates those principles in their life. Then we have wandered back into hypocrisy and authentic brand knows what it stands for and why it exists. So here's the question. Do you do you know where you came from and where you're going? Do you have clarity of vision and a driving passion? Now, if you do not have a vision passion, or clarity of purpose about yourself, then how can both customers and employees jump on board? More than ever, consumers are looking to belong and participate and engage, give them every honest reason to do so. That's authenticity. But this goes for both the good and the bad. Must be honest. As a human and accompany you are going to make mistakes, if not many mistakes, right? It's just part of the growing process. And authentic mentor, an authentic human and brand. Are those brave enough to own their own mistakes and make amends when necessary. Now from a consumer's perspective, this sort of transparency is crucial to building brand authenticity. Remember when Apple finally admitted to slowing down their phones due to the old bolder batteries. Well, there's a huge gap on their part and they could have totally blown it by defending their actions or whatever else. But they ended up owning up to their failure and offered battery replacements for a fraction of the cost which I took advantage of and my trust in Apple was reconnected. Now, does that make everything better? No, not necessarily, but it does show a willingness on their part to be honest and own up to their mistakes. Now I like what Jill domain, patagonia sudden. She said Consumers think, I trust what you tell me about the good because you're willing to tell me about the bad. What if we, as honest, authentic brands took that same mindset? Now I think we all understand the necessity of authenticity, but one of the best ways to define a word is to define the opposite. Now the opposite of being authentic is to be a hypocrite. Now, the word hypocrite has a rich and meaningful past, which is why I've got these really cool images on your screen. Now the word hypocrite comes from the Greek word hippo Caritas, which means an actor or a stage player referring to actors on a Grecian stage. Think of the famous stage of epidermis, just outside of Athens, Greece, which you see here on your screen. Now before lights and sound and the jumbotron, how is an actor going to express to all the audience in every seat, including the last row, the emotions that they're trying to express and to mark which character their plane. While the grease came up with the idea of wearing these jumbo size mass that you see on the right to display their emotions to everyone in the audience. It was the Greek version, binoculars or a zoom lens right. Now, these actors are called hypocrites. The Greek word took on an extended meaning to refer to any person who is wearing a figurative mask and pretending to be someone or something they were not. Now you can imagine why we adopted the same term in English because it's a great description. A hypocrite is a mask where someone who is saying or doing something that is not the real them, it's not genuine, it, it lacks integrity and authenticity. Now, just like hypocrisy is sickening when we see it in ourselves or others, or worse yet, mentors. So to hypocrisy is a great way for a brand and lose trust with their target market. And so when it comes to acting like a mentor, our goal is to where no masks or as the old adage goes, what you see is what you get there. There's no surprises with me. Again, if you take on and really own the role and characteristics of a mentor, this relationship with your consumers may come a bit more naturally. 34. Belief Framework: A Mentor is Empathetic: Thirdly, a mentor is empathetic. Notice I did not say sympathetic. Sympathy is the third party emotional feeling, compassion, but can often come across in marketing as annoying or degrading or condescending. So you may want to avoid that. So when we talk about authenticity and honesty, these are the characteristics owned by the brand. Contrast that with empathy, which is something that is offered for a business. Empathy is simply putting yourself in your customers shoes and letting them know that you understand, you know, what they're going through. You've been there and felt the pain, which is why you created a solution to their challenge or problem. For instance, a CMO friend of mine is developing a software for fellow CMOs based on a common struggle that they all face. Now you can bet he will be very empathetic in his messaging. And he should shout that from the rooftops. Rooftops and his messaging because he has walked a mile in their shoes and know from personal experience the pains and needs for a specific solution. But this can go for almost any brand out there. If you have a cleaning service, you understand the pain of having a dirty house. If you've built a software, it's because you've felt the pain of not having it. If you have a service is because you felt the pain of not having that service filled in the blink of your brand. However, what if you sell a product that you don't personally need or would ever personally use. For example, let's say you've created a product that increases the safety of a work environment. Now you may not work in their specific environment or anything remotely close to it. But you do definitely can relate to the desire for safety. Make that the apex of your empathy. Or, or let's say you created a software that saves time, increases productivity, or simply keeps you legal. Now although you may not need the software you have developed for others, you can relate to the need for more time. Again, that should be the point of your empathy. The secret to empathy is curiosity. In fact, highly empathetic people, hips, ATPs, are known to have an insatiable curiosity about strangers. What makes them tick? What problems are they facing? What keeps them up at night? What would make their life better? So to like a mentor, your role is to be curious about your customers, listened to their challenges and the problems they face. Find a point of commonality that lets them know that you see them as you see yourself. Which also means being vulnerable, right? Empathy is a two-way street, at its best is built upon mutual beliefs, experiences, and understanding. Where you can say, yes, I, to get it, I struggle with the need for more time or desire for safety for myself or for my children. Your goal to be empathetic is to find that point of commonality because it's what you can speak into with authority. Rather than talking about your products, features, and generics questions, you are actually engaging in an authentic empathetic dialogue with your customer. And it's then when a consumer starts to realize that they have a lot in common with you because you're more than a corporation. You, your relatable human that is empathetic to their wants and needs and pain points and are actively searching for a solution for them personally. I like how Daniel Pink defines empathy. Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart. Scene, with his or her eyes. Please catch that. Empathy is not something you can outsource or Automate. It's a personal investment in another person's life to be able to see the world as others see it, to be non-judgmental, to understand another person's feelings, and then to be able to communicate the understanding of that person's feelings. And as you take the necessary time to invest into the lives, emotions, and needs of your customer. Then you open them up to being able to trust you and invest back into you. That's what we call a win-win. 35. Belief Framework: A Mentor is an Authority: Now as we have gone through already, being relatable and authentic is good. But no one wants to follow a brand that is in competent, right? Because in competence does not sell. This is why you have a mentor in the first place, isn't it? You listened to a mentor because they have not only been where you've been and understand your pain personally, which is good. But they've overcome it and they found a solution or at least a working through some given solutions, and they're willing to share their solutions with you. Now, one of the greatest examples of a mentor's Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. Now if you don't know what I'm talking about, then you are missing out. In fact, I suggest you press pause this lesson and take the next 30 hours to get caught up on some of the greatest epics of man kind. Well, if you are familiar with Star Wars, then you know, OB1 comes alongside a young Luke Skywalker as a trustworthy expert in walks them through his challenges along a path that reaches Luke's goal. Ob1 is helping Luke through uncharted territory by building trust and modelling experienced authority. I do find it interesting that Google identifies the three most important aspects of high-quality content to be, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Why? Because if you lack any of these three, then you start to wander towards incompetence, opinion, or manipulation. These three qualities are what people are looking for and content in a mentor and in a brand today. But it does not come without effort. However, I would caution you from displaying too much authority. As we have seen, the next generation of buyers are looking for a brand and put its arms around them and be their friend. If you're brand comes across as too authoritarian, then you have the potential of obviously scaring people off. So listed here are just a few key areas that you can demonstrate your own authority as a brand. Number one is research. If you were able to, meaning it does take time and money. But if you're able to develop a lead gen PDF, a lead generation PDF that includes unique research for your industry. Then do it. You'd be surprised how many different ways you're able to use and reuse your research across all channels. Plus, you now become an authority that people will follow, share like, and trust. How about testimonials? It's the old marketing advantage. Why talked about yourself if someone else is willing to do it for you. Plus testimonials are more powerful and others talk about how you help them solve their challenges. And then if you just talked about it yourself, it's more relatable this way. Number three is social proof. Now you've probably seen the social proof bar on websites or on social profiles wearing a company will showcase all the other companies or logos that use their software. And usually there's a catchy title like our customers love us or who we work with, or our partners or something along those lines. What are they doing? Well, they're showing you that they have successfully helped other companies just like you with the added benefit that yet now you get to go second. Number four is statistics. People love numbers. In fact, digitally speaking people are drawn to faces, eyes, and numbers more than anything else. It's on a website. If you have statistics that underscore how many customers you have, what percent growth do they achieve or your customer satisfaction rate, then showcasing, making graphically pleasing without being overly boastful and it'll be a nice touching your footer are on your homepage. Number 5 is competence. Now, this is the hardest part, but this is where the belief framework comes in. You display your competence by contextualizing your message. That is, you speak to your customer and the language they understand based on where they're at in the buyer's journey, satisfying their immediate concerns and needs. Now without that belief framework that we're gonna go through later, then chances are you are simply developing good, unique content, which is just a marketing buzzword. That means you have no idea what's your tuning. So you write a lot of content and hope some of it sticks. Now we will take a look at this much more in this session and in Session 5. But for now, if you want to display authority, if you want to begin wrapping your mind around how do I display, then these are just a few ideas that have proven to be very successful in positioning brands to be trustworthy, authoritative experts. 36. Belief Framework: A Mentor is Committed: Lastly, but certainly not least, a mentor is committed. Just like a mentor mentee relationship. It takes time. So to consumer trust doesn't happen overnight. It takes time as well. Cultivating relationships and growing your story, letting people get to know you. It all takes time. So the goal as a mentor type of brand is to get involved, become culturally relevant, give back, and demonstrate to your customers that you're in this together for the long haul and you're not going to let them down. Now you can only do this if you take the mindset of a mentor and tell yourself in your team, we are in this to see the customer succeed. Tragically. The heart behind most by now buttons or request a demo buttons is a quick win with almost no follow through. And the commitment that is exhibited is only temporary. In fact, it lasts only long enough to see the dollars come in and then it's over. But being committed to your customer means walking them through not only the buyer's journey, but also as a customer. That is why customer support teams have changed their names to customer success managers. Why? Because they want more than just to support the customer. They want to see their customers succeed so they remind themselves by changing their titles. I like it. Here's the point. If you are committed to their long-term success, a customer will sense it and they'll reciprocate that commitment and trust. In the end, you're both going to end up winning. So here's a quick list of some authentic mentor like brands. And this list is from Conan Wolf's research that I mentioned earlier. I think it's interesting how many supermarkets and electronic companies are considered to be authentic? Probably because the competition is so high or maybe consumer expectations are high. But in reality, what we're finding is that more and more brands are understanding the necessity of honest, sincere, authenticity that resembles a real relationship. Think of oh, lays behind the Beauty campaign or always like a girl campaign or Nike's find your greatness campaign. You can Google any of those. And you'll see Greg campaigns that resemble this kind of honest, sincere authenticity. Now, what are these companies doing? Well, they are honestly and with integrity, placing the customer first, speaking their language, meeting them right where they're at with what matters most to them. In other words, they're acting like a mentor. Before we close this section, let's take a look at one example from this list, apple. Now, have you noticed if you've ever been to a brick and mortar store that from the moment you walk in the door, you feel like someone wants to take care of you. Unless of course, you're there on Saturday afternoon and the number of occupants are probably way over what the legal Fire Code allows. That's a different topic entirely. However, if you do walk into a store during the weekday, you're generally met with a concierge. She immediately asked how they can help you. And right away you are the center of their attention and their focus. You are then passed to an expert who will walk you through your needs, not theirs. They may show you a new product that will meet your needs, answer your questions or solve your problems, but they will not sell you. For one, the product sells itself. But secondly, they are there to simply serve you, give you the information and support you need for you to make the best decision for yourself and if you've ever experienced it, what I'm telling you is a no-brainer. Absolutely. You get that sense. You get that feeling every time you walk into a store. Now, do you see how Apple is set an image beyond the big multi-billion dollar corporation that sticks out tax havens, which thing may be. But in person. They've presented you as the center of your story and has made you feel special, cared for, and empowered. They're not competing with you for attention and that is key. They are not making themselves the center of your story. You are the center of your story. Essentially what Apple has done is they have mentored you through the buying and owning process. And as such, they become one of the most authentic and successful brands of our day. Now, before we step any further into the belief framework, you must understand your role. Takes on the flavor of an authentic mentor who guides, leads, and nurtures your customers to their desired goals. Isn't that what we're really looking for and brands? Now, once you've started to grasp your role as a mentor, then and only then we can move on to the role of the customer in the future lessons. 37. Principle 2: Your Customer is Human: Now we come to belief framework principle number 2. Your customer is human. Now, as we just saw in the last lesson, we are no longer marketing to the vague customer identified by just an ID and a marketing automation platform. Rather, we are marketing to real humans with legitimate wants, needs, and pain points, who desire to have an authentic relationship with businesses that are relatable and respectful and real. And if we are to act like the mentor, then we're to place this real customer at the center of this real relationship. Because if we don't, then guess what we end up creating. Jump. That ends up on late night TV infomercials. Then at the discount aisle of the supermarket, and ultimately at the dollar store, brands that create products like these fail to see that customers have actual, real, tangible and measurable wants and needs. And these wants, needs and pain points and problems are all in flux. They're evolving, they're changing, they're adapting. We are living in a fluid landscape where we cannot afford to guess at what our customers want. So before we dive into identifying customers wants and needs and then presenting the solution and the belief framework. We have to be able to identify and describe our audience and answer questions like, who are they? What matters to them? What motivates them? What do they want people to see in them? What problems are they facing? What challenges do they hoped overcome? And as we begin to answer these questions, one of the challenges that will immediately spring up is that there can be so many different customers. Therefore, if we want to target our customers more effectively, we need to start to group them together. Now, not just one main group as that's obviously not helpful. Nor 20 micro groups as you would be overwhelmed trying to market to all 20 different groups, but rather just a few manageable groups. And rather than calling them human groups or groups of like-minded individuals, the term used in marketing and business, which you've probably heard is persona's. 38. Introduction to Personas: First off, let's take a look at personas. Personas answer the question, what types of companies or individuals are we selling into? And what do we know about them? Persona's are basically a method of market segmentation. When we collect a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data to build archetypes of the members of our target audience. In other words, we take the data to tell a predictive story about our users based on past behaviors and attributes. The challenge though, to developing a good persona is that what happens online is you're constantly dealing with invisible audiences. For instance, next year you may have the goal of earning 100 or 500 new customers. And you've segmented them into two to three separate persona's to the best of your ability. However, customers change over time. Audiences grow and new metrics and characteristics are constantly introduced into your customer and target audience, right? This is the challenge. Therefore, when we talk about persona's, we do not take the philosophy that it is one and done. Persona's should be analyzed, an updated every six to 12 months for accuracy simply because of the rule of invisible audiences. So let's first build a definition of persona. Persona's are semi fictional representations. That is, they're not completely fictional. They are based on some sort of actual reality, but they are nevertheless semi fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data, actual analytics. And some select educated speculation, sales and support can definitely help here about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. This can be extremely beneficial. Basically, persona's help you segment your large group of target consumers into more bite-sized chunks. So you can mark it to a smaller number of collected groups that have defined characteristics. The worst form of marketing is lumping everyone together in a single audience. Because then nothing is tailored, nothing is targeted, and everyone receives the same marketing message. And the benefits of persona's though, is that it helps you to focus decisions surrounding marketing efforts by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation. Especially when it comes to things like motivations and goals that drive the consumer to behave in certain ways. It can also help avoid the false consensus effect. The false consensus effect refers to people's tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. And of course, only people who are very different from them wouldn't make different choices. The false consensus effect was first defined in 1977 by Ross Greene and house. They showed that unlike scientists, lay persons, psychologists, that is all of us who are put into the position, I guess, how others would behave. That is, most of marketers today, we tend to overestimate how many people share their personal choices, values, judgments, and perceive alternate responses as rare or deviant and more revealing of the responders, right? We do this all the time. We see a brand new website design and we say, No, no, no, that part of the design isn't good because I don't think people like that. Or I like this design because it just makes sense. That's the false consensus effect. And this is where persona's can definitely help. Because when it comes to a market or like a copywriter, They can now ensure marketing content is written to the appropriate audience. Not for themselves, not for their boss or their CEO, but for the appropriate target audience as defined by the persona. And we're going to take an in-depth look at this in later sessions. But there's no point in writing content unless you know who it is for and what purpose it will serve. Or how about UX designers? They create the overall look and feel of the website, right? Well, just like we saw with the luxury ads, if you know your specific persona's, then you can create a pleasing experience for them. Not necessarily you or non target audience. For instance, if I was developing an ad for a luxury brand, I personally would not understand people walking down luggage or sitting on top of a pile of luggage because it wasn't made for me. It was made for a specific persona. Or how about stakeholders and leaders in the marketing department or the business in general, who evaluate new features and ideas. Having persona's let you ask questions like, is it helpful and beneficial for this specific audience and this defined need? If you don't have persona's and you're not asking these questions, then generally hippo is going to win. That is the highest paid person's opinion. Persona's also help developers or information architects are system engineers. Focus on satisfying, improving user experiences for a specific audience. So the first important question that we need to ask is, what do you need to know about a persona? That would be helpful? You see when building persona's the most important first question is, what do you need to know? What are the motivations? What are the behaviors about this person? What are their previously held beliefs that would be helpful? Now this can be a challenge. So let's start with a simple exercise. 39. HOMEWORK 2: DEFINING YOUR TARGET MARKET: Well, welcome to video number one of the homework section of session to building your belief framework. Now like we did in session 1, first off, you're going to want to come up to File and then make a copy. The reason is is that this is a readable version of this Google sheet. You'll want to save it to your own Google Drive so you can make active edits without it being deleted. You'll also notice at the bottom we are on the first tab called target market. There are four tabs here representing four different homework sections during the belief framework. Now first off, what you should notice is that this is a very simple, but this is where we want to start. These are the all important primary questions that you have to understand and be able to define before we even get to the persona element of the belief framework. So first off, let's ask this question and I'll have you define it. How would you describe your target market? In just one sentence? This is harder than you think. We loved to define things in multiple sentences or paragraphs, even essay format. But what happens is if you're a subject authority or you really know your target persona, you could define them in just one sentence. If you feel like you have to take more chances are you don't know them as well as you think you do. Now, we're not quite at the persona level yet, so that's why we're starting very broad. So let me just continue to define this in the grand scheme of things. Do you and your organization have a fundamental understanding of your target market? Do you even say the same things and use the same terminology? Do you, and where's your business partners or fellow employees, or even people in your industry? Do you describe your target market even the same way? This is the primary first step that needs to be defined and memorize and understood by everyone in the organization. Now secondly, and this is, this is where it gets a little bit more difficult, is what matters most to your target market. Alright? This is where you're crawling inside their mind, getting into their motions. But most importantly, it's the all difficult question. Do you know what motivates them? Alright, this is, again, a very simple place to start, but it is important nonetheless. The next series of videos we will dive into what a persona looks like before building our own in the second homework session. But even building our own persona is built off of these two fundamental questions. First off, describe them, and secondly, what motivates them? 40. Elements of a Good Persona: Here is Manager Mark. What do we learn about this buyer persona that can be helpful in marketing to manage your mark. How about where he likes to consume information? You could target him there. How about what is important to him personally? Family, kids comfortable living. That helps you speak his language, right? Or how about the pain points he faces with getting his team on the same page? This can be your title or call to action. Notice though that this person has a name. That way you and your team can target specific groups by referring to them by name, Manager Mark. These are not casual elements for this persona that are pulled out of thin air though. Keep that in mind. They are researched, studied, and developed with different groups in your organization. Let's dive into this analytical approach of building a persona. Now, in my experience, marketers tend to swing to one end of the spectrum or the other. The first group is the quantitative group. These are the ones who loved the data, the numbers, the spreadsheets they'll spend all day in Excel and they love it because they just want to create pivot tables and make averages and charts and graphs. And this group, though, can often diminish the value of having a conversation with the customer or prospect. They either don't have time or even desire to speak to people or they don't view it as valuable enough data, they need the actual numbers. This group though, to their credit, can pull great data using quantitative techniques and software like crazy to see user behavior or Facebook analytics or form completions are Google Analytics all very good information. However, you've got to balance the quantitative data with the second group, and that is the qualitative group. Now, this is the group that loves talking to people. They love hearing the stories and the struggles and the challenges in victory. And this group, though we'll often balk at the idea of numbers and spreadsheets because all you've ever wanted to know about the customer while they can be gathered over a nice conversation with TN trumpets. And it's true there is great data using these qualitative techniques which honestly, most marketers do neglect. Things like in-person interviews or talking to sales and support about the conversations that they have with prospects and customers or closed one or close loss calls. These are very valuable. Or even online surveys have proven to yield great information. The reality is that it is not either or it's both and only a truly great persona. We'll integrate both quantitative and qualitative data. You may step on some toes with office politics, but don't let up until you have a truly meaningful and beneficial persona build out. All right, let's start putting together the necessary elements of a good persona. Now I want to credit HubSpot for putting together this handy little list of the elements of a good persona. And first off, you want to gather questions and knowledge around that persona's role in their organization. What is their job role? What's our job title? How is their job measured? You can ask questions about what is their typical day or what skills are required for them to do the job well? Or what knowledge and tools do they use on a daily or weekly basis? You can also try to figure out who do they report to and who reports to them. Again, you're trying to figure out kind of an average for this persona is not targeting one specific customer, nor is it targeting all of your customers. You're trying to develop a persona and so get an idea of how you can describe this persona to yourself and to your team with these different elements. How about goals? What are they responsible for? What targets are they responsible for? What does it mean for them to be successful in their role? Or the challenges? What are the biggest challenges that they face on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And how did they overcome? These challenges? Are what about the company in general that they work for? What industry or industries does their company work in, and what is the size of their company, revenue and employees. This also determines how you market to them and often how they behave. Or what about watering holes? I actually really like this part of building up persona's. And that is, how did they learn about new information for their job? Or what publications are blogs do they read? Where do they go to for information? What associations and social networks do they belong to? This should underscore in this day and age of digital transformation. Some of the greatest ways to market to this persona. Now, personal background is kinda those basic demographics that we often think about when we think about persona's. Things like age, family, are they single, married to have children? What education do they have? Again, very important for how you speak to them. And lastly, shopping preferences. That is, how did they prefer to interact with vendors? Do they do so through email or phone or in person? Do they like to be more digitally oriented or do they not mind talking to people? Voice a voice or face to face? Do they use the Internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how did they search for this information and what types of websites do they use? Gathering this type of information and asking these questions both internally with your sales and support team, as well as externally with prospects and customers, will help lay the foundation of understanding their behaviors, their motivations, their goals, and what drives them. All of which you can use to build out a great persona. And as you build out your persona, this is a quick list of the information that you will want to try and include persona group. That is, are they a web manager? Are they part of a customer success manager group? What group are they part of within their organization? You'll also want to include a fictional name, as we saw with manager market just helps you internally use the same name to describe the same persona, job and titles and major responsibilities such as day-to-day, but also what are they responsible for on their quarterly reports? You'll also want to include demographics, right? This is the basic persona information that we often think of such as age, education, ethnicity, family status. That way you can make sure you are speaking to them in a way that resonates and is not meaningless. Also, make sure you include the goals and tasks that they are trying to complete within their organization. That way you can message to them in such a way that you are helping them succeed and achieve their goals. And targets also include things like their physical, social, and technological environment, right? If people are on really old computers and aren't using smartphones to search for your type of a product, then you've gotta make sure that you market to them effectively in a way that works for them. You will also want to include a single sentence or quote that sums up what matters most to this persona and include something about the motivation, what drives them. It's just something that you can keep coming back to to remind yourself. Oh, that's right. This is who my persona is and this is what is important to them. It's also helpful talking point for you within the organization. Because as people ask, who is this going to be marketed to, you can say, well, it's going to be marketed to marketing manager. And this is what's important to him. Consider it kinda your elevator speech for this one persona. And lastly, I would include a, just a casual picture representing that user group. There's something powerful about visual imagery that we can kind of draw a lot of information just from the image alone without having to read through the persona. 41. Telling Your Persona's Story: Remember, the goal of developing personas is to tell your persona's story. So organize the persona information in an easy to read logical format that reads like a story. You want people to walk away with an image in their mind that is realistic rather than just bland information they have to memorize. So to start, just choose one primary persona and build from there. If you start with 45 or even six persona's, then there may be unnecessary overlap. Plus the task is just too daunting for most people. Then send it to the entire organization or your leadership staff and print it out so that you and your teams can have a copy of the persona next to the workstation. You should never forget who you are marketing to. Neither should your team. When content is being written, they should always have an image in their head of who it is going to be reading it. Otherwise, you will join the millions of others flooding the Internet with just generic content. When creating a good persona, you should always establish a quick reality check by asking some of these questions that you see here. Number 1, do your personas represent a major user group? Or is it too narrow? Now you can usually tell this by checking to see if there's too much overlap between persona's. Remember, the persona affects marketing messaging. If your messaging is identical or nearly identical for two different personas, then combine them and save yourself some marketing time. Secondly, are the persona's realistic and not idealized. Remember there to describe real people, real customers with backgrounds, goals and values and motivations. But at the same time they're also to be somewhat fictional. That is, there not to be an actual customer. It is to represent a group of people. So for example, if I was to develop a persona called high-school video game attic, some of the values that would represent this group, not just one person, but this group of people are well late night now, not all high-school video game attics or late nights, but, but this one specific persona will be late night people. They have a core community, their tech savvy. They love Mountain Dew or other toxic caffeine drink, right? You get the idea there to be realistic describing a group not idealized. Thirdly, focus on the motives behind the behaviors rather than just the knee-jerk behaviors themselves. For instance. What is really driving them to consume your content or fill out your form? What are the identified pain points, challenges, wants, needs, and desires. Can you explain them? Do you understand why they do what they do? Fourthly, make sure the persona reflects patterns observed in research. That is through both quantitative and qualitative research. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. Now these representations should be based upon actual user research and web analytics. Remember, your persona's are only as good as the research behind them. Therefore, don't validate your opinion. It's called cherry-picking. You look through a bunch of data and you find out the one that validates your opinion. Instead, investigate, study with your actual target users whenever this slightest doubt is involved. Fifthly, they should, these persona's should focus on the current state, not the future or ideal state of your target audience. That is, don't develop a persona on what you want them to behave like. Develop a persona on what they are actually behaving like presently. And sixthly, focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user groups, right? The persona is to give a clear picture of the user's expectations and how they're likely to use a site that way you can satisfy them. But if your persona doesn't detail that out, then you're not going to know how to be able to satisfy them effectively. And seventh, make sure the person was helpful, right, when you're reading through the persona, the persona's should help you understand users context and behaviors, attitudes, needs, challenges and pain points, goals and motivations. If the persona isn't helpful, then go back to the drawing board, take away the stuff that you say, Hey, this just isn't going to help me do marketing better and include more of the things that will help you change your messaging, your design, your cadence, how you target them, and so on. Now before we move on to the second stage of the belief framework, and that's the funnel stages. I want to take a look at one final example of a buyer persona and that's traveler Tracy. Now as you quickly read through this, what do we learn in this buyer persona that can be helpful in marketing to traveler Tracy? Well, you can see right off the demographics of who this person is. So you can paint a visual image in your mind. But then you can see her likes her passions, her schedule and her pursuits. These are all important because it will affect how you speak to this persona in a way that resonates. Or you may also notice where she goes to for information, right, super valuable from a marketing perspective. Now, this type of description teaches me where and how to market to this persona. Most effective way possible. However, if you're reading through this and you say, now, this part of the persona just isn't helpful to me and never will be helpful. Then remove it. Replacing with something that you think will be helpful that will help you write the right marketing message and Gulliver it to traveler Tracy at the right time on the right platform in the right way so that it resonates the most with her. Again, that's the purposes of the persona. All right, up next, we're actually going to build a buyer persona in the homework section. 42. HOMEWORK 2: PERSONAS: Well, welcome to the second video of your homework in session to building your belief framework. And now we get to the fun stuff. This is where you actually start building out your own persona. Remember, persona's are supposed to be helpful. So if there are elements on this persona tab, the second tab down here, as you can see, then get rid of it. If there are things that you want to add, then maybe replace. Some of these are just add more boxes. Again, this is not the definitive persona profile, but this is a great example that I have used quite regularly and I have found helpful a number of the organizations that I've worked with. So let's just walk through this really quick so you get an understanding of what a persona is. First off, a persona name, this is just that fictitious fictitious name that we took a look at, such as manager Mark or travel or Tracy or whatever it is. This is a way for you to just describe the persona without saying, oh, remember that persona we build, that's for males 30 to 34 from this. Just use a name and it helps everyone kinda understand. Oh, yeah, we know exactly what you're talking about. On this side, you're gonna see a lot of demographic information. And on this side you're gonna get to more of their heart, the emotions. And so on this side, very basic age, gender, and obviously do age ranges, right? This is a persona. You don't want to have 20 persona's. You want to have two or three personas. Gender, you can say, hey, this is a male and female. As long as their motivations are the same, start clumping people together, right? Because this is going to affect how you mark it. So if you mark it differently to the males as you would the females and well, that's two different persona's. But if you can start lumping people together based upon the similarity of marketing, do it, you're gonna save yourself a lot of time and money in the long run, marketing to only two to three persona's versus five or ten. Again, a lot of this is just straightforward. But when you enter things like location or occupation, tried to be broad enough, but also specific enough. So it's helpful. Like location. I wouldn't say they live in this city unless that's exactly what you're targeting. I would I would describe where they live. What kind of location is that? The South, is it suburbia versus urban versus rule? Whatever it is, that's going to be helpful. That's what you want to enter here. Again, as I mentioned before, on this side we're getting to more of the motivations. So quote is, what is something that they would say or how would you actually even describe them so you can use it either way. Roles are obviously the roles that they play. But I would put it this way, not just the roles within the organization, but also their roles in life. Like if you are selling baby food than the roles would be, well, this is a mother or this is a coach or whatever that case may be. You want to make sure the roles work with your product. Same thing that goes down here and the goals. What are their values? Challenges that they face? What type of company do they work with and for. So this is an important one. If you have different persona's working for different types of companies. So this would be if you have different types of buyers, watering holes is one of my favorites. Simply because I love marketing and this is going to affect my marketing. So I want to know where they go to for information, what information do they trust more than others? If they trust people in the pub more than they do television news, then I need to put this down there because that's going to affect the way I market to them. And then again, shopping preferences, especially if you're in like B to C. This is really beneficial. Where do they shopped? They prefer online versus retail. What magazines are the into that type of thing. I put down here also a resource that will help you out. I love this resource, make my persona.com. They ask a lot of the similar questions like this. But the nice thing is, at the end of this kind of prints out this really nice-looking persona. You've got the name, you have the image, you have all of that kinda put together. And you can just print it off, put it next to your computer, or send it out to people in your organization. So have fun with this. What I would do is if you do have two or three persona's come down here and just make a duplicate of it. But to start off with, just do one. Don't try to do more than one. Otherwise it's going to be overwhelming. And again, there's a lot of boxes on here. If you say, well, I really don't know these things, don't fill it out. Do it over time, and ask the right questions. Surveys on your website, sales and support in a lot. Ask your current customers. And over time you're going to refine these, unimproved these. So it's actually going to be helpful in your marketing efforts. 43. Principle 3: Identify and Establish the Need: Once you have understood your role as a mentor and have defined your customer groups in real human language. Then you can start to identify and establish the most pressing needs of your target audience. That is defined something they want as it relates to your brand. Now notice that I am seeing need, not needs plural. The mistake most companies make is they either don't define what our customer needs or they define 25 needs. Now, there are no doubt many wants and needs of the consumer and your target audience. But if we try to address all of them at the same time, we will lose focus and water down our message with unnecessary noise. So your goal is to have a singular focus, identify, and establish the need. That's belief framework principle number 3. Because once we have identified a specific need, we now provide direction and purpose to our relationship with the consumer. The basis of this relationship is us seeking to solve a problem, a dilemma, a need that we have defined for the consumer. Now, here's why it's important. If there is not an identified need or problem, then what's the driving force for them to listen to you? No established necessity. It might be good information, but it's not pressing or relevant. And the result is that your messaging will fall flat and your product will just appear unnecessary. But if your potential customers know exactly what want, need or pain point you are addressing specifically and that need is real and relevant to your product, then you have provided purpose to your relationship. Now, in the business world, this idea of identifying and establishing need is nothing new. In fact, it goes by many names. Problem recognition category need, need arousal, you name it. But it all refers to a similar topic and that is identifying and describing the difference or the chasm between the consumers current state and their desired or ideal state. And part of marketing is helping to identify not crete ATE that gap. For instance, this is where you are, but this is where your life could be. And this is what your life could look like if you use our product. Now, while you may not particularly love, the idea of trying to find someone's needs are pain points and then communicating back to them. The concept nonetheless is still really important for most people. Before they seek out some kind of solution or change, they have to face this critical junction that forces a decision. Either they will continue to deal with the identified problem or they're going to seek out a solution, hopefully yours, that will help them solve their problem. I like what Albert Einstein said about this topic. If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem in one minute resolving it. Why? Because if you're trying to resolve a problem that you haven't defined, then you are going nowhere quickly. That is what we saw with the as seen on TV products. Companies spending one minute defining a problem if even that long and 59 minutes resolving it. And the end result is junk, it totally misses the mark. And we wonder why we miss opportunities and waste resources at end up pursuing innovation. That ends up failing or underperforming. That is why this step is a primary principle in the belief framework. In this step, your goal is to identify and establish a specific basic need or desire as it relates to your brand that is simple and relevant to the consumer, right? The key is clarity. What is the need? Can you define it? And will your product support that need? If so, write it down, make it clear, so clear that people are empowered when they read it or hear it. Now, we will work on this as we build out the belief framework. But for now this idea is often identified as the elevator pitch or the one liner or to a certain degree, the mission statement. This is where you slow down and identify the need that you are going to solve before jumping directly to a solution. If we don't, in our zeal, we will overlook defining the problem we're attempting to solve and forget to articulate why those issues are important in the first place. So again, as we go through this topic of need, understand that the key is clarity. Our goal by the end of this belief framework principle number 3 is to be able to answer these three questions. What is the singular need? Again, not plural but singular. What is the most important? Neat. Can you prioritize number two? Can you define it? This is where you employ your power of simplicity, right? And one is sentence or short phrase. Describe the need of your user. And number three, will your product support that needs specifically, remember, we're, we're not describing all of their needs. There's too many, but we're only describing their needs that relate to our product. Your customers may have a desire for self-actualization, but your product actually helps them with status. Find, and identify the needs that your product is capable of satisfying. That's where you'll make the most impact in your messaging. Let's look at a quick example. Let's say you on a bike store and you've identified three primary personas. You can say the primary need of persona a is a new bike. They are coming to look or purchase a new bike, it could be used, doesn't matter at this point. Persona B is they have a bike but they need a bike fixed. Persona see is they want to purchase bikes, stuff, tires, pumped, energy bars, bottles, right? You get the idea. Three different personas, three different needs. Now, For persona a, there are a lot of needs concerning purchasing a bike. What type of bike is in mountain bike, road bike, Cruiser. Is it a kid's bike? Wheel size, there's color, there's features, There's seat style handlebars style gears. Is it going to be a fixed gear or how many years do you want? Right? You can see how quickly it can become a mess in your mind. Which is why First things first, identify and establish one fundamental overarching meet the consumer. Then and only then a belief framework will we break out that primary need into different stages of the buyer's journey. That way we can address they're needed when they needed addressed. But for now, your goal is to have a singular, focused one need and one need only, and then state that need clearly and concisely, just like I did with persona a, all of those tons of needs for persona a. The primary need is I need a new bike. However, imagine you are a persona a, and you walk into a bike shop to purchase a bike. But when you walk in, you don't know where to go. It's one of those super trendy urban bike stores that is the result of gentrification. It's cool, it's hit, it's trendy, but it is totally unhelpful. Behind the counter are a couple of hardcore cyclists engrossed in a deep conversation about gear versus freewheel. There are no signs or displays pointing you where to go to view the different types of bikes. And nothing seems to be ordered or organized very well. But hey, it's a cool bike store. Now, chances are in this situation you would leave that store and go somewhere bright and cheerful, friendly and helpful with nice signs and helpful staff where you wear your specific need is being addressed. Why? Because you and your needs are not the center of the focus of the super trendy hipster bike store? No. You want to go to a place where you are the center and your primary needs are being met. 44. Defining Consumer Needs: Now let's take a minute and talk about needs. So far we have discussed needs generally. But in reality, there is a difference between the variety of needs a consumer holds. First off, there's something called stated needs. This is the needs that a consumer actually verbalized or ask for. There's the actual underlining or real need of the consumer. Then there are unstated needs or really expectations. And then the all powerful moral need that we see becoming much more popular in marketing today. Now a quick side note, in this topic of consumer psychology, there are many more than just for consumer needs. But I've pulled these four out because of their ever-present importance I see in today's business world. Now let's talk about stated needs. First off, state and needs are what consumers ask for. Primarily stated needs are general needs that are evidence such as wanting to buy a home. Now, these are the easy ones, right? You could call these obvious or external needs. You already know these needs because chances are, this is how you talk about your product satisfying the stated need. Plus people are quick to let you know they're stated needs. Hence they are stated. I need a new car, I need software to fix this issue. I need to buy some shoes or I want to buy a house. These are stated needs, but actual needs are what the stated needs actually meet. Such as the reason they are purchasing a house in the first place. There are current places too small, it's in the wrong place. They want a bigger kitchen. They don't like how it makes them feel. You name it. But this is the real motivation behind their pursuit. Imagine if you knew this information, then it would affect the way you spoke to your target market, right? Your messaging wouldn't be around purchasing a house. It would address the actual needs of the buyer. You would start talking about the location and size of house. You would talk about the neighborhood. This is where we, as marketers have to sit up and pay attention. We often, if not almost exclusively, sell to this stated need. But the consumer buys based off the actual need. We have to do some sleuthing work and figure out what is this internal irritation, the annoyance, the dissatisfaction and frustration that would motivate this consumer to purchase in the first-place. Focusing on buying a house just isn't enough motivation because it doesn't address the real problem. Find the real problem in your consumers. And then you were able to craft the messaging that addresses their beliefs. And then there's unstated needs. Unstated needs are what consumers expect, but do not ask for. These are more difficult to discern because they are expected, right? People often use terms like it's just common sense or everyone knows. Now you can generally pull this information out just by spending time with your customers. You'll figure out their expectations fairly quickly. Things like how the software should work or the product should feel, or if we are using the House purchasing analogy, things like friendly neighbors or convenient services, they just expect friendly neighbors, they expect convenience service, they expect certain things. Now the reason I have this in here is because this is extremely important for customer satisfaction. Remember customers speak to customers in today's business world, happy customers lead to more referrals and that's what you want. But then we get to the most exciting and fascinating need, and that is the moral need. Now, moral needs are needs that have become increasingly important with today's consumers. These are needs that bring along with it a sense of belonging and community. These are needs people would use words like OT and shouldn't, such as everyone ought to be environmentally concerned or people shouldn't knowingly hurt themselves or others. These are the needs that give meaning to our life. For instance, you can buy a really nice house anywhere. But is there a nice house that would give you more meaning and a sense of community that meets your moral obligations. One with a green roof, solar panels, recirculated water supply. But you may say I only sell a widget. Well, does your widget make the workplace safer? Does it save your buyer's money? Is there a community of like-minded widget owners or you may make a generic software. Yes, it is true, but does it help your buyer meet their legal obligation, thus maintaining justice and integrity. You see, you may sell a product that fixes a stated need because something is broken, but the buyer will purchase it because of their actual need. Your product gives them a sense of status or wholeness, or it feels better, or they feel more inspired, accepted, or less anxious. But you will have one, an advocate, a promoter if they sense that your product satisfies this all important moral need. Now, there are more needs, as I mentioned before, such as the lighted needs that has needs that are not essential but are rather pleasant to see that there's secret needs are needs that consumers are reluctant to express because of embarrassment, but still can influence the decision process. Either way, let me ask you, at this point in the discussion, can you quickly define it, at least these four primary needs of your customers? Now, no doubt you will be able to quickly identify the stated need. Just look at your homepage and it's probably already there. However, do you know the actual need? The need that keeps your customers up at night, that, that makes them feel anxious if they don't have your product. How about the unstated needs or really expectations? Is there a specific user experience that must exist? Otherwise it would turn them away immediately. And fourthly, most importantly, does your product to overcome an injustice, create meaning and better humanity? 45. Discovering Your Genuine Contribution: Now, let's take a few minutes and look at some examples of moral needs. Now, one of the most common examples that we've probably all heard and seen his Toms shoes. Now, as you may or may not know, Tom's was founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie after a trip to Argentina. Now, during his visit, Mycoskie saw many people living in impoverished areas, living without shoes. So he wanted to do something about it. So he created a shoe company with giving as the core part of the company's values and brand purpose. Their mission is described by two words, improving lives. Now since 2006, toms has donated more than 60 million shoes to children around the world with their one for one program. Every time you buy a shoe, they donate a shoe. Or shoots plural, since there's generally two. But they didn't stop there, right? Since, since their brand purpose, it is giving an improving lives. They also give prescription glasses and surgery and medical treatment for site. They get fresh safe water supplies to people in need and get pregnancy and birth support. They even have event programs for bullying prevention. Here's the point. This is the heart, the passion, and the vision of Blake Mycoskie. So he was improving lies before he started to come shoes. Therefore, it makes sense that he would improve lives through toms shoes. Now, obviously that's an easy example. So let's use one of the most classic debates among marketers, soft drinks. How is a soft drink company actually making the world a better place? Well, glad you asked. Let's turn a Coca Cola and look at their Coca-Cola or a new hashtag. Now this is actually a page on the corporate website that talks about all of their social responsibility initiatives. In fact, you may have seen their television spots emphasizing this hashtag. Let's watch this one right now. What I love about this does match a moral mean. Now it's true that there isn't really a lot of good stuff in a soft drink, right? It's mostly sugar. It's probably not good for any human being out there. But I suppose you can argue that brings together families and friends and compute community. But let's be honest. It's a sugary syrup drink that rots your team. So if you find yourself with a product that doesn't match it up to the typical green initiatives or healthy lifestyle at so many care about today. Then, like Coca-Cola, find something that is good and relatable and meaningful about your company. All right, That's exactly what Coca-Cola did. They went beyond the negative to find something good that they can connect with their consumers on based upon a common moral need. And I can mention a ton of other companies that are doing the same thing. Unilever, Patagonia, Warby Parker, lush cosmetics, even Apple, with their recycling sustainability and $1 billion deal with First Solar. In fact, here's a huge list of the top 100 ethical companies that are engaged in CSR, corporate social responsibility. And the great part is that these companies are doing well for doing good. Now, I do want you to notice that there are both B2C and B2B companies in here. Please note, I'm not saying go be like Tom shoot or Coca-Cola or Apple or Unilever. What I am saying though, is discover your genuine contribution. Your genuine contribution is your brand purpose. It's what you as a brand can say with confidence, is a part of your core philosophy. It's not something you do. It's who you are. Great moral and ethical brands that consumers can get on board with. Don't just talk about what they do. They show evidence of their efforts. And when your customers see that good you're doing in the world, it will build this emotional connection, the one to be a part of what you're doing. And as a byproduct. Sales are going to reflect this. Everyone profits when you put people first. Again, we're not talking about just clean water projects were talking about your brand purpose. Your brand purpose is not a strategy, it's a philosophy. It's your philosophy. And if your desire to better humanity lines up with your target audience, then let them know. Let them know how they can join you and how their product purchase will also help such clauses as you see here. Environmental, social, like bullying programs from Tom's or give back programs. Legal and justice, your product may help organizations maintain a legal standing. How about fair trade? Do you deal with any sort of cotton or cotton byproducts? You may have a winner just right there. Transparency and accountability. Equality such as gender equality, racial equality, not just in how you hire, but in who you service. And also accessibility. Is your product accessible to people that have a wide range of disabilities? Again, what you were doing is building strong relationships with consumers through a set of shared values, moles, and purposes. You're not seeking to solve just a stated or obvious need. You are showcasing how your product, addressing the actual and real need of a consumer. While reiterating that a purchase of your product aligns with their moral code and helps create a better world. If you think meeting the moral mean is not necessary that I encourage you to take a quick look at the most successful companies today in every industry and every level. The ones rising to the top and taking over are those who are putting people first. Here's another example that you may have seen during the 2018 Super Bowl. Now I love this NADH on so many levels. Budweiser is donated nearly 80 millions of cans of water to disaster leaf over the last 30 years. And they showed that in this ad spot as you just saw, It's a powerful message because it appeals to the deepest part of a person's being. Now although a person may drink Budweiser because they like it and it's something they can do with friends. They now have this added unspoken moral benefit. Knowing that the company is constantly in effectively helping those in need with their most basic needs. Now, no matter how you feel about Budweiser beer, the focus on their marketing strategy during the Super Bowl earns him a great deal of respect. So let's make this topic about Needs Practical. Let's see you have a cake shop that sells sorts of yummy cakes. A customer comes into purchase a birthday cake and nice perfect king for a good friend. Now the state in each should be obvious. I need a cake. That's the state of neat. But what about the actual need or the regal needed? Well, in this instance, we can say that they wanted to make their friend feels special. That's the actual or real need. The unstated need would probably revolve around things like look and taste, right? It's got to look nice and it's got a taste nice. And if either a missing, then this customer would probably be quick to write up a choice review. But how about the moral neat? How would this cake make the world a better place? Well, you could say that everyone deserves to be loved. And now, as you were thinking about messaging and the belief you want consumers to have it off your cake shop. Which one would you say resonates most? Let's, let's think this through together. State in need. You get, say, we make cakes. Well, yes you do, but that's not very convincing or powerful or engaging, but so many brands do that today. We make software, we clean houses, we make widgets. Grade book. That's not exciting. How would the actual or real need? Well, you can say something like, we help make people feel special and all of that. Yeah, that's much closer to home and sums up many different factors. All of a sudden you're starting to engage some emotional elements then, how about the unstated needs? Well, unstated needs are necessary, but they just don't sound that great. For instance, we make yummy cakes that look nice and well, that's true, but it talks about you, you're the center of that story, not the customer. But what about the moral name? You can say something like, because everyone deserves to be loved. Well, that's something came buyers can get on board with. Ya. I want to make people feel loved and this is evidence of the cake shop that's going to make me do that. But it's just a cake shop. Exactly. But if you make the customer and their needs central, you will be surprised how you can identify the right needs that you and your product can satisfy. Now keep in mind, we didn't even touch on all the obvious elements like ingredients, location, atmosphere, the client tell how you donate to the community, all of which can also meet moral needs. We just, in this silly example, focused on one element that most people care about. And that is being loved and accepted. 46. Create or Satisfy Needs?: Now before we wrap up belief principle number 3, identify and establishing need. It is important to understand that when we use the word need in something like the belief framework. What belief and needs are two different topics. Marketers do not create needs. We create beliefs and satisfy needs. The needs are already there. Many consumers though feel that this is marketing, constantly creating wants and needs in the industry. And due to their strategies, they are able to manipulate consumers into buying unwanted unneeded products or services, hence, the image of a greasy car salesman. Unfortunately, there is truth to this, and if this is you, shame on you, you need to hear this more than ever. In fact, HubSpot recently put out some research that shows marketers are trusted just as much as car salesmen. And what's shocking about this research, and honestly really disappointing, is that marketers are trusted less than lawyers and salespeople and politicians. Really. At least the good news is that there's nowhere to go but up, nevertheless, this image has been portrayed from many years where the marketer is the diabolical salesmen only up to swindle the unsuspecting, innocent customer. Genuine marketers though, believe that consumers have the ability to distinguish from needs and wants. And it's the marketer's objective then to identify and satisfy the needs of the consumer. However, this is where we have to be really careful. Marketers do not create needs, but only enlightened wants. If you are creating need through fear, mongering or manipulation, the reality is that in today's world, you're just going to fail. People talk to people, customers talk to customers. Real needs though, the ones that we seek to identify pre-exist marketing. And it's up to the marketer to understand consumers needs in order to create belief that our product will satisfy that need. Think of it this way. A variety of competitors are vying for a small market share within the industry. Therefore, marketing strategists analyze the industry strongly held beliefs or miss. They analyze consumer behavior and geography, demographics and personal interests in, in order to develop a strategy that will effectively communicate to the targeted consumer, right? We all understand this. Therefore, marketing is the process of creating beliefs and customer value through creative strategies around the consumer's wants, needs, and pain points in turn, increasing brand awareness and overall profits. That's it in a nutshell. Again, these needs are not created but discovered, analyzed, and satisfied by marketers. Now concerning beliefs, Our job is to change, create, and nurture consumer beliefs towards these wants and needs. But as you do, just make sure you do a reality check. Do you actually believe your own hype? Are you fear mongering? Are you introducing manipulation? Are you being trustworthy? If what you're putting out there sounds ridiculous? Well, maybe it should be consumer-centric to satisfy the consumer needs. And that takes us to believe framework principle number 4. You have the solution to the needs that you have just identified. 47. HOMEWORK 2: IDENTIFY AND ESTABLISH THE NEED: Now in this homework section, we're going to attempt to refine everything we know about our persona needs within our industry to just these four boxes. Now as it says here, we're going to identify and establish the need. But you notice that it's singular. We want to find only one customer need per persona for each box blow. In this section where your product will be the solution. Now as we've already gone through in the videos, let me go through quickly again, just so you remember, stated needs are the obvious ones. These are the ones people asked for. Now, primarily stated needs are general needs that are evidence such as, as the example I use, wanting to buy a home, right? Again, these are external needs. People talk about these needs. These are fairly obvious across your industry. However, the actual needs are what the stated needs actually mean. Again, back to our example in the videos, such as The reason they are purchasing a house in the first place. Now, this is where you as marketers really have to pay a lot attention to your users and your customers. You have to figure out what's going on behind the scenes. They may ask for something. They may state, yes, these are my needs. I need a software to do X, Y, and Z, but the actual needs are the ones that you want to sell to. Now, it could be, well, I need more time and I just don't understand accounting or I need to be legal with whatever industry you're in, fill in the actual or real need that your product will satisfy. Thirdly, Are the unstated needs. Now, as I mentioned before, the reason I have this in here is because this is extremely important for customer satisfaction. Remember a customers speak to customers in today's business world. And so you wanna make sure that they're happy customers, that when they use your product, it's a really good feeling. So for instance, let's say you have a SaaS product, a technology product, and people log into your website. It may be functional, but is it beautiful? Do you delight them? Right? There's some just common expectations of basic user experience. All the features have to work. It has to be, has to make sense to some degree. And it has to look good. Alright, and these are kind of unstated needs of a typical SaaS product. Fourthly, though, as we looked at in detail, are the moral needs. This is where I would love for you to brainstorm and write down as many moral needs as you can possibly write down in this little box here, that your product will be able to satisfy, right? If you have nothing to do with replanting trees than all of that might be a good initiative has nothing to do with your brand and your product. So try to make a connection between what's important to your users from a moral standpoint. And then see if there's something in your product that you were already doing as a brand or that you could potentially do in the process, you are simply letting the customer know we care. And again, this is the, this is the need that gets people very passionate about and bet about a brand or a product. So take time in this again, brainstorm with your team. If, if there's only one of you, then brainstorm by yourself, ask your customers through a Hot Jar, polar, any sort of pull on your websites. Some of these questions here, you can sit down with sales and support, but take some time, take a day or two and just think about this as you're walking outside is you're going to work whatever the case may be. Try to figure out based upon your interaction in your experience, in what you know and what you can gather, what should go in each one of these four boxes. 48. Principle 4: You Have the Solution: Believe principle number 4, you have the solution. Remember, if you've identified a need that lines up with your product for a very specific target persona. Then don't be shy since you build your product for your audience, their needs, and for their benefit, then let them know. This is where you can be really bold and courageous with your messaging. Tell them exactly how you provide the solution for their need. Plus if you really believe this, then you can proclaim you have the best solution. And if you don't have the best solution, then go to your customer, ask them, how can you make your product better? But let's not make the mistake of getting ahead of ourselves. And that's something I've seen many companies do. That is they tried to present the solution and close a deal before a customer's even walked in the door. You may have the solution. Absolutely. But remember, as we've talked about before, relationships sometimes take time. I've heard this aggressive sort of selling the solution strategy described as proposing to a perfect stranger on public transportation. Again, you may have the solution, but they're not ready for that yet. So we have to step back and realize, and this is really important that our product is not the only solution that we have. Rather, if we're going to build out a helpful belief framework, then we must provide a journey specific solutions. That is a specific solution to the specific need of each persona during each stage of the buyer's journey. It sounds really specific. I understand that, but think about not only do different persona's hold different beliefs, right? We can agree on that. But the beliefs that needed to be created for each persona differs per each stage of the funnel. For instance, the values, questions, concerns, and needs of a bio changes throughout the buying process. First, let's step back just a little bit and take a look at the basic funnel again. Now, you should remember this from session 1. This is the most basic of funnels or buyer's journeys. And you have three different stages here. There's the top of the funnel known as tofu. Mo Fu is middle of the funnel and then Bo Fu, bottom of the funnel. Now during the tofu stage, you are creating awareness about a defined need, problem, pain point, or even desire. It's also an introduction to your brand. You are an expert, authority, trustworthy source. And at this stage of the journey, you can be as generous as possible with the amount of content you give away for free, just share information, build yourself up as an expert authority by talking about the customers defined needs, problems, and pain points. Well, during the Mahfouz stage, you'll be creating belief that there is a solution to the need or problem that is worth investing in. This is a great place for lead generators. Here you are building on the quantity and quality of the previous stage. But now you're asking for a bit more commitment on their part, like an email or a phone number. Now, among marketers, we call this giving away the Y. But you sell the how that is. Now you're starting to ask them to invest in you as you start to give more detailed information, which by the way, probably took more investment on your part. And then you come to the bottom of the funnel of a Bo Fu stage. Now at this stage, you are creating belief that you, your brand has the best solution to the problem that you've already defined. This is the stage for decision-makers. This is where you start to force a decision. Now if they truly aren't ready, then send them some more lead generator style content and then follow up with another decision-maker type of content. Now, I don't want to get into this discussion to deep yet. We'll say that for session five. However, for now what I want you to see is this. What motivates a consumer at the beginning of the buyer's journey and what they need most likely will be different at the end of the journey. Because as you are aware, problems, needs, and questions develop and change from one stage to another. 49. Journey Specific Solutions: Let's make this a little more practical by looking at an example. Let's say a new runner who has never run the 4s looking at purchasing a pair of new running shoes. Now if you've ever been to a running store recently, you know, you just can't guess at which she will be best, right? It's a rainbow of confusion. Now, as you can imagine, a new runner who walks into a store may not be ready to buy yet. So after asking some friends and family, they go to the mighty Google and type in best running shoes. Now, this kind of generic search returns different lists of the top 10 shoes reviews by shoe companies or she running stores with their top sellers, Right? Very generic. Top of the funnel, educational results due to the very generic search. Well, after looking through some of these lists in a bit more research than now, more savvy searcher realizes they need a certain type of running shoe with a certain type of support for them personally. So going back to Google, they now search for best trail running shoe with extra support. And again, after more research, they have found the type of shoe and brand that would work best for them. Now, you can begin to see all the different types of content that a consumer would find helpful during this journey. Just show a product purchase page at the beginning of their search. Then you haven't helped answer any of this consumers initial questions. There was no trust and rapport or relationship developed. And not to say that a consumer would not purchase from you right off for these type of running shoes, but you sure haven't given them any reason to do so. Plus, you haven't been able to deflect brand questions. Let's say you know that consumers either don't know your brand of running shoe or have a foul disposition toward your brand. This is your opportunity. During the informational search stage, you can change their mind by producing content early in the funnel that showcases both your authority and willingness to help. However, again, one of the mistakes I see too many companies make is they create a generic overflow of the same messaging to every customer no matter where they are in the journey. And it usually says the same thing. We are awesome by now, over and over and over. That's why when you go to a B2B website, what is the one button you see on every page? Throughout every page, it's the requested demo, it's the free trial, It's schedule a consultation. But what is really being said by such companies is, we are more important than our customers. Our time is more valuable, our money more important. Otherwise, we would invest ourselves in satisfying our customers needs with consumer centric solutions. Let's take a look at luxury brands. Again, luxury brands use what are called luxury strategy, right? No brainer. The luxury strategy aims at creating the highest brand value and pricing by leveraging all the intangible elements of singularity. Things that time, heritage, country of origin, craftsmanship. It's man-made, it's a small series, prestigious clients and so on. Will take, for instance, this ad. You may not be a luxury product person, but there are occasions in your life where you deserve luxury or should be luxurious for someone else. Now this ad is a great example of the awareness stage because they are identifying a need that is to be generous for pampered and offering a desire or belief that previously wasn't central in your mind. Now, in this ad, someone is getting married. Therefore, since they're getting married, they deserve a luxurious product because this is their most precious moments, right? As the ad says, life is about moments. And by the way, since you are celebrating such a special moment, have you thought about a watch? Now guess what exists now in the back your mind by association. So when that friend of yours who is the hardest person has shot for us getting married. You now have a great idea. And hopefully, if you remember this ad, this brand comes to mind, which is why this can also serve towards the bottom of the funnel, especially if you have a large disposable income. What's happened here? Well, a need was identified, a solution was provided. Perfect, right? Precedes any inner product no matter the cost, engages some sort of process. And just like this, I like how HubSpot simplifies this process as a three-stage buyer's journey. Now, we saw this example in Session 1. Instead of tofu, tofu and Bo Fu funnel process, they have a process of awareness, consideration and decision. It's basically the same thing. The idea is that at each stage of the funnel, each person will hold different beliefs and have different needs and desires. Take the luxury process again. At the awareness stage, this is a great opportunity to tap into the need of a luxury product for someone getting married, right? They're becoming aware of a problem or a need. Now during the consideration stages is when you start to consider, well, what kind of gifts should I get? A watch, a purse, close, household goods, or for some, even a car. That was not the case for me. But during the decision stages when you are actively researching and deciding on what kind of watch or product to buy. How big is the watch face? Is it gold or platinum does have it. Embedded diamonds and so on. Now, it's our job as marketers to hypothesize, create, and test different content for different persona's at each stage of the funnel in order to meet their needs. Let's look at another example of this process for something more relatable to most humans. As you can see from this example, the persona is a parent of a sick child and a house. Now you can replace this with a bunch of other persona's. Similar persona's like a spouse or a roommate, friend, sibling, whatever. But a typical persona in our illustration, again, a lot of assumptions here. Generally walk through these various stages during the buying process. Stage one, the awareness stages. While you're sick child is leaving germs everywhere. That's the problem, right? Secondly, you realize you need to fix it, but how? So you start to take a look at some solution categories. You use soap and water, maybe Clorox wipes, cleaning spray, what have you? Thirdly though, you get to kinda that decision stage. You already know the solution category, you've already selected it. And so now you move on to deciding which product. You may do a quick search online or at Amazon and settle on just one brand and one product based on the reviews. Now, this buying process may be fairly quick and happen within a matter of an hour. But the point is, it still happens. Now, the speed at which this particular buying process takes place underscores the necessity of product positioning in the mind of the consumer. In other words, if I was to say headache medicine, what would be your specific solution? Positioning your product top of mind is much more important for these quick off the cuff purchases. But if I was to say, what is the best car for you or your family, you would probably have to go back and do some research if you haven't done that already. Because the buying process is that much longer and more engaged. Now, if you were the digital marketer for a situation like this, for this type of cleaning product. To satisfy this searchers and tetanus desire. Here may be some content suggestions for each stage of the process. For instance, during the awareness stage, you could create content like the five disturbing diseases found on every day door knobs, right? That there's a little bit of clickbait there, but you get the idea. You're bringing awareness to, hey, there are actual problems. That's the point of the stage, the consideration stage. You might write something like the science of cleaning a door knob. And did you even know there was a science, right? What you're doing is you're showing the consumers that there are different solutions while positioning yourself as the expert. And during the decision stage, you could say something like seven things to look for in a household cleaning solution. Now you've already identified a solution category that is cleaning solutions. And your goal here is to satisfy searchers intent and curiosity by supplying facts, research, and possibly social proof to backup your product and brand. Now this content obviously is a little silly, but you get the idea. Your goal is to set yourself up as an authoritative, trustworthy expert at each stage of the funnel for the target persona. For instance, if your target persona is a parent of a sick child, what magazines, what publications, what websites would you promote your product on? This is why developing personas are so helpful. You could also set up another persona of an office manager or potentially a cleaning company looking to buy in bulk. 50. Homework 2: ESTABLISHING THE SOLUTION: In this homework session, we are going to be establishing the solution. Now, out of all the homework sessions, this is one of my favorite because when you brainstorming, when you start getting together with people in thinking about what are the solutions that we provide and what are the needs of our users and how are we going to marry the two together? It's easy to come up with 3 thousand different ideas. But if you notice there's very limited number of options here on this homework slide. You have six boxes and you are going to enter in information for each one of the six boxes, meaning you have to be very specific. Now as it says here, for an individual persona brainstorm to identify just one primary need, one primary solution. And what this persona's life would look like if they purchase your product and service or if they did not. So what you wanna do is simply go through these boxes, entering the persona, right? You want a different slide. You can copy this slide for each one of your personas. And you want to enter in the name of the persona, your targeting here and establishing the solution for. Secondly, the, what is the primary need? Remember, we have to start somewhere. If you try to bite off more than you can chew, its going to be overwhelming. It's going to be too daunting of a task. So start off with one primary need. It may not be a moral need, but maybe just the, the actual data or even as stated need. But start with one primary need. And then how do you solve that need? How do you specifically solve that need in a way that actually means something to your target audience, right? This isn't supposed to mean something to you as much it is to mean something to them. We are to be consumer-centric brands. And so we're supposed to speak their language in a way that resonates with them. Now, if you notice the box on the right, it says secondary needs. This is an opportunity for you to put in a lot of different brainstorming ideas. And I suggest that you do. And again, this is based upon the tab down there that says define the need. Now at the bottom are Value-Based and fear-based marketing. And I also threw in some other words, just as reminders, success and we're reward goes with value-based marketing and other words, what would their life look like if they purchase your product or your brand or your service? Or they're gonna gain more time. Are they going to save money? Are they going to be legal? Or they're gonna look cool, or they're going to feel cool. What is that success look like compared to that need, right? This is success based on that need. And so if you're selling cleaning supplies, then you wanna make sure that the success looks like something like your house is going to be cleaner. You're gonna feel more confident about inviting people over. You're not going to be embarrassed, right? It has to go along the lines of that need and solution. But also there's the fear-based marketing side of it. What would their life realistically not marketing mumbo jumbo. You, you're not trying to make up stuff. But what would their life really look like if they didn't go with your product? Is it just the status quo? Are they going to lose time and money? Is something going to be broken down the road, our competitors going to beat them? Are they going to lose customers? What realistically is going to happen if they don't go with your product, what is failure look like? What risks are they taking? Now again, I love this homework slide just because it's so simple and it gets me to think about just one persona, one need one solution, one success and one failure. And again, the secondary box over here is simply because I find that it's a difficult just to hone in on one. So I'll brainstorm a bunch of ideas over here that I've pulled from the define the needs slide. And then I'll bring over the most important one that I want to tackle in order of priority. 51. Content Types per Stage: No matter which persona you use though, to help in the process of identifying what topics work at each stage. Recent marketing research has shown that specific terms and ideas were better at different stages of the buying process. For instance, during the awareness stage, consumers were often, not always, but often use terms like issue, risks, or improve. Now as you can see, these are vague question in terms, consumers don't have an idea of a solution yet. They are addressing pain points and then doing some vague high-level searches on the search engines. However, during the consideration stage, now this search begins to narrow to a general solution to a specific problem, or maybe even a provider or service that can help. However, at the decision stage, consumers are actively comparing. They're looking for social feedback and reviews. Why? Because they know their pain point. They think they have a general solution and now they're comparing specific brands, options and solutions. Now we have to address the elephant in the room. Actually, just a couple. Number one, there's no clean cut process that a user goes through when purchasing, right? I think we all agree on that. That is, people just don't go from one stage to the other every time. It's very fluid and may fluctuate back and forth for different periods of time for different prospects. You can actually use this though to your advantage. For instance, if consumers are at the decision stage for a solution that your brand doesn't offer. You may have an opportunity to redirect consumers back to the consideration stage, but this time, taking your product and solution into account. Secondly, though, not everyone will enter your funnel at the very beginning. So may enter your specific content funnel towards the decision stage for a number reasons. Meaning their first impression of you may be at the end of your specific defined buyer's journey. Take this into account when producing marketing material. Now, having said that these terms will still be helpful in starting the discussion of what type of content could be created. Again, these are not specifically hard defined lines between awareness and consideration and decision. This is just for your benefit and hopefully some helpful education. There's also research that has been done on the types of content that are most beneficial at different stages of the buyer's journey. But again, we want to be very clear that this is just a guide for content types. There's no real scientific consensus on what types of content work best at each stage. Because it depends a lot on your sales cycle, your industry, your audience, and so on. There's also a lot of overlap between content types and stages. However, that being said, this is the best we've figured out for now. And according to research we've seen, it seems to still hold true for the vast majority is accompanies, was successful content marketing campaigns. For instance, when you are in the awareness stage, you are not looking for trials and demos. Are you? Rather you are learning about your wants and needs and pain points. This type of information is much more consumable in ungated content like a blog, social post, or a tip sheet. Now if I go to a website looking for information about wants or needs, and I'm really kind of at that awareness stage. The last thing I wanna do is fill out a form to receive information. I will balance a 100 percent of the time. This is why Forbes, if come increasingly irritating. They are hiding their awareness stage content behind a 3 second add. And then you'd have to click a button and then you have to go back. If you want to go back to the search engine with two clicks, it's if you don't know what I mean, click on a blog post from Forbes on Google, and then you will feel our collective pain. This kind of gated content is much better further down the funnel when you have already spent that time to build rapport and trust. And consumers are more dedicated in their search to the point that they're willing to finally give up their private information that are private email or phone number or address in exchange for a demo or a trial, or an e-book or some Collateral download. Now to drive this home, let's take another look at that customer journey maps, the experience maps we saw in Session 1. Now I want you to notice a part of this document that we did not point out in Session 1. Do you see the persona on the top of this experience map? This map shows not only his persona and the funnel stage, but it shows the emotional state of this particular persona during the buying process. Now why is this valuable? Now you can measure and tailor the content for this specific persona based on their emotional needs. I think we can all relate that purchasing broadband, as in this example, is a lot more fun during the initial stages then during the checkout and instillation stage, right? For instance, as you can see here, there's a dip in emotions. At the end of the inquiry stage. The question should be, what kind of content could we create in order to satisfy this person's emotional need? Remember, each persona will have different needs and hold different beliefs at different stages of the funnel. Knowing the emotional state of each persona will help you create the right content for the right persona at the right stage of the personal journey to help satisfy that emotional need. The question I have heard frequently as how the answer time and volume. Over time, you and your team and other teams like sales and support, will hopefully interact with different prospects at different stages of the buying process. Gathered together different teams and start piecing together experience maps over time based on real data and feedback. And also based upon this feedback, start to ask the question internally, what could we do? What could we create that would help satisfy this? Are there specific questions or their concerns or their statements? Are they angry? Are they fearful? What is it that they're looking for that we can help create to satisfy that need. You may find that there are opportunities and frustrations that you have not seen, but have an opportunity though to satisfy. Now so far we've talked about a single buyer. However, that is not always the case. The challenge is that larger groups make it more difficult to sell into CEB. Do this research study that you see here of 3000 plus businesses and found that the average bind group in a business is 5.4 people. While there's often one indicated decision-maker, typically we are going to be selling into consensus purchase situations. Your job is to find out who's involved in the buying process. And what do we know about the decision making process for that company? Build a persona. Then for each buyer in the process and think about primary and secondary decision-makers as well as those who are influencers. The goal is the same. Satisfy the curiosity and concerns for all parties involved by creating the right beliefs for the right persona at the right stage of the funnel. 52. Homework 2: DEFINING THE BUYING PROCESS: Welcome to the third video in the homework section of session to building your belief framework. As you can see down here, we're on tab number three called the buying process. This is really just a simple Google sheet, but it's an important one nonetheless. Remember, you've already built out your buyer persona's. Hopefully you have two or three solid personas that you've worked on. You've asked other people within your organization for input and you're starting to improve upon them. Well, in this section, we start attaching a persona to the buying process. So ideally there's going to be at least one, right? But primarily more than one, you'll have two or three personas that are a part of any buying process. And so what you're gonna wanna do is just put in here the name of the actual persona, such as manager Mark or traveler Tracy. What is their title in the organization, even though that fits the actual persona, you can get a little bit more specific here. Whereas persona can tend to be a bit broad. In this specific buying process, you can say, well actually this is the exact title of this person's role in their organization. And then put enroll the primary decision maker, secondary or Influencer. The reason this is important is that it's going to affect the way you market to them, right? If they are an influencer, you're gonna speak differently to them than you would a primary decision maker. You may equip them differently. You may say, hey, if people in your organization are struggling to understand this topic, then here's a great download. Whereas a primary decision maker, you wouldn't say it that way. You would say, if you are struggling with understanding this topic or what have you, then download this collateral, alright, it's just again for you and your organization to start wrapping your mind around. How did these persona's fit within each of the buying processes. Now, these all may look alike. I put three on here. Some, if not, most of you may have just one buying process. It's very straightforward and you may only have two personas. Nevertheless, fill this out because over time, hopefully your company expands and you grow and you add more products and you may have more persona's. And so you want to have a good understanding of the role of each person in the buying process so that you can communicate it well to current and future employees. 53. Principle 5: People Respond to Direction: Now we come to believe framework principle number 5. Customers respond to direction. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, wrote, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. So to when people interact with your brand, they need to know what you expect them to do. They need direction. Because if there's no direction than your brand and customers will simply fall into confusion. I see this all the time. A company writes a great blog or produces a fantastic PDF E-book, only to have no direction at the end of that content. Meaning at the end of the article, there's nothing. There's no CTA, there's no next steps, there's no journey, no direction, it's a dead end. So in other words, is the consumer thinking in the back of their mind, well, what do I do now? Well, they have one of two options. Either going to chart their own course through your site just hoping they find the right information or the balance and they leave your site. Let's actually step back just a little bit and take a look at a couple of practical examples. Now if you've ever tried to ride public transportation for the first time, you know how difficult it can be. Take for instance, the London Tube map. Now, this may seem confusing to you, but it's actually brilliant because this is not an exact replica of the London tube system. Rather, this is just a beautiful effort to simplify a difficult system with the hope of clarifying and directing visitors. This is the actual London Tube system. Right now. This is a complicated mess. It's accurate, but it's complicated. And it's far less enjoyable and much more difficult to find directions to your intended location. Now think about your company. The steps to engagement and purchasing may seem obvious to you, but they can actually be quite confusing and daunting for our customers, right? We are the product owners, we get it, it makes sense to us. So if we design our systems and our marketing message to reflect our knowledge, then we're just going to confuse our customers who've made for the first time, be introduced to your brand. Consumer centric calls to action simply let the customer know, hey, I hear you and you understand their needs and you've charted the course for them. Now, here's another example. As long as we're talking about public transportation. I love how the Chicago public transportation clarified a seemingly difficult transportation system. Three steps. Find your bus stop and wait near the sun. Step number two, check the destination sign is the best approach is step number 3. Ride. Yes. They said ride. They made it crystal clear. Now, two things they did in spelling out the actions a person should take drive the bus. First off, they obviously educated people on how to ride the public transportation system of Chicago. It's a simple three-step process. It's not that complicated. Secondly, they reiterated that it isn't as difficult as you may think, right, is only three steps. And by the way, the third step is just ride. Thus, they were helping people with possibly some anxious fears about writing a new system. Now what if we did the same? What if we chose to give our customers a plan of action steps to take expectations that clarified what a relationship with us would look like. And secondly, we made it so clear that removed any doubt, frustration, or anxiousness. I imagine trying to ride Chicago's public transit can be noisy and confusing. But so too can the experience of a customer trying to find the answer to their needs in your marketing messaging. Now if we make the solution as clear and simple and straightforward as possible, then we will position ourselves in their minds as the trustworthy authority and empathetic authority in the industry. However, this isn't always the case. Tragically, a mistake that I see many companies make is either not directing at all or trying to direct every customer at every point in the journey. Here's a great example of a company that believes more as more. Now if you landed on this pricing page, landing page, homepage, whatever it is, what do you do? How is this answering my single question, my primary need. Now, I have no doubt my questions are being answered on this page, but it's up to me to weed through all the noise, do the hard work, and chart my own course. Here's the problem with this. There's already too much noise online. If you offer people more than just a few simple, clear choices, then cognitive overload will set in and the user will bounce. That's why we are building out that belief framework. Understand your users needs, build out the solution, then provide very clear direction. 54. Ad & Brand Exposure: I want to take a few minutes and just take a look at some facts in the industry as to why it is increasingly important today to produce clarity and direction in your marketing messaging. We live in a world with a ton of marketing noise, too much marketing noise. Alright, everyone is providing some sort of solution. Answer here, direction, what have you to all of life's questions and elements? But few do so in a way that is satisfying and trustworthy to the customer. Take for instance these facts. Now this is just a study of media usage and add exposure by a company called Media dynamics that shows that the average American consumes 9.8 hours of media daily. Okay. Now that that number is already obscene, can we not agree? Now a quick side note here, just random thought. According to Nielsen, I read this a while ago. Did you know that the average American consumes 33 hours of TV per week? That's almost five hours per day. I want to add a lot of commentary right now, but I'm not just let that number seeing kina bit. Okay, So we can agree there's a lot of media consumption going on. Not just in America but across the globe. Now factor in everything else at consumer takes in during the day. For instance, this number that you see here, 5 thousand AD and brand exposures per day. Now, that refers to everything, right? You're driving down the street, you see ads on the side of the road. You're, you're watching television, you're reading a magazine, you're walking through the supermarket right there. There's add in brand exposures all around us. Now some would suggest as low as 3 thousand per day, but is 3000 even low. Now, obviously, since there are so many ad and brand exposures around us, we ignore most of it. For instance, walking through the cereal aisle of a grocery store, you may view a lot of packaging, but not actually register what you were looking at. So take a look at the stats at the bottom right of your screen. Out of the 5000 ads and brand exposures, about 362 of those are considered ads. Only. That is specific marketing messages trying to grab your attention or speaking to you. Now, out of the 362, only a 153 of those are considered noted. And out of that 86, we're only aware of that is we've paid some sort of attention to. And 12 of those have actually made an impression. That is, we've engaged with it. Therefore, this isn't what I want you to know. Just because you created an ad or website doesn't mean people are going to even notice you because most of it just goes right overhead. We we ignore it. Right? If there's too much information around, because no matter how you slice it, only a fraction of the ads we are exposed to make any sort of impression on us. That's why the amount of advertising competing for your engaged attention is considerable. But remember, advertising doesn't just offer the right product to the right consumer at the right time. If we're going to cut through the clutter, then we have to go beyond just talking about ourselves. That's why it's so important to know and understand the consumer and their needs. Then position ourselves as the solution to their need. And then this is the most important part towards the end, provide direction. That is, what are the exact steps they should take next in order to be happy? The point is this. It's to get them emotionally motivated to investigate and ultimately to buy our product or service. That's why engagement has become so important. The bottom line is increasing engagement, directing and leading our customers with helpful plans, insights, and CTAs, right? Increasing engagement will help our marketing breakthrough. All of the clutter around us of not only the hundreds of add exposures per day, but we'll give them also a sense of respect and trust in our brand because we're speaking their language and we're speaking directly to their need. Why? Because we saw their need. We understood it. We anticipated there questions. We provided the solution that they needed and we showed them the path to take. 55. Two Types of Actions: Since we're talking about directing our customers in the world of marketing, there are really only two types of actions that we can lead our customers to take. First off is a nurturing action, and secondly is a decision-making action. Now go to any website, open up any magazine visit any store. And consumers are either traveling through the buyer's journey or they're being encouraged to purchase a product. And it's one of the two. Let me start with an example. Let's say you own a small bed and breakfast in Spain. So you start to write articles that will draw people into visiting your B&B. So first off, you decide you want to address a problem or need that you see. Your first article is a generic blog posts about five health issues caused by cold weather. All right, you want them to start thinking about warm weather. Now, although you are excited to get people to come and visit you, maybe now with this type of article is not the time to tell them about reserving a room in your B&B. So at the end of the blog posts, you may have a link with beautiful imagery to another article, ten Masie beaches when visiting Spain, right? You what their appetite to a very real need. Then you satisfy it with a link to something relatable. It's a perfect intermediate article. Now at the end of that article, you hit them with it, right? The decision-making CTA of make your reservation today, right? There's two different types of CTAs. One nurtures, the other calls them to make a decision. Now, the primary purpose of a nurturing CTA is getting consumers ready for a purchase. And you do that through identifying needs, building trust, answering questions, and positioning yourself as the go-to authority in the industry. So that when they are ready to make a purchase, guess who comes to mind? You and your brand and everyone else hopefully. Now, as in the B2B illustration, when someone gets tired of the cold weather, chances are a warm B2B on a Spanish beach fills their mind because they just read this really great article. Now, nurturing CTAs should be used when it would be inappropriate to ask for a purchase or a demo. Now these CTAs will generally be low-risk or risk-free and usually give something to the customer in order to build rapport and develop trust. However, on the other side is decision-making CTAs. Now these CTAs are direct and clear calls to things like requested demo or free trial or a Buy. Now, now I strongly do not believe in selling until the customer is ready. But if they are, don't mince words, be clear and concise because we believe that they're making a purchase will solve the fundamental need that we have identified in the first place, right? We're hoping them. But if you find your prospect is not ready to respond to your decision-making, CTA will then follow up with another nurture piece of content until they are ready. Such as download this PDF or read this case study, watch his video, or just take another step on your journey. Now, having said that, makes sure there is always and I underscore always an opportunity for your consumers to make a decision. Now we see this all the time in a typical B2B environment with the requested demo or Free Trial button, right? It's always in the top right of the website or in the footer, but it's always available no matter what. But even the Apple iWatch, which is a B2C retail item, makes it satisfyingly simple to purchase the product. However, on the flip side of that coin, although it should be evident, it should not be the only CTA, right? As we have clarified, users have needs and happy and satisfied users have a better chance of becoming happy and satisfied consumers. So make sure you always provide those nurturing CTAs with your nurturing content. Because what you're doing is you're trying to get your consumer, your visitor, ready to make a decision. So either way, whether you're nurturing or you're calling them to make a decision, whichever CTA you use in your content, word to the wise, don't make your prospect guess at what you want them to do, right? Tell them clearly importantly what action you want them to complete. And the make it as easy as possible for them to complete that action. Remember a field studied their needs. That means you have developed a path for them that will satisfy their needs. So don't be shy or vague. One of the mistakes I see many brands make is delivering great content, but forgetting to lead the consumer to the next stage of the relationship. It's like following signs in an airport and then all sudden the signs stop, they disappear. These companies, so too, are on a roll and they're getting people nurtured through the buyer's journey. But then what happened, right? They didn't think it all the way through to the purchase decision. For whatever reason, the human brain moves away from confusion and is drawn toward clarity. So having great content that meets a specific need without a CTA can be just as disappointing. Don't be weak. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. Remember they are overexposed to thousands of ads and messages every day. The only way to overcome that is to anticipate their needs and tell them exactly what they should do about it. By now, Request Demo, learn more. Download solution, read this PDF, look at this listicle whenever, whatever it is, make sure your CTA is very specific that you know, will have the highest chance of satisfying their present need. Why? Because if you don't ask your customers to buy from you or take a specific action, chances are they won't. 56. Creating the Belief Framework: We now come to creating the belief framework. Now before we dive into the actual content of belief creation in Session 5, we needed finish building the framework first. Like a house. The framework is what holds everything together for our purposes right now. The belief framework is what holds our content engagement plan together. Now when we start talking about content creation, there are lots of ideas in even more books. So let's start this section by addressing three fundamental elements of the belief framework. And these questions should be asked at each stage of the buying process. First off, what belief do we need to create? Now, again, I say belief singular because you need to think narrowly and specific. You want to avoid generalities at this point because that's simply isn't helpful. Things like I can afford it or this car lines with my value system or I deserve it, right? These are specific identified beliefs. And then secondly, who needs to hold that belief? Belief should always be applied to a specific buyer persona that you have already developed. So don't just add it to the void of your generic audience because that's really not helping anyone. So as you craft the framework, remember that it is to draw a specific persona into a tailored story that needs them right where they're at. If it's vague, generic, or meaningless, you will turn them off. It should fit like a glove, speaking their language, addressing their needs, providing you as their solution. Remember you are the mentor. Your job is to come alongside the customer and walk through this journey for their benefit. Not only will you score a customer, but you will win and advocate. And then thirdly, what we create that belief, is it social proof in the form of a case study or quote? Is it formal statistics and research? Maybe an epic 100-page e-book, right? If you don't know what would work, then ask use surveys on your side or ask your sales and support teams. Asked her current customers what part of the process and what information specifically was the most helpful in y. Now, as I mentioned earlier, you will need to answer these three questions for each stage of the funnel. However, once you have these questions answered, then you are starting to put together a framework that will hold together your content. Now hopefully you can start to begin to see how important a framework is like the belief framework versus just creating a load of content with no distinct purpose or goal in mind. Now as you create belief, there are two primary strategies and topics that we will see in the next lesson that will help direct your efforts. 57. Homework 2: THE BELIEF FRAMEWORK: In this homework section, we're finally going to build up the belief framework. Now, everything you have learned through the videos and all the homework that you've completed up until now is for this belief framework. Now I understand that there is a lot going on in this belief matrix. So let's walk through this one at a time. First off, you will notice two axises. Across the top, you'll see the belief framework address each persona, hence the beautiful color coding, right? And along the left side, you will see each stage of the funnel and several rows for each stage. Now for each persona. And there will be four columns. First off is the need column, right? This is what is the most important need that you believe your product can satisfy? At this stage of the buyer's journey, remember, we're starting to talk about funnel stages. And so you have to start brainstorming because there really is a lot of boxes here. You don't have to use all of them. But start to think about what is the most important need for this persona at the top of the funnel stage. Secondly, IS your solution, right? This should bring back a memory of this slide here, this homework section where we define a primary need and a primary solution. We're just simply breaking it down into funnel stages now because the needs at the bottom of the funnel are obviously going to be different than the needs at the top of the funnel. And so you have to start speaking to each persona at each funnel stage specifically. So the solution is really what is the solution or the content title or the topic? What would create the belief that your product satisfies this define need? Thirdly is type. What type of content we create that belief? Is it going to be a blog post? Is that a webpage, e-book, social engagement and white paper, whatever it may be. Alright, we will take a look at this much more in depth in session five, but I just wanted to make you aware of it now. Fourthly, as the CTA, right? This is what desired action do you want them to take? And this is important because so often people will simply put a learn more or worse yet, click here to contact us whatever the case may be. But you really want to create this CTA that then leads him down to the next piece of content. Now again, you, you may only have one defined need and solution per funnel stage. That's okay. You're CTA then should lead them to the next stage. Right? You're trying to reward them for following through with this entire article or blog post or e-book. And you want to anticipate their next step. Now again, this is not supposed to be a flip and exercise. In fact, I would be surprised if many marketers could actually fill this out quickly. Rather, I have found this addresses a couple primary challenges many, many companies face. Far too many organizations today simply create content because well, it's what they do. Unique, valuable, engaging content, right? It's like robots. You've been preprogrammed. We will make one daily blog post. You want to start thinking differently. It's not more content works, it's smarter content works. Secondly, as you can see here, we have different defined personas because each persona reacts differently in each stage of the funnel, a CEO is going to react differently then maybe an entry-level marketer. Versus maybe someone in accounting, right? They all speak a different language and they're all looking for slightly different things. And so contents should be created for a persona funnel with a specific design and purpose in mind. Now, the content that is built from this belief framework should typically be evergreen content. That is, for Persona one, there may be 123 tofu content pieces that addresses the needs, market problems, the pain points that challenges and struggles that the specific persona faces. All right. Think of it as a primary pain point in industry. For that specific persona. Typically, these type of pain points aren't going to go away, right? If you have defined a specific need for this persona, then this need is probably going to be here next year, or two years from now or five years for now. Think about again, if you have accounting software, those kind of basic needs just live on. That's the type of content you want to start to identify. That's why this content is often evergreen because primary pain points rarely change that frequently. Now, over time, you will be able to test incorrectly order your content by analyzing the click-through rate and past user behavior. For instance, you'll be able to identify which content was consumed at each stage of the funnel. And when certain content lead prospects to move from one stage to another, eventually becoming a customer. In other words, you are building an effective nurture Stream based on data. You're also going to build out some of this content and is simply going to flop, right? You're not gonna get it right the first time. And you're going to see, well I have three different tofu pieces of content. And I'm delivering them by social, by email there on the website. But this one is actually the first one engage with, and it's got the highest click-through rate. So maybe you move it up here, you just move it up one column. And then you make the CTA, the call to action to these other two pieces. And again, you may find that these aren't necessary and people just wanna move right down to the mofo stage. As I've said before, there is no clean cut journey anyone makes. But the reality is, is simply just putting out more content is not a smart way to go. We're simply trying to make it a smarter way to create evergreen content. Because once you create, let's say a mofo piece of content will then over time, after you've created all this content, you can take a look at maybe some underperforming pieces of content. And you may say, well, this one actually doesn't really fit. I thought it would, but I totally bombed on it. So I'm going to remove this one. Other ones you may say, hey, this is actually resonating. I can see the scroll rate through using a tool like Hot Jar, Crazy Egg. But the click-through rate isn't right. So maybe I've got changed his CTA on this. So once at least one Nim and one solution content piece has been identified for each stage of the funnel, for each persona, a true multi-channel lead nurturing campaign can finally be deployed, right? Delivering the right content to the right person on the right channel at the right time. What happens is soft and people just create one piece of content and that's it. And the CTA on a tofu piece of content is by now requested Demo, get a consultation free trial. And they're simply skipping all of these other content pieces that would nurture a person and most importantly, get them ready to purchase, right? That's really what Mo Fu is about. The mofo stage is simply getting people ready to finally purchase your product. And so by properly deploying content marketing like this belief framework and lead nurturing, you'll be addressing the heart of your consumer's wants, needs, and pain points. Because you're going to figure out what is really needed and what's a need you just kind of made up, right? The result is that your sales funnel will hopefully widen and the prospects journey through it will be accelerated. That's the point. So again, this is not something you're gonna do overnight. You may just, what I would suggest is start with one persona and one content piece per stage of the funnel. I think we're all really good at the Bo Fu. We put it on our homepage, our pricing pages. We put it on our About pages, on our social profiles in every email. We're really good at the bottom of the funnel. But even then, I would have you rethink what's valuable, this persona. What, what final need do I have to satisfy in order for them to click on the buy now or request a demo button, rather than just putting the requested demo right at the very top. Think of this as a journey. You're helping them through the journey. You're getting them ready to purchase with the tofu. You're answering last minute questions why you're the best brand in your solution category over all the other competitors. And tofu. While you're just trying to position yourself as the trustworthy, authoritative expert with well-researched, easily consumable content. Because what you're trying to get them to do is engaged with you. Click on the Next button, whatever that may be, that then leads them further down into the actual solution category content. So good luck with this. Again, take your time. This is a big project. It's not something again, you're gonna do overnight, but hopefully you're going to build it out over time, over months, if not years, and you're going to perfect it and refine it and change up content. So again, don't beat yourself up if you don't get it right the first time. Or if this just looks too daunting, start simple. And over time, if you are measuring based upon your model that you created in session one, then this thing will start to come together. 58. Values-Based vs Fear-Based Marketing: When you start to think about content topics that will help satisfy needs, there are two primary strategies and topics that marketers generally employ. Now the challenge is in understanding the necessity and tension between these two primary messaging strategies when creating belief. The first off is a values-based marketing, and secondly is fear-based marketing. Now remember, there are two options or actions or decisions for your customer when it comes to you. Either go with your product or service or not, it's black and white, right? So to help consumers make an informed and more immediate decision, marketers will employ the balance in the dichotomy of marketing messages, known as values and fear-based marketing, or positive and negative, or success and failure, or risk and reward. Now, most of what we focus on naturally is values-based marketing. And this is because we love to talk about our product. And as we come to the stage of building out the belief framework, we want to start to share with our customers that if they purchase our product or service, well, this is what their life is going to look like, right? What we want to show all the benefits of it. That's the purpose of values-based marketing. It's to identify an aspirational identity for your customer and then associate your product with that identity. The point being by association, their life will be happier, healthier, better because they chose your product. That is, you help them become a better person. Remember, as a mentor, you want your customers to succeed by helping them become a better version of themselves. Thanks in part to your product. You're not just selling a product or service. You're selling this narrative that you're crafting. Meaning values-based marketing is consumer-centric, not product-centric. The product is the means that will help the consumer get where they want to be. But note this, every positive must have an opposite negative. Meaning if their life will become better, if they use your product or service, then it stands to reason that their life will be worse off if they do not use your product, right? This is something called fear-based marketing. Fear-based marketing warns the consumer what could happen and what their life will be like if they do not purchase your product or service? Are they going to lose money? Are they going to be in danger of legal repercussions? Maybe wasted time, increased confusion, reduced safety, right? What would their life be like if they didn't invest in your product or service. You see it's often easy to ignore the benefits of a product or service because you're wane many factors like cost or effort to implement. However, fear-based marketing or reach in and tell them what's at stake. If they choose to ignore your offer, what risks are they going to take if they simply do not use your product? And in order to engage those emotions, which is in essence a sense of urgency. You can employ fear-based marketing. However, you can easily overdo fear-based marketing. So here are three helpful hints when applying fear-based marketing. Number one, don't be weaken your messaging. If you're really saving your customers from something truly awful, then tell them clearly, plainly and succinctly, don't mince words. Take, for instance, a sign on the edge of a dangerous cliff. Would you put there a long paragraph about how it'd be nice for people not to get too close to the edge of the cliff because something really not nice might happen. Or like they actually do. Do you place have a picture of someone falling and cracking their head on rocks blow with the big words in bright red, all caps warning exclamation point. Exclamation point, right? If you are going to use fear-based marketing, just make sure you're clear, don't be weak. Secondly, create a sense of urgency. If it truly is important, then make sure it needs to be heated right away. If you're in a plane that's going down, you don't wake up your seat mate with a gentle tap? No, right. You screen, you yell, you shake, you get their attention. Listen. If it's not important enough for you to be urgent, then it clearly isn't that important for your customers to purchase or use your service. However, if your product saves lives or dollars or lawsuits or whatever it is, then make sure you get your customer's attention. And thirdly, fear-based marketing should never be a stand alone tactic. It is always to be used with a well-defined, clearly articulated path to a solution. Meaning, if you're going to tell the customer what they will lose if they don't go with you, then present the path they can take that will protect them from such risks. One question I've been asked a lot is, what's the balance? That is, how often should I use fear-based vs value-based marketing? Well, like many things in life, I like to use the 80 20 rule is kind of just a rough guide. That is, if you send five emails a month, just make one of them fear-based, right? Or at least a sense of urgency. Again, just make sure you don't overdo it, right. It's like crying wolf, plus it's a total turnoff. Remember your product or service is supposed to do good and improve a customer's life. Fear-based marketing simply increases the stakes by introducing risks for not going with you. 59. Features vs Benefits: We have just looked at the two primary strategies that marketers employ in their messaging. And that is values-based and fear-based marketing. Well, as you think through the belief framework, there are two fundamental topics that will influence your customers beliefs as well. And both are important. And those topics are features versus benefits. While whether they know it or not, there is not a business owner in the world who hasn't already wrestled with the features versus benefits argument and challenge. The interesting thing is as critical as a constant may be. And I found that only a fraction of marketers and businesses understand the actual difference to the point of allowing it to affect their strategies. Here's how they dilemma starts. As a business owner, you are passionate about the product that you've poured your heart and soul into, right? You want to tell everybody about all the bells and whistles of your products, all that your product can do. You are rightfully so proud of your product and you want others to be just as proud of it as you are. So on your homepage and product page and other pages you load on the user with one epic feature after another, with the hopes that they will get it and be just as passionate as you are. Well, here's the rub. When you try to sell the features of your product or service you're making the customer do all the work to figure out why they want that feature in the first place. That is, how it helps them. A feature is just a factual statement about your product or service being promoted. But features are not what entice customers to buy. That's where benefits come in. A benefit answers that question, what's in it? For me? Meaning the benefits provide the customer with something of value to them personally. And this is where most businesses go wrong. It's in the seller's best interests to draw the connection for the consumer. But before we throw features out entirely, let me propose this question. Do features of a product help change a consumer's belief? Well, to help answer that question, let's look at this ad from Nike. Now. In this ad there are no real benefits. There was almost no text, right? It's just features, visible features of Nike shoes. Now, this ad tells me that Nike has only gotten better concerning their Eric cushioning technology. Probably based on a lot of user research, years of experience, countless dollars Nike's own Eric technology. But whatever the case may be, it shows me that, wow, Nike shoes are only getting better. So features do have a place, a strong place in changing beliefs. But the operative word here, place, just like benefits. Benefits may get you to take a look at a product, but features will often keep you. Let's look at how this works on a website. Now the best way to understand the true benefit of your product or service, or really to answer the question, what's in it for me is to focus instead on the results. That is, a customer's perception of each features result is what attracts him or her to a particular product or service. For instance, when someone chooses a smart watch with a built-in messaging app, the assumption is that the benefit is convenience, but the actual results are, well, they don't have to constantly carry their phone or check their messages on their phone or missing important text or update. Those results are the true benefits. So here's where most businesses stand. You've got your core value proposition, your mission, and your, you've got your set of benefits that support your value proposition. Well, you want those on your homepage or landing page or brochures so people can quickly see how your product will personally benefit them. And then there's features. Well, features are the things that support or substantiate the benefit. Coming back to the smartwatch analogy, let's say the new iWatch States live healthy. Now that benefit may mean different things to different people. So you have to be able to show through features how this is true. The benefit. They're draws a person in, where the features back up the benefit and make the sale. The point is that every feature should be tied back to a benefit. And once you get to a comparative shopping, which is further down the funnel, then features become more of a priority. Until then, your job is to convince the prospects, aka established a belief on your website that their life will be better with your product due to the benefits that you have made very clear. Now a common mistake I see is that businesses will often lead with the features of their product. But the reality is no one really cares about your product. They care about how your product will benefit them. Now, I like the iWatch, but I only like the iWatch because of what it can do for me in and of itself as a piece of technology, it holds no value to me. So in the next video, we're going to be taking a look at building out the belief framework matrix and Google Sheets during the homework section. And this is all going to start to come together and make a lot more sense then. 60. End of Session #2: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass. 61. Session 3: Welcome to session three, where we will unpack the topic of conversion rate optimisation, otherwise known as CRO. Now steer roe has been considered by many the most important marketing activity because it makes every visitor exponentially more valuable. For example, if you double your conversion rate, but keep the same traffic on your website, you have essentially doubled your revenue. So in this session, you will learn how the best companies design and optimize sites that convert. The goal is to remove the fog of mystery around CRO, by introducing you to common sense, data informed and well proven strategies for optimizing your conversion rate. I look forward to working with you in identifying and building out your own CRO tests in the coming lessons. 62. Introduction to CRO: Hello, and welcome to session three of the modern marketing course for leaders. In this session, we will look at conversion rate optimization, or more well-known as CRO. Now so far in this course, we have spent a great deal of time talking about the fundamentals of building a solid, data informed marketing framework. And this session we will begin to dive into some of the more practical marketing aspects that will help drive your numbers up. Remember, this is not the 1990s anymore, meaning marketing today is much different than it was 20 to 30 years ago. The point is this, you have competitors out there who are marketing in today's world with today's tactics and tools. And to keep up with them and really win in this marketing game, you should too. Which is why we begin with the topic of CRO. The reality is that most likely you already have visitors coming to your primary marketing channel, that is your website. So rather than first focusing on getting more of what you already have, that as visitors, Let's look at what you're doing with those visitors. In session 4, after we learn how to convert current visitors, we will look at how we can capture more traffic and ultimately customers. But first, Let's look at some stats to show you why this topic of conversion rate optimization is important. Now, these statistics may apply to you as well, such as only about 22 percent of businesses are actually satisfied with our conversion rates. Now, I would suggest to you that no business should ever be satisfied with their conversion rates. Remember, we don't live in our market in a static environment. Everything around us is changing. And the moment we are satisfied are content with our numbers is the same moment we get overtaken by the competitors. Now, four-fifths of businesses could be unsatisfied for a number of reasons. One of the reasons, as you can see here, could be the amount we actually spend on conversion rate optimization. Only about 1% of marketing funds are spent converting versus acquiring customers. Sadly, this underscores the value that people plates on CRO. Conversely, I like what Rand Fishkin says about the importance is CRO. Now if you've been around the marketing world at all over the last decade or so then you've heard of the name Rand Fishkin or maybe you've seen them at a conference or seen his Whiteboard Friday videos? He is, I believe this is self entitled, the guru of moss. Either way, he's pretty smart when it comes to marketing. And he's been quoted in saying, CROs the most important marketing activity because it makes every visitor exponentially more valuable. You can see right off that adding value to each visitor is a win for your bottom line. Now he points out in their case study that initially they did have high traffic, but few visitors took the next step. In other words, they, each visitor had low value. Now it didn't matter to the business if 50 thousand visitors read their blog, what mattered was that they only had a handful of conversions from those visitors. The disconnect presented a massive opportunity to them, right? To leverage CRO, and so that's what they did. And ran would go on to say that if he could go back in time, he would have gotten religious about CROs sooner. When he speaks about the most valuable web marketing activity, he always puts CRO first and so should we. And here's why. If you've not already seen this graphic, look, let me introduce you to the power-law of CRO. It's a principle developed by conversion rate experts.com. Now as they point out, the obvious reason to improve your conversion rate first is that you want more customers without having to spend any more on advertising or gaining new visitors. Write this simple CRO equation shows that your revenue is equal to your visitors multiplied by our conversion rate. That is the percentage of your visitors that turn into customers. And we'll look at that in just a little bit. Multiplied by the lifetime customer spent. That is the amount that each of them spends with you. Now the point is this, if you double your conversion rate, you double your revenue. Now let me ask how difficult or expensive would it be to get twice as many visitors in order to double your revenue or get your current customers to spend twice as much. As you can see, conversion rate is the lowest hanging fruit in this equation. But this chart shows a second benefit. And you can see here your profit is even more sensitive to your conversion rate than your revenue is. That is, your cost generally double if you tried to attract twice as many visitors, right? But your conversion rate does not. You can see the obvious implication for business when revenue increases proportionately larger than your costs. The end game is exponential gains and revenue, which is why I do agree with Rand CRO is the most valuable marketing discipline to execute on first. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most businesses. Now let me underscore this point even more by pointing to a few more stats. And as I do so let me say that CRO is not the same as UX. However, poor UX will lead to poor conversion rates because 79% of visitors will search another site to complete a task if your site is simply too confusing and look at this one. Mobile users are five times more likely to abandon the task if the site isn't optimized for mobile. Now this is important because according to Search Engine Watch, 60 percent of consumers use mobile exclusively to make purchase decisions. Now, two thirds of mobile consumers are looking to make a purchase the same day. This is common sense, right? Wrong. Most businesses may agree that conversion is important, but it remains low on the list of marketing priorities. Again, let's look at the impact of CRO. This time, let's take a look at it in chart format. Now you've may have asked this question, why is CRO important? Well, let's take a look at three sample companies in this very basic diagram that should drive home and important point. Now as you can see here, there are three companies and each company has the same amount of traffic. That is 10 thousand monthly website visitors. The only thing that changes is the conversion rate. Now what I want you to notice is that the conversion rates are not ridiculous, but can be very standard for most industries, such as company a has 1 percent and that may be on the low end. And Company C has 3% and that may be on the high end, but for the most part they are still very reasonable. The key point here in the key takeaway is trying to generate more website traffic isn't necessarily the right approach. Not only as generating more traffic costly and takes time, but most businesses have a finite demand for products and services. So it's imperative that you make the most out of your existing website traffic. Let's take this one layer deeper and look at a few primary assumptions we can make concerning the buyer's journey. As you can see here before people purchased, they generally go on a journey, right? The buyer's journey. And here are some just basic assumptions. Number one, most businesses have a primary goal. That is a specific defined activity that they want you to perform, such as purchase or subscription or free trial, whatever it is. Secondly, every user starts from a specific source. If not online, like Google or Facebook or an email, then it's a direct reference from a friend, commercial or print publication, right? Number 3, third assumption. There are touch points on this journey, on the buyer's journey. And each touch point along that journey has a specific conversion rate. Although many will focus on just the primary step of conversion, such as qualified lead to pain customer. The reality is that every touch point is an opportunity for increased conversion rates. Number for generally speaking, you are able to combine different groups of people into personas, as we saw in the last session. And these persona's will have similar expectations and exhibit similar behaviors. In a nutshell, CRO is simply about increasing the flow of qualified buyers throughout the entire journey. Along every touch point to that primary goal. Reality check though, is, don't expect that you're going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for the first time and convert them instantly. That rarely happens sometimes, but rarely. Rather in this realm of CRO, we have to constantly thinking, how can I delight people? And how can I satisfy their wants, their needs and pain points. During every step of the funnel. The goal is that we build a report in the consumer's mind. We actually care about them and that we are the authoritative, trustworthy experts for any given subject and therefore are able to be trusted with another click and ultimately their business. However, if we're simply doing the same marketing activities day in and day out without the purposeful intent on understanding and satisfying the unique consumers wants and needs and pain points at each touch point of the journey. Then we do it, albert Einstein said, and that is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Now, may I ask you, is your marketing department in Saint Domingue and so it had you get the point, write. Blog posts may not have worked for you in the past. So generating more blog posts won't necessarily work for you in the future. And yet so many businesses continue to do that. Social, maybe very unsatisfying in the sense of new leads or even traffic. And yet, since most companies have a social presence, you may feel inclined to automate this part of your marketing. My goal though, during this session, is to cause you to think about every marketing activity and see what can be optimizing what needs to be put on hold, right? Priority is the key here. Which marketing activities have the opportunity for the lowest-hanging fruit? Do those first and foremost to the best of your ability. And then, and only then move on. As the old cliche goes, less is more. And this is absolutely true when it comes to marketing. Less marketing activity. But with high-quality and intent, will win every time. All right, In the next section, we will move on to some common CRO definitions so that we're all on the same page concerning this topic of conversion rate optimization. 63. Defining Conversion: In this video, I want us to define some of the common terms that you hear in the marketing world. So that we are all on the same page using the same meaning for these terms. First off, what is a conversion? Well, in it's simplest definition, a conversion is a visitor completing a goal that you have predefined. Now, goals come in many shapes and sizes and we're going to take a look at these much more in depth later in this session on CRO. But for now, if you use your website to sell products, the primary goal, known as the macro conversion, is for the user to make a purchase. If you're in the B2B world than it is to fill out a request, a demo or contact sales or free trial, right? That is considered the end goal or the primary goal or macro conversion. However, it's really important to note that there are many smaller conversions that can happen before a user completes a macro conversion, such as signing up to receive emails or downloading an e-book. These are micro conversions. Now, understanding what a conversion may be is the important for step before we can measure the conversion rate, which leads us to our next definition. And that is what is a conversion rate? Now you should remember this from our previous sessions, but it conversion rate, It's simply the number of times a user completes a goal, a goal that you've defined, divided by the traffic. Now furthest definition, we get into some very basic formulas. As an example that you can see here, to figure out our websites convergently, we would take the number of unique orders or purchases or macro goals, such as demos are free trials and divide it by the number of unique users. As you can see here, 500 and unique orders generated from 2500 unique users or visitors results in a 20 percent conversion rate. But really this basic formula works for nearly anything. If you sell a subscription, for instance, divide the number of conversions by the number of users, right? Fairly straightforward. So now we're ready to define CRO. What is CRO? Well, let's walk slowly through this definition. Conversion rate optimization is a continuous and systematic process. Systematic referring to the fact that CROs as scientific process of diagnosis, hypothesis and testing. And you put that on repeat, right? So conversion rate optimization, is it continuous and systematic process of increasing the percentage of ideal website visitors? Because it's important to remember that optimization is about getting more of the right kind of visitors, right? Not just blindly optimizing the conversion rate of a given page or campaign. It won't do any good to you if the people you are acquiring or the wrong fit for your business. So it's important to keep the focus on optimizing to find more customers who will love your product and help you grow by spreading the word. Everything else is just a waste of your time and resources. So increase the percentage of ideal website visitors who take a desired action. And that is a desired action by both you and the customer will take a look at this later by eliminating all the possible causes of a lack of trust and high bounce rate. Remember, in order to optimize the conversion rates, you have to know what to optimize and who to optimize this for. This information is the cornerstone to successful CRO strategies. But not just by eliminating all possible causes of lack of trust and high bounce rate, but also by optimizing for specified target audiences, right? The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what's stopping them from completing your goals. So this is what CRO is. Let's take a look at what CRO is not. Here's a quick list of items simply for the sake of discussion so that we can get on the same page. First off, CRO is not UX. Ux is all about making a webpage look great and look high-tech and all fancy, right, user experience or UX covers that can't buy, which is absolutely important and will help conversion rates. But conversion rate optimization covers, though won't buy two different elements. A lot of overlap, but still two different things. Cro is also not SEO. For years, Internet marketers have spent time on SEO or search engine optimization, which focuses on driving more free traffic to your website by improving the likelihood of people finding your website through an unpaid search results, right? These are things you probably know, traffic, those only one component of success. Getting people to your site. Yes, it's absolutely necessary. But if 98% based on average e-commerce conversion rate of 2%, if 98% of those people coming to your website or just getting there and not buying or signing up or completing whatever conversion goal you have for your website, you're leaving money on the table. So we have dedicated an entire session out of the six sessions in this modern marketing course for leaders to SEO and another entire session on CRO Because they are simply two different topics. Cro is also not getting more users. Regardless of quality or engagement, it's not copying the competition because what works for them may not work for you. Cro is not just the sales conversion rate either. This is important. We're gonna get into this a lot more later on. But there are many touch points, not just the end touch point that we focus on in conversion rate optimization. Also, CRO is not manipulating your visitors to do what you want them to do. And that is Debye. But it's answering questions like which PPC campaigns or traffic sources are, keywords are resulting to higher average order value and y, right? Or questions like content on my site is generating me the most adclicks or options or sales and why or which my e-mail marketing campaigns are generating the most opens clicks, sales. Why? Or how much is my cost per acquisition or which is which of my content or the top 20 most shared commented on and why, and on and on and on, right? Conversion rate optimization seeks to answer a ton of questions, not just manipulating your visitors to purchase from you. It's also not just focusing on the CTA. Again, that is often the end point or towards the end of the buyer's journey. Cro yes. It focuses on the scene, the CTA, but it's about every touch point and optimizing the entire process, right? We're looking for the lowest-hanging fruit. Where does the conversion rate drop off and fix that? And lastly, but often, most frequently, CRO is not driven by hippo. That is the highest paid person's opinion. Or guesses or hunches are just gut instincts. Cro is a smart, iterative, analytics based process. If it is driven by opinion, emotion, or office politics, then you're just going to continue to struggle. Let's also quickly take a look at some CRO myths that you may have heard around your office or in office meetings, such things as oh, well, we'll just update our button colors. No, that's good. If you have a rainbow assortment of colors for your CTAs across your website. But in reality, if you're going to change from blue to green, don't expect some massive change in your conversion rates. Or things like we need to include more whitespace or we need to update our imagery or a copy of competitors design of all, thanks, or get a fancy font type. That's right. If, if we use one of these new font types and embedded on a website, we're going to get loads more conversions. Now, these are all good, right? But these statements often reflect just a complete lack of understanding of the user and their wants, needs, and pain points and what conversion rate optimization is all about. And please, please, please try to avoid words like best practice as much as possible. Because your place in the market in industry among your target audience is unique. Here's the reality. Small changes result in small changes. The last thing you ever want to hear is someone who says, we got a 3.7% lifting conversion losses landing page because because we changed the form layout or button color, font type, none of those temporary solutions or changes addresses the user specific pain point. Remember if you see a small percent increase in conversion, it's most likely going to be temporary. There are some recent research from word stream that shows small gains almost never persist over time, right? The barriers can version or seemingly endless, and each barrier has a distinct solution that almost certainly doesn't involve changing gesture button colors are copying a competitor's design because you can't truly ascertain what your site's biggest barriers conversion are. Without rolling up your sleeves, running some real test, gathering some real data, and putting yourself in your user's shoes. Write your goal is not to manipulate users into converting despite whether your product or services, right for them or not. Your goal should be to convert engaged users who will love which you have to offer and help your business to grow by telling their friends all about, you know, I don't want you to think that I'm diminishing some fundamental UX changes as you see here. These are indeed trust builders, but incremental changes such as changing the headline of a landing page are indeed a component of CRO, but they aren't the main component that far from it. I believe it's more important to take the view several thousand feet up above those more in the weed. Questions about button colors are imaged placements. Rather, we should be asking why happy customers are happy? Why unhappy customers are unhappy, and what problems you're able to help them solve. Because true CRO is going to touch everything from the direction of your product, how you're invested, and how you approach changes to your business model. Cro again, is to be an ongoing iterative process that will only improve with time. Unfortunately, this is an example of the typical CRO strategy, rearranging the deck chairs and ignore the sinking. Well, this so-called strategy falls and definitely within the CRO myths, that is, with true CRO, we can learn why users did or didn't buy what they hope to gain from their time on our sites or what they found the most and least valuable about their experience. And so much more. Many times those CEOs, founders, and executives don't ask these important questions soon enough or really at all. But when you get answers to these types of questions, you gain a new perspective. One that informs real lasting changes on much more than just your landing page and informed your company's strategy or product development, your, your value proposition. That's the beauty of the research process behind CRO. It can accelerate your growth and how you appeal to your marketing ways you wouldn't have a magic. But if all we're doing is rearranging the deck chairs like button colors or whitespace or imagery and ignoring the obvious signs of failure all around us then, well, here's an analogy. Imagine that your website is a bucket. Think of your visitors, is water going into the bucket. Now, think of the things that are making your visitors not buy or leave your website as holes in your bucket. And trust me, there are usually many. The point we all have to catch is that point more water into a leaky bucket won't fix the root cause you'll just end up with a lot of waste. But also, you can't optimize your conversion rate until you know exactly what's causing the holes in your business bucket. Alright, every bucket is leaking. And the thing is that in real life you can't easily see where those holes are. And that's the challenge of CRO, redesigning the elements of your website without first investigating what could be going wrong is just like getting a flash year posture different colored, but also whole infested bucket. It can't better serve your customers if you're still stuck with the same problems as before and you have several thousand dollars worse off. If not more, the solution should be obvious. You've got to investigate and find out in nature, location, and shape of the holes. And based on your findings, come up with the appropriate solution to repair those leaks. Conversion rate optimization is about getting more from what you already have and making it work even better for you. 64. Building Your Conversion Plan: Now as we enter the strategic part of this course, let's start by going over the funnel one more time. Now, by now you should have a firm grasp of the sales and marketing funnel. Now, although in a perfect world we would have a cylinder, that is everyone who heard about you would end up buying something from you a 100 percent of the time. Alas, that's simply not the way of things, right? Visitor start their journey from different locations with different mindsets. And the further down the buyer's journey they traveled a few of the people, hence the funnel. Now as we look at this funnel, we need to remember that revenue equals traffic times conversion rate. So if we want more revenue, well, the solution is simple as we've already seen, get more traffic and convert at a higher rate. So again, one last time, we will look at CRO first. That is our conversion rates because it's best to start converting the traffic you already have. Then in the next session on SEO, we will talk about getting more of the right kind of traffic, which brings us to our conversion plan or a conversion rate optimization plan. Now, as you can see right off, CRO is not static, it's cyclical, hence the CRO loop. The conclusion should be secondly, that CRO is never done, right. If it's a loop, it should be repeating. Unless we're converting 99% of our visitors every single time. That's a cylinder instead of a funnel, there's going to be room for improvement. So here's the six steps of CRO that we have put together. First off, you got to measure. Secondly, analyze. Third, strategize, design. Fifth, implement, and sixth. Learn from this loop. Now we are going to take a detailed look at each one of the steps in the CRO loop during this session. Now the reason we start with measure is because CRO is a data informed process. Now this is very, very important. Please don't miss this. The core of CRO is data, which is why I said it's a data informed process. Often when people think of CRO, they think of AB tests that give small incremental gains. There are definitely great benefits to AB testing that we will talk about shortly. But AB testing is only one form of gathering data. So the question remains, what other forms of data exists? Well, let me answer that with three primary questions I ask before I ever begin the CRO process. First off, what data do I all ready have right before you start to fine tune your website with AB testing and things like that, can you already tell with the data you presently have if there are problems with your conversion rates using things like Google Analytics or Crazy Egg or a hot job. Or there's some obvious failings that you can tackle first before you dive into the micro testing and things like AB testing, chances are the answers yes. If you haven't set up these other forms of data gathering, that should be your priority one for right now. Now secondly, are there some obvious things that should be changed? Now, I don't want to use the word best practices, but something along those lines is what I'm referring to. For instance, if your site look like this, well, I think there are some obvious things that a good web designer could do to help you out, right? Even looking at this website, I get a headache. So priority number one for me, if I was optimizing this website is create a non headache producing website. I could almost bet you that none. These images on this website are optimized. They clearly don't have alt tags and the image sizes are probably massive and they're downsized in HTML. Probably a lot of really bad stuff there. So this is where I would look at some common e-commerce designs and ask the question, am I doing something that just doesn't work right now? Are all of these colors necessary? Do you need so many images in the initial real estate of the web screen? Is that the best place for the menu? And my goodness, look at the size of that menu in the rainbow colors. Beautiful, right? Actually, my first question would be, how did someone even design this? There are some unique layouts with absolute positioning, so something's going on here that's not normal. Right? Now. Your website might not look like this, but it could still be fairly wonky. So get a few legitimate opinions first about your site to see if there's some fairly low hanging fruit. The reality is you don't need to start AB testing to tell you something needs to be changed. Make the obvious changes first, and then come back to the fine tuning with AB testing later on. Thirdly, in my setup technically to test and handle change. Now this is important question. Let me answer this question with an illustration. I was working with an organization recently who had a different page for every state. Each page was a static state page that is not dynamically driven. The same was true of other sections of the website. Meaning, if I wanted to test or change anything, I would have to go through one page at a time and make the changes statically worse yet, there were several variations of their primary CTA across all these static pages. Which one work which didn't. It was a total guessing game. So the result was I chose to spend eight weeks and redesign and rebuild the entire site from the ground up using some common sense best practices, things like dynamic pages, uniform design, consistent messaging including consistency, TAs, write my belief was that eight weeks of a rebuild would conquer a lot more and a lot less amount of time than trying to finagle with this bloated static site. It was after the rebuild and redesign that I was then ready to gather data more effectively and be able to respond quickly with the changes we wanted to make based on the data, right? It was only at this point that we were able to then jump into the CRO feedback loop effectively and then begin to measure. And so too for you. Before you dive into your own CRO plan, make sure that you effectively and honestly answer these three questions. And before we begin our discussion on developing your own Cerro plan in the session, we're going to walk through some homework to make sure that you are set up to accurately record data. That way your site will be recording data. While you go through this session. 65. STEP 1: MEASURE: All right, Now we come to step 1 in your conversion rate optimization plan, and that is to measure, specifically measuring key data points. Now hopefully during the homework session that you just went through, you're able to set up accurate data gathering tool so you can start to use the data that you gather in this session by making data informed decisions. Now the first data point that you must define is your goal. Understandably setting your business goals is the most important first step, right? For example, which business goals will your lead gen program helped you to attain? Do you even know, even define your top priority and goals? Now generally speaking, top priority angles for most organizations is a conversion. Now, as we pointed out earlier, goals or convergence come in many shapes and sizes. For instance, if you use your website to sell products, the primary goal, known as the macro conversion, is for the user to make a purchase, that is the end goal. Examples of macro conversions can also include things like purchasing a product from your website, requesting a demo or quote or consultation, right? Subscribing to a service or starting a free trial. These are all primary heavy hitting goals that you have on your website. However, it's also important to note there are smaller conversions that can happen before a user completes a macro conversion, such as signing up to receive emails or downloading an e-book, right? These are called micro conversions. Examples of micro conversions, like I said, are like sign up for email lists or creating an account subscribing to a blog. Unless, of course the blog is your product, then you sell subscriptions or adding a product to the cart. These are all steps that happened before the macro conversion, hence, micro conversions. Now, some common conversion goals can be organized by industry type. For instance, if you're in the media in history, then you measure page views or add views or newsletter subscriptions or recommended content engagement. If you're in the e-commerce industry, then you measure things like product sales or add Descartes's or a shopping cart, completion rates or e-mail, newsletter sign-ups. If you're in travel than you think of things like booking conversions or a social shares, those type of things. And B to be the common ones are like leads generated deals, clothes are adults. Now, before you gather data for CRO testing, you need to know your main priorities. It's not simply a matter of increasing sales or increasing sales or increasing sales, right? That's often put on repeat by the executive team over the loudspeakers of organizations. Rather, it is knowing how to make your website the best platform for your target visitors to perform the things that you want them to do. Now once you've identified these macro conversions, you want to start thinking about what drives these conversions and how you plan on measuring success. A quick reminder, though, in CRO, revenue, is your primary end goal. Ironically, conversion rate optimization is about revenue not conversion, Right? We're looking for full funnel optimization because the only good conversion optimization is the one that impacts and increases the end goal. The reason we focus on CRO is because we understand that the end goal of revenue is manipulated and changed by every touch point along the journey. There's nothing worse than a boss coming to you and saying, we need to increase marketing originated or influenced revenue by 40 percent year-over-year. But we're not willing to invest in full funnel reporting or marketing. The end result of that direction from leadership is often chaos because members of the marketing team end up running around trying to do more without an understanding of what is actually generating revenue and where in the funnel there are opportunities to increase the conversion rate. So again, the end goal is mostly about revenue. Conversion rates. Simply increase the end goal. If we lose sight of this, then we run the risk of measuring and optimizing the wrong micro conversions. That is why CRO is more than just optimizing conversion rates. It's about revenue, average order value, lifetime value. This is why data is the fundamental step of CRO. I appreciate what Admiral Grace Hopper says here. One, accurate measurement is worth more than a 1000 and expert opinions. Now, I may not fully agree with this as experienced can be very valuable in a new discipline like digital CRL. But the point is still powerful. Everyone thinks they have an expert opinion. A true expert opinion is valuable. Someone who thinks they have an expert opinion, but don't but have a higher pay grade than you. That's not valuable. That's when a quote like this becomes very important because one accurate measurement is worth more than a 1000 leadership opinions if they don't have the experience in this discipline. So when it comes to data, Let's underscore an important point. And that is, when we talk about data, we are not specifically focusing on the numbers alone as though it's black and white. Most people seem to think it's just about the data, but it's not, it's about behavior. Here, as you can see are some of the ways that conversion optimizers measure, adjust, and optimize a website. For instance, as we look at this list, you will notice how much of it's subjective and inferred. Persona user research is a powerful tool, but it's not perfectly accurate, right? We're pulling out the most important beliefs and behaviors that relate to our product, market and industry. We're interpreting heat mapping software like Crazy Egg or Hot Jar. Again, we are inferring the motive of the consumer by their suggested behaviors based on the data. Notice, I continue to say it is centered around the user. It's the user who is purchasing. It's a user who is clicking or bouncing or behaving. Therefore, it's the user we should be studying. Now by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. According to Walker info.com, meaning tangible numbers are important, but not the most important. We have to focus on what the numbers represent. So let me ask you, do you have answers for these questions on this page? Now, I apologize, there's way too much text on the slide. I'm breaking all these design rules, but these questions nonetheless are very important. I would suggest you pause the video right here and just write these down or take a look at these and try to answer these things like, is your website offering what your visitors are looking for? Now again, loaded question, I get it. But are you optimizing for the right kind of customers? Is your website easily navigable and appeal emotionally? Can visitors find what they are looking for without any difficulty or are there obvious pain points? Is there any distraction on your landing page that might be a cause of high bounce rate. Remember, less is often more. You don't have to overload users with all your info on one page. Try to make it appealing and consumable. How well does your website persuasive enough to lead your visitors into the conversion funnel? Or do you just have a lot of marketing speak? How about the question? Are your CTAs clearly visible and facilitating conversions? That is, do they actually stand out? Do you lead people in a certain direction by obvious cues and signs? Or is it fairly vague? Or is your content adding enough value in 18 visitors in making decisions, right? Content is supposed to help people. Now, do you notice how these questions are different than what most leaders today ask? Often, I will hear questions from leaders, are marketing leaders are executives like how many page visits did we get last month? It's important, but completely different than the questions you see here. How many unique sessions do we get or how many people visited our pricing page, your landing page, as if any of these numbers actually put food on the table? Again, I'm sure you can add in a dozen more similar questions and I'm not negating them. But the obvious point is this. The questions that you see here on this page are extremely important. Therefore, CRO is important because these are S0, R0 questions, right? A higher user satisfaction rate equals a higher conversion rate. Because confuse users don't make for happy users or customers for that matter. Higher conversion rate equals better ROI. This is more cost effective than finding more visitors. Plus, it defends against the limited patients of your visitors, right? Customer loyalty is waning and is being replaced today by a good experience at every touch point. So the question is, where do we start with all the possible issues out there? What issues do you address and and what priority will honestly, the CRO opportunities can be overwhelmingly numerous. So for now, let me just make a few overarching suggestions for possible issues and areas to start measuring during this CRO stage. First off, is your website difficult to use or certain information hard to find, right? What you can do is install heat mapping software, checkup, the click-through rates and scroll rates. How are they? Are our users even finding the pages you want them to? Or it could be that your copy is just confusing or boring. Maybe it's got too much marketing or business height that is meaningful to you, but not to your users. Maybe it's, maybe it's heartless or maybe it's simply flat out in appropriate because it's tapping on the wrong buyer motivations. Now, we're going to look at this later. But this is where you can test different copy using AB testing software like Optimizely or Google Optimize to see the click-through rates or interactions. It could be your website design may not look credible or trustworthy. This is probably the point you want to set some time up with a designer and have them come to your site and make some professional recommendations. Or it could be most of the traffic you're getting is just unqualified or they're just research. And when his shopping at this point in time, that is your marketing to broadly or maybe even to the wrong audience. Or it could be that your visitors don't trust you or believe your claims. Do you do need more research on your website or experts you linked to or that link to you. It could even be that some of your visitors may think your offer is not the best one at this time for them. And this is where you focus on your unique selling proposition. What makes you unique for your target market better than the competitors? It may be that you're forcing your prospects to go through an unnecessarily frustrating process to get what they want so they balance or the exit. So you've got to ask yourself, can you shorten the process? Can you do in three steps what you're doing right now in four? Or maybe does it require only two steps to request a demo or to purchase a product? Ask yourself that question. Is every step necessary? Or how about this last one? This one can happen often. Your ads and links lead users to believe you offer a product or service you don't in fact offer or you tell them all about a product benefit and then you leave them to the homepage. Or there's a dissonance between the ad copy, the actual landing page. You would be surprised at how these simple possible issues that I just mentioned here are far more common than you can believe. Most of the CRO that I have tackled deals with one of these issues or a variation of it. 66. 3 Primary Methods of Data Analysis: Our goal is to simplify the entire experienced by making it more pleasing and satisfying. Now due to the sheer amount of information our senses process unconsciously. Everybody has to what they call delete or ignore things their senses take in. Now as humans, we process about 10 million bits of information every single second or so I'm told. But we can consciously process only five to seven pieces of it. Now, example of this is your left foot, in your shoe or in your sandal. Know, you knew it was there, but until I set it, you didn't consciously feel it there. Now you do. Or the shirt you're wearing or picture on the wall or the aroma in your office, right? You get the picture. That's called deletion. We identify things exactly like that on websites. We want visitors to focus on just the right information while everything else provides that clean, satisfying experience, we don't want people to get attracted to the unnecessary parts in a bad way, such as things that annoy them, are confused them. In other words, we pay attention to and improve the bits of information that everyone else unconsciously filters out so they can focus on just the right bits of information. Now, each one of these barriers and pain points also would require a solution unique to itself. And CRO there is no one size fits all solution available that tackles every hurdle in the buyer's journey. Like it or not. The only time you'd be able to take the appropriate steps to improve your conversion rate is when you know exactly what's preventing your prospects from taking the desired action. Non CRO, there are three primary methods of data analysis in order to get at the bottom of the possible issues. And that is quantitative, qualitative. And for lack of better terminology, the bad method. Now these three primary methods that we're going to look at, data analysis will help equip you during the measure stage of CRO that we're going to take a look at later. Now we've already seen two of these methods in our previous session, quantitative and qualitative. But let's, let's go over this quickly in light of CRO. Now, quantitative data analysis gives you hard numbers, if you remember from our last session. And it gives you, it gives you hard numbers behind how people actually behave on your site. If you haven't already, please start with a solid web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics and then move on to the other software we have discussed like crazy agar, Hot Jar, Optimizely, Kissmetrics, bright funnel and so on. Now this quantitative information will let you know where to focus your efforts. Because not only will you see which pages are most engaged with and valuable to your users. But you will also start to see pages in elements and content that are not engaged with. That is areas where you were for a ton of interaction may not be getting enough. Or you may also see confused users. For instance, you may see people on the pricing page who continue to click on the pricing button in your main menu. They may not even know they're on the pricing page. It's this type of data that you're going to start to gather during the quantitative data analysis stage. Now, doing this analysis first, this kinda numbers first analysis is especially valuable if you have a large site with diverse content as it lets you know from a numbers perspective where to focus your efforts, right? If you've got a 500 page website and you don't want to be wasting your time on pages that aren't very valuable to you or your users. But now that you know how users interact with your site, generally speaking, you move into step 2 and look into the why behind their behavior. And that's where qualitative data analysis comes in. Now, qualitative data analysis is a people focus method that can be much more subjective. It's not just black and white, There's a lot of gray area at this stage. Now, the quantitative data analysis will help you identify who you should be asking it and what you should be asking them. Remember, you can't optimize for all users. So optimized for your ideal users, your ideal persona's that the users most important to have as a customer. Now the easiest and most effective way to find out what's missing or broken or confusing to your users on your website is just by asking them. Use onsite surveys or user testing or satisfaction surveys. You're just trying to figure out what makes them tick. Why aren't they requesting a demo? Why aren't they downloading that resource? Why aren't they finishing the purchase process? Now using basic survey tools like the ones I just mentioned can help you a lot. Basically, these tools will enable you to determine what your customers really want by just simply asking relevant questions or asking them about their experience on using your site. Now, three simple questions you should be asking your visitors is number 1, what's the purpose of your visit to our website? Why are you on this page? Why are you downloading this paper? Right? You're trying to find their basic intention. Secondly, Were you able to do what you came here to do? Were you able to complete your task? Did you find what you were looking for? And then thirdly, if you weren't able to complete your task, why not write 3s? Very simple questions. What's the purpose of your visit? Were you able to complete your task? If not, why? This is where you can get some really good feedback on some maybe pain points or confusing points for your website. This type of qualitative data analysis helps optimize for conversions by providing information about users such as, why did they engage? Why did they originally decided to visit your site or navigate to a specific page? What about the page or product appeal to them, capitalize on their responses? Or what do they think about your site offers that makes you different from competitors? Is there a feature service offered by your company that makes buying from you a better experience. If so, again, capitalize on that information. Now. Now this is key. What words do they use to describe your products, services, and the pain points they address? How would they describe your product or service to a friend? In essence, how do they talk about what you do? There are certain things that raw data alone can't tell you about what brought a user to your site or how to make their experience better. But when you combine this information with your analytics data, you can gain a much better understanding of the pages on your site that present the best opportunities to optimize and engage the audience you like to target. Now that leaves number 3 the bad method. Now this comes in many, many forms, some of them not so effective CRO methods include guesses, hunches, and gut feelings. Or it could be doing something because your competitors are doing it. Learn from your competitors, don't copy them. I seamless way too many times. Or executing changes based on the highest paid person's opinion, right? The hippo. This happens all the time. All the CFO says this or this VP said that or that director really their sacred cow, not a good reason to make changes on your website. Bringing some data, right? We're supposed to be consumer-centric. How about, about getting as many users as possible regardless of the quality or engagement? I see this all the time. Yeah, let's run this campaign because we're gonna get more people. Will more, isn't necessarily better. You want more of the right type of people. Examples like these have something in common. They're not data-driven and might as well just be random shots in the dark. It's better to spend the time gathering and analyzing the data. So you can create meaningful tests based on clear insights. It's like painting a room. I tell my wife this all the time. 80% of the process is taping, wiping, cleaning, Getty thing, getting everything set up. The last little 20% is actually throwing paint on the walls. So to a CRO, most of what you're going to be doing is gathering the data, analyzing it, and then responding to it. Because nobody loves running random tests that continue to fail to provide meaningful result. So to sum up these three methods, your decisions must be data informed, not opinion driven. 67. Data Tools and Tags: All right, first things first, as you saw in the Google Sheet, make sure you have the right tools installed. Remember the importance of gathering data is to know how well you are meeting your conversion goals and what you could be doing better. Now It's a bit challenging to optimize the right pages of your site if you have lots of unnecessary pages. So here are tools you might want to check out to help you spot the non-performing pages or leaks that your customers, your visitors are simply finding unnecessary. Now these are the perfect tools to start gathering data. Now use most of them in combination. The best thing they help you track is how your users are going through your site and if they are dropping off at any point in your suppose in phenyl pages. The purpose of this course, again, is not to teach you how to use each tool, but why and when to use each tool. However, let me say this about Google Tag Manager, GTM, Google Tag Manager lets you do a couple things really well. Number one, it lets you manage the tags or snippets of JavaScript that send information to third parties on your website or mobile app. For instance, each of these tools listed here can be installed by hand in the backend of your website, or it can be installed with Google Tag Manager. It's just much easier and seamless using GTM. It's not flawless, it's just more seamless. Because if you have to change any of those tags or add new tags are takeoff tags. And you don't know how to get into the backend of your website, then you gotta pay some web developer or contact them or wait for a week or two until they can get to it. Google Tag Manager is simple tool to use and you can do it on your own. But secondly, our events, GTM lets you easily add triggers on your website that tracks interactions such as how many people played a certain video on your homepage or pricing page, or interacted with my slider or a carousel or view different tabs on my product page. You can imagine how important this information can be. Now, having said that Crazy Egg and Hot Jar will also show you all user interactions on a page. And if you'd like to spend money, Kissmetrics is better in my opinion, at tagging parts of a webpage in GTM is. However, having said that, GTM is free, and GTM gives you accurate analytics of user engagement on your website. Now, to keep better track of traffic, you should be tagging everything using UTM tags. Now to build your own URL with UTM parameters, I would suggest you use Google's own URL builder. You can just Google that google URL builder. An example of what it looks like is there on the right of your screen. Now, you would use a tool like this to create the URL parameters that you would then be able to track and Google Analytics. Now, although as you can see here, there are six items at the most. Generally you would use for sometimes you would use five. Rarely do I ever see people using all six of those, but you can if you want. Now you can see an example URL on the left of your screen here, where I've only used three of the UTM parameters. Now, on that form on the right on Google's URL builder, you will see the first form field is the website URL. This is the full URL of where you want to drive traffic. Do you want to drive traffic to a landing page, to a product page, a pricing page, blog post. Wherever you're going to dry them, just copy and paste the URL into that form field. Secondly is campaign source. This is where they came from. This is the Refer that is, where did you place this link? Did you place it on Facebook? Did you place it on LinkedIn? Was it on a partner website? Was it in Google? Paid Search? That's what you would put right there, just as basic as possible. You just put Facebook, all lowercase, no spaces. If you place it on Google, just say Google on LinkedIn. Just Linkedin because you want to be as uniform as possible when you're doing UTM tags. Thirdly is campaign medium. Again, it's pretty straightforward, but if this link is in an e-mail, then this value would be email. If it's a paid campaign, then just enter CPC or PBC are paid or whatever your uniform naming convention is, you can infer that it was a Facebook paid or a Google paid based on the campaign source and medium combined. And then of course there's campaign name. This is the actual name of the campaign. It might be a date for you, it might be an actual codenamed internally, whatever it is, this is your campaign name. And again, you want to make sure that your campaign name is synonymous with all other links that are driving traffic using the same campaign. So let's say you have a spring launch. Well this should all be one word. You can use an underscore for spacing, but you can say Spring Launch, but just make sure every link has this same spelling of the word Spring Launch. Otherwise your data's not going to be accurate. Now as I said before, there's two more fields you can see at the bottom for more granularity, especially when it comes to paid advertising. So my suggestion, absolutely use the top four fields and only use more if you really need to parse the data better. Now if you are not tagging every URL on every campaign, then this is an immediate fix to have better data from here on out. That means before you write your next email, make sure you go to Google's URL builder and just use this as your link. That way you can start tracking accurately. Now if you're using something like Mailchimp or HubSpot or any one of these other tools. They will build a lot of this stuff already in. But if you don't think they are a, you don't know if they aren't just do this best practice. The reality is that we can all be better at gathering accurate data. In fact, Crazy Egg, the number one heat mapping tool who should be a master at this kinda data gathering, realized that they needed better information tracking. Here's what they had to say in a recent case study. We discovered long ago that our recommendations can never be better than our facts. Obviously, that's why they created the software. So it's critical to begin by gathering substantial visitor intelligence. And you can do this by using the right tools and implementing UTM codes on every link leading to your website. Suffice it to say the goal is to tag, measure, and then be able to analyze all user events, both on your website and that come into your website. If you are not tagging everything accurately, then you're not going to Avenue accurate data. And then your recommendations are not going to be accurate as well. This should be priority number one for you and your organization. 68. Homework 3: INSTALLING TOOLS: In this homework section, I want to go over the Google Analytics dashboards and the Google Analytics reports that we have generated for you. Now, you can click on these and you can attach them to your specific Google Analytics account. And so these dashboards are already pre-built. We've used these for years. We've optimized them, continue to improve upon them, as well as custom reports. Now as you can see here, lets start with dashboards. Actually let me use this as an example. This is a typical dashboard. I got this from analytics. This is just Analytics is a great website. If you haven't been there, please go there. They've got a lot of great tools for you to use. But this is just a great image of a typical dashboard. You can start seeing right now, real-time, who's on your website? Real-time page views, real-time active users, where are they coming from in the US? Revenue by metro, right? Because there's this revenue section here. So this is, this is a really nice, just quick overview. What are the device categories people are using mobile versus tablet and desktop. This is what a Google Analytics dashboard is like. Now we've created a custom ones for you over across all these different categories. There's the typical overview, which is your quick snapshot. So maybe you look at this once a day or once a week. But you know that you have a bookmark somewhere in your browser that you can just click two and then see this custom dashboard. But we've also included all these others. And you can, you can include all of these in your own Google Analytics account, or just a few of them, let's say to really running on social media and Google AdWords. This is really valuable information to see, just a general snapshot. How is your Google AdWords performing? Where are people clicking? What's their engagement like? What's the bounce rate? Like? Something like SEO is great for organic, right? We're gonna go over SEO in the next session. But I wanted to include all these dashboards here for you to install now so you can start taking a look at and getting familiar with what a leader should be looking at. Alright, I'm, I'm not having you go in. I'm not teaching your Google Analytics and all the intricacies of segments and filters and all the admin features. But what you should have are just basic reports. Plus it makes you look good as a leader to say I've got my own dashboard reports and built out in Google Analytics, where you can dive in a little bit deeper and generate custom reports. Now Google Analytics is really a set of hundreds of different reports that you can then analyze and tweak a little bit. Well, that's what we've done here. We've found the most important reports, the most valuable at least to me. And then we've included them here for you. They've already been tweaked, they've already been edited. Such things like all traffic sources. This is a fun one hour and day. What is the most popular hour in the day for your website help day of the week. Internal site search. If you have something like that, popular pages versus popular landing pages, these are the pages people landed on when they came to your website versus just pages in general. So include each of these. All you have to do is click here, click on each one of these reports and each one of these dashboards and they will be included right into your Google Analytics account. Or you can just come to the solution gallery and you'll see actually all the dashboards right here. So have fun with this. Again, it can be overwhelming. So I would suggest you install all of these first, see which ones you would use. Maybe you don't use all of them. You can still keep them in your account is not going to hurt anything. But just take a look at them, see if you can't start understanding and comprehending the data enough to start making informed CRO decisions. 69. Important KPIs: So after installing the right tools and gathering accurate data finally, secondly, as we looked at earlier, you should have a primary measurable goal in place for your business overall. Let's call it total conversions and goals. Now your total conversions is the number of people who did whatever it is you've defined as converting that has made a purchase subscribed, joined or whatever. Now, most of you will have this information on hand. Make sure it is readily available for everyone to see and comprehend because without this baseline, you're unable to define future success. That's why it is and it should be a main priority for organizations. But there are many more KPIs that we should be analyzing other than just total conversions, as important as that is, there are things like conversion rate. Now to get your conversion rate, this should be review and it should be fairly obvious, you simply divide the total number of conversions by the number of visitors to your site, right? For example, a site with 5 thousand visitors and 50 conversions has a conversion rate of 1%. Now, your bounce rate is another great metric and that is the percentage of people who leave after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate is not a good thing. For whatever reason, people aren't finding what they're looking for, so they leave almost immediately. You can see why this is an important KPI to be measuring specifically on a page by page basis. Another metric like bounce rate is one called exit rate. Now, exit rate is different. Exit rate is the percentage of people who leave after viewing the page. Your exit rate let you know the last page that users view before they move on. Now a very high exit rate on a specific page can be a red flag for that specific page. That is, people were really turned off by this or they were confused or this was exactly what they were looking for and it confirmed they don't want to buy from you. Or it could be. I'm going to come back tomorrow in and purchase from you. So make sure you don't read too much into these numbers, but make sure you do know the numbers nonetheless. Now there are other engagement metric just as valuable, such as average time on site. Now, average homicide of users gives you a general idea of how long people are sticking around. A high bounce rate means a low average time on site. Visitors aren't sticking around long enough to do whatever it is you want them to do. Again, you gotta keep in mind you can't read into this too much. Make sure you block your internal IP because chances are you're gonna be spending a lot of time on your website and really throwing this metric out the window. Similarly, average page views is another engagement metric that tells you how many pages the average visitor went through before leaving your site. More page views can mean more engagement, but also can mean a lack of clarity, anionic conversion funnel if there is no conversion. So again, make sure you analyze this data accurately. If you go from two average page views per user up to five or six, then chances are, people are confused. But if you go from three down to one, then chances are people who just aren't interested in you. Now, last, but by far, not least, on this list that I have before you is CTR or click-through rate. Now click-through rate, like events are the actual interactions that a user takes on a website. A button click is a click. Again, your goal is to understand the motive behind the behaviors behind that clicks behind the engagements that we see in the data. We want to understand what delights and deters the user from taking the required action. So if you don't know where to start with KPIs, just use these that I have listed before you. These are the generic, overarching ones. You can obviously bring in some of your own and maybe even dismiss a few of these on the list. But if you have no idea where to start, start with these, start measuring them, analyzing them, and reporting on these metrics to see improvements or changes in trends over time. 70. Funnel Pages: Now before we wrap up the measure section in CRO, I want to answer this question and that is what's a funnel page? You may have heard that term thrown around. We throw it around in this course quite a bit. So I want to take just a second and define a funnel page. Now simply put a funnel pages, a web page in your site that is necessary for a user to go through in order to hit a goal. For example, at payments page is necessary for a user to finally be able to complete a checkout. So the payments page is part of the checkout funnel. It is therefore considered a funnel page. Rocket science. Once you're able to gather your website's user behavior data, there's no reason for you not to find out which pages need improvement, preferably funnel pages first. Now a helpful tip is check out the exit rate of the funnel pages on your site. People who are leaving your site and accelerated rate on a certain page. Well, that's definitely a leak. And so as I've heard many, many times before and as I share as well, fix leaks immediately, especially if it's in a funnel page. You don't need any more data to tell you that there's a problem. Try to see if there's some maybe obvious issues to the page that are important to you in the buyer's journey. It may be that you have a broken link and they just can't get through. I have seen this before and it's happened to me before. I get so involved with the content and the layout and how beautiful it looks and the messaging that I forget as the link, even work camp people even get to the destination that I'm trying to send them to. Remember, links happen when a visitor wasn't really satisfied in their experience using your site or couldn't even get to where they want to be. So to be fair, kinda covers a broad spectrum of reasons. Not being able to find what they thought they would find themselves stuck in your software with a broken link being lead to a broken page from a broken link and the list goes on. There could be a host of reasons. So you want to analyze this data through Google Analytics or whatever software you have, and then start to analyze the pages in order of priority. That is, figure out why aren't people going through can you can you, when you go through your own process, worked through it. Does it make sense? Sit your grandmother down or your mother down or friend down and say, Hey, I know you may never seen this section of my site, but I would like to see how you interact with it. She would be surprised at the amount of information you get from family members. They just don't seem to hold anything back, especially if they think your site sucks. So you see the link at the bottom here, you can find the exit rate of your pages using Google Analytics. It's just under the behavior section. So pull your report, you can do it in 30 seconds and just start analyzing. Maybe there are some funnel pages that are leaking. So again, the recommendation is fix leaks immediately. 71. Homework 3: : DASHBOARD & REPORTS: I wanted to share with you another tab here in the homework section for CRO. And this is the Google Analytics segments. Now just like the custom dashboards and the custom reports, we've also included Google Analytics segments. Now, remember when you're looking at a typical report in Google Analytics, you can look at it for all visitors or specific visitors that have certain attributes about them, such as converters, one visit versus two visits versus three visits. I find this valuable to figure out how many visits does it take before people convert? You can do something like customer versus prospect, right? If you have a log-in page on your homepage or a login button on your homepage. Well, you want to exclude all this traffic because it's just going to ruin your numbers for CRO and all your testing down the road. So you want to remove customers when you're taking a look at your prospect traffic. This is just a browser one. I find this one fascinating. Who's using a really old browser? I worked with an organization that sells to government agencies. And you would be surprised how many people are on IE nine? Yes, this is from many, many years ago, IE9 or less. And so this is just important. Nonetheless. This is a good one. This is based upon the demographics, and this is just millennials. So based upon the age, you can dive down further. You can change this up, uses as just a baseline, right? Uses as a baseline for generating more segments. So you say, well, I'm not interested in this. I'm interested in people 65 and older, or maybe 49 to 59 or whatever the case may be. Use this segment as a template to build out more same thing with this, who's on Chrome browser versus Safari. Or you can even go the country route or the regional route. So use these, install all of these just by clicking on them again. Installed them into your Google Analytics account, but then start generating more. Take a look at what I've done in here. And in my Google Analytics account, I have about a 100120 different segments for different organizations. But just because I like to dive in different angles depending upon what I'm testing and what I'm looking at. And so take this as just a baseline. You can find a lot more custom segments online for free. Just type in Google Analytics segments or suggested SEO, Google Analytics segments, whatever the case may be. And you will find a whole bunch of these at, you can just add to your account. Again, if you add too many, you don't really know what they're for. Chances are it's gonna be too overwhelming and you're not going to use them. So start off with something simple like this. You don't even have to have all of this, right? Let's say you want to figure out who converts after three or four visits only. Keep it simple. Use them, get rid of the ones you don't use, and then search for ones that you think you might be able to use down the road with future testing. 72. Homework 3: SEGMENTS: In this homework section, we're gonna take a look at some common CRO and analytics tools that I personally use. But also I suggest for you to use as well simply because many of these are free and offer free trials. Now, there are thousands and thousands of technologies in the marketing stack today. However, I just whittled this down into these various categories just for your ease of understanding and use. You're not limited to this by any means. You can spend a lot of money on software. And so I tried to take the more free approach. And so if that's more your style, then you're going to be inclined to some of this technology. Because remember the first thing that you have to do in CRO, and really your business in general is, are you set up to gather data? So in this homework section, and we're going to make sure you are set up to track and analyze any data coming into your website or other marketing channels. Now, first off is analytics. Every website should be running at least Google Analytics. This is a software you actually install on your website with just a piece of JavaScript snippet. It literally is a copy and paste. Google Search Console is something that you register for. You log into Google Search Console and then you attach your website. And this is the data that Google will give you based upon what they see in the search. And so when you marry these two together and Google Analytics, what happens on your website and Google Search Console, what happens on the surface or the search engine result page, Google search engine. Then you're going to have a wider view, a larger vision of what's happening with your website and how users are finding you and engaging with you. Full funnel tracking is really a pet peeve of mine. It's one of those absolutely necessary elements in the modern marketing world. But it's so difficult to set up accurately to track someone all the way from any channel, be it social or e-mail or what have you track them all the way through, let's say organic traffic. You track a user from Google search engine. They come to your site, they start engaging, they start downloading collateral. They request a demo, and then they're passed off to sales. And generally that's where it ends for marketing. We don't see how many dollars are earned from certain channels, right? You may remember this from session one, how important full funnel tracking is. Well, these three do it really well. A HubSpot is hands down my favorite simply because there are a mile wide and an inch deep, they're reporting isn't the greatest. The website technology is not the greatest, but they do everything. They do social and e-mail and form, lead capture. They do at all. Which means their technology speaks really well with itself, right? It's, it's all done in house and you can get some add-ons for as well. But full funnel tracking is something that I would suggest you aim for and maybe not start off with, but at least aim for user behavior. This is great software because it can tell you how users are engaging with your website. You can track mouse. Movements, you can see their scroll rate, average score, which you can see where on the page people are clicking. It will generate heat maps for you. And so it's just a great way to figure out, are people clicking on elements like an image that's not clickable. We'll add a hyperlink to it and see what people are hoping to find. You're going to see where the score rate drops off. You might have a section on your website that just doesn't resonate and people don't stop there. Well, try changing that out, right? It's this idea of measuring user behavior and then AB testing and kind of creating this cycle where you see how users engaged. Then you test something, Test 234 variations of it using some like Optimizely or Google Optimize and Website Optimizer. There's so many of these. But again, I'm trying to keep it simple for you. But the end result is that you're constantly in this iterative process of optimization, hence CRO, and we're gonna talk about that a lot more during this session. Now usability in UX testing, this is a nice way, a nice tool really I should say, to have people tell you what they think of your website and you can ask different questions and you sign up, it doesn't cost very much money. But you can say, what do you think this page is supposed to communicate? What product do you think I'm selling? What do you think I want people to do? What action do you think I want them to take? Or you can ask certain questions and they'll give honest feedback. These are real humans giving an actual user testing feedback. Thirdly is surveys are not 36 million surveys and we've talked about this a lot, right? Surveys is a great way to have your customers give candid feedback. It's also a good way to kind of invoke in them or evoke a sense of fear. So such as, let's say you have a software that your customers need, and if they don't have a software like yours, then they could facing legal ramifications. So you prompt questions. Do you know the laws in your country or your state surrounding? Fill in the blank right here. You're asking a question with a simple yes, no. But those people who don't know, there may be legal ramifications or that really is that important and may invoke in them a bit of a sense of emergency. So again, a great way to have little toaster actions. It would pop up in the generally the bottom right corner. You can have them fly in or just fade in, whatever. But it's usually just a little questionnaire, a little box. And once they click the little down arrow, like the toaster action, it just won't pop up again, but it will, it will hover down there. It'll stay in the bottom right section of your website. And lastly is data tracking. We're going to look at this much more in depth later. But this is the Google URL builder. This is where you can do UTM parameters for instance. And it's just a nice little tool that Google has built for you to create URLs that you would then paste onto things like emails or partnership websites or social. And that way you can simply track in much greater detail, what are these clicks about? Where are they coming from, what campaign is at four? And it's simply going to help your analysis. So again, there is a lot more analytical tools and see our total tools out there on the market. Seo tools, for instance. But these are the ones I would start with. At least have these up and running on your website like a couple of these, you can double up a Qajar. You've taken care of user behavior and surveys. Definitely, obviously have Google Analytics and right away start using the Google URL builder. And then you can start adding these over time. When you get to this stage of wanting to AB test, maybe you've created a new site and you want to see what people think. So take this in stride, start with a few of these right off, and then add overtime because you can definitely pay for a lot more than just what you see here. 73. STEP 2: ANALYZE: So now that you have measured and analyzed the most important interactions and KPIs on your website. What specifically are we looking for? Well, let's jump right into the punchline. Here are the five most important areas to analyze when it comes to CRO. Now quick, let's do a high level overview. First off, setup and review your goals. As we said before, if you've, you've not set up defining goals and are measuring them, then there's no way for you to define success. That should be fairly obvious by now. Secondly, look at your traffic sources and list them by goal conversion. Since you already have your goal conversions, next step is to divide them by channel. This allows you to see which channels are working and which are not. Thirdly, look at your top entry and exit pages as we just saw a couple lessons ago. Fourthly, look at balanced rates on your top entry exit pages. This will help you understand which pages are successful and which ones are disappointing. Again, you will have to infer motive from the user behavior. For instance, just because a blog post where seeds a high bounce rate does not mean that it's failing. Blog posts in general have very high bounce rates. People are looking for an answer on a search engine. They find it on your blog and then they go back to look for something else. However, if your pricing page has a high exit rate, this may be something you want to dive into more. Number 5, setup and study your goal funnels. Now, as we saw in Session 1, setting up your goal funnels will help you to start to identify areas of weakness that can be optimized in the funnel. Now, here's the why behind the web. At a top level, you're trying to find out what parts of your site work the best and what parts don't work at all. For example, do more than 10 percent of people in your funnel dropout on a particular page or are the bounce rates on your top landing pages over 40%? Do you Do any of your pages have exit rates over 20 percent or what traffic sources are performing well and which ones are not performing well. Now, there's a lot of gray areas in here as well, right? Some work really well, some don't work at all. And there's a lot of in-between. You have to prioritize based upon the value of the pages. Now, there's a lot more you can learn from your analytics, but these are just some excellent starting points on the road to improve conversions. Now although we have already defined balanced rated exit rate from kind of a high level in the last session, CRO, and during the measure session, I want to spend some more time just diving in deep here because there is a distinct difference between exit rate and unbalanced rate. And it is important when you're analyzing data. Now an exit rate is specific to each page, is the percentage of people who leave after viewing the page. Your rate let you know the last page AT users view before they move on from your site. Now a very high exit rate on a specific page can be a red flag. For example, if your product tour page that details the benefits of what you sell has one of the highest exit rates. You are likely not connecting the true value of your product with your visitors. Now, your bounce rate is different. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website after visiting a single page on your site. That's the primary difference. Exit rate is where they left your site after viewing pages, plural. That is, they were on a journey through your website. They visited 234 or more pages, and then they left. Exit rate is the rate at which they left that last page. Bounce rate is where they landed on your website and then left your website on the same page without going anywhere else, without visiting any other pages. Now the higher your bounce rate, the lower your percentage of engaged users. Your bounce rate can be affected by your page, such as blog, but also by the quality of the traffic coming to your site. Now, you can see the different ways that a user leaves your site constitutes a balance. Here on your screen. For instance, they hit the back button, obvious, or they type in a different URL. They closed the window or tab, or they click on an external link or even a timeout. Now remember, anytime a user lands and leaves on the same page is a balance, your goal is to keep them engaged and entertained across your site. So if you've got them to land on your page, how can you keep them there? How can you entertain them? Where do they want to go from there? Where can you send them from there? Now, each page has its own bounce rate. But when it comes to CRO, initially, you probably want to look at the bounce rates for three main pages. First off, our landing pages that you're sending paid traffic to through ads. You need to know for your landing pages are resonating, right? Especially as it, you're spending money on them. Secondly, our pages where you're attempting to make conversions happened. Since these pages are where major conversions happen, you just want to make sure they are helpful and useful. And thirdly, high traffic pages, that is pages at most of your visitors see. Now high traffic pages are important because they often answer questions and declare benefits and engage users. If this is not happening, then you've found a leak in your funnel. But if you do come across high bounce rates, there may be a few common reasons why. Now as you can see, this is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully this gets some creative juices flowing in your mind. So you can start to think about, hey, maybe this is the reason why people are bouncing. Now, if you do have users that are bouncing, one of the primary culprits could be that your website is just visually unappealing. It could just be kind of disgusting colors or a really poor layout and just as confusing to people, it could be that your websites difficult to use. You might have too many menu button items or too many images are just too much text and really bad flow through your site. Or it could be that your website doesn't meet user expectations. For instance, if your target audience is a group of engineers, but you've decided to put some really cutesy, artsy effect on the homepage. It might just turn them off and think, oh, I'm on the wrong site, or this doesn't make sense to me. It could be that the people come into your website, aren't the right people. Remember, getting more people is not what you're after. It's more of the right kind of people. And you may be spending a lot of money on ads or on boosting Facebook posts. But if it's bringing in the wrong people, then that's going to be translated in a high bounce rate. It could be that there's no call to action. You send people to a really great piece of content on your website. And then what? You leave them hanging. You don't direct them to the next step, the next stage in the journey, in the process. And where we spent a lot of time looking at that during the belief framework. And we're going to be spending more time during the content lesson later on. It could be that there's just too many call to actions. Maybe you've got CTA happiness and I'm going to appeal to every persona and every target person that comes onto my website. And that just confuses people. Remember, each of these issues has a unique fix. So the primary point I want you to take away is we simply need to be asking the right questions so we can start providing the right solutions and increase our CRO. We need to move away from the score card. Lagging metric mentality that says, if we have low numbers than we need to do more wrong, we need to be asking smart questions that answer, why are the numbers low, and how can we improve these numbers? So again, not an exhaustive list, but hopefully you can start seeing that these are the questions you need to start asking when you see a high bounce rate or even high exit rate on any one of your primary webpages. 74. Funnel Touchpoints: Another area to analyze the data are the touch points in the funnel. Now we discussed this briefly in Session 1. So let's go over again. If this is an actual funnel on your site, what challenges do you see? How about the low conversion rate from sees add two clicks on Add. This may be an obvious area to ask questions like, are my ads targeting the right audience? Do my ads resonate with the right audience? Do these ads work on the platform that I'm putting them on? Remember each platform has its own unique style. So play to the strings. How about all the touch points? Do your users have to interact with every page, every touch point in order to convert? Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. If this funnel is for mobile visitors, then remember the golden rule of mobile calls to business are worth three times. Then a visit to a website. You can do away with a leaky landing page by simply directing mobile users to a phone number. Or can you bypass them? Touch points with Google AdWords, calls, extensions, phone number on ads, Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn, Lead Ads, Mobile forms. Remember they're smaller, so do the forms need to be shrunk down on mobile goal here, when you take a look and start to analyze the touch points of your funnel is to reduce the friction for the user. So when it comes to touch points, the two primary questions are, is it necessary? And are each of my touchpoints delightful? Now, the delightful isn't a word I usually have in my vocabulary, but please, please ask yourself this question. None the less. If this next page in the funnels necessary, is it delightful? Are you bringing a delightful experience to your users? Are they engaged? Do they enjoy themselves? I have cancelled out of more shopping carts than I can count simply because it has been such a bad experience, even if it's been just a port experience, I will cancel out of it because it says a lot about the company. Number one, it says they're not willing to invest a lot in me by designing a better checkout experience. But two, if they're not willing to invest, how can I trust them with my credit card information? Write it speaks a lot to their trustworthiness. Now please don't forget, Internet users are becoming increasingly discerning and picky. Therefore, this remains one of the most important questions today. We simply cannot neglect user experience anymore. Let me illustrate. Now, let me ask you, what do you think of this webpage with all its wonderful colors and font sizes and checkmarks and buttons and whatever else is going on on this page. I love this part. You found it, you write. I absolutely did find it by searching for the worst landing page ever. See if everyone hippo included that as highest paid person's opinion, has input on your landing pages are on your website design, then your pages will be a Frankenstein of everybody's input just like this. Now, if this is your landing page, then take heart, there is a way to improve this. Look. Try this segment here in visitors, survey them and ask them questions like, what would make you more likely to sign up? Or what are your biggest objections? Well, or how about this? What made you take the free trial? Or what caused you to cancel your subscription? What's been most valuable to you? The point is get into their brain, not your brain. If you internally say weren't going to be the design experts and we're not going to ask our consumers, then you're going to have a webpage just like this. You have to get into the brain of your consumer because you're not the consumer, you're the product owner. There's no replacement for qualitative data direct from your target audience. Now, at its most basic level, conversion rate optimization is simply finding wide visitors aren't converting and fixing it. Rather than a series of guesses and hunches. Cro is to be a process of diagnosis, hypothesis, and testing. Now, although this example you see here is obvious, there can be lots of barriers to conversion that we simply do not see or think about. Here are some of the typical conversion barriers that I see on a regular basis. To start with, is your CTA, your call to action clear and easy to find? Does it answer the question the user has? Are you trying to force them to do something that they're simply not ready to do yet. How will your graphics? Are they relevant? Are they well placed on a clean and are they unique? Or are they distracting and overwhelming in number? As soon as way too many times people get graphic happy and it's just a noise, it's a sea of graphics. Do you have a lot of unnecessary or maybe misplaced or not yet necessary text. How about usability? Can users easily search your site for what they're looking for? If you're an e-commerce, is it easy to complete your checkout process? How many pages and clicks does it take to complete the cake conversions you're measuring? Is there a mobile version of your website or is your responsive version beautiful? Remember keep your navigation, registration, contact payment. All of these things, keep them on cluttered and easy to find an operate. Or is it clear to your visitors that their security is your top priority? Is it easy to trust your website? At the most basic level? Have you even secured your URL or search engine optimization SEO or your SEO efforts up-to-date, accurate, relevant. Are you, are you using accurate titles, relevant keywords in proper metadata that resonates with your searching audience. Images should have correct names and keywords should be used properly, right? I mean, this is basic SEO, but it can be a big turnoff. Such things like titles. Titles should be clear and descriptive. These items are not relevant. People may be coming to your site looking for something you don't offer while those who seek your services are unable to find you. Now, these techniques worked back in the nineties when we use the keyword stuff every area of our pages, including the Meta keywords. But gang, that doesn't work any more. The goal is to make sure every element is necessary, beneficial, and to the best of your ability. Perfectly implemented. Public customer testimonials. Customer testimonials simply lets visitors know how happy others are with your services. Testimonials so that you have other customers and that they are happy that they have enjoyed your service or your product. People love to read reviews today and that trend is only increasing. So make sure you give them simple, short, and powerful reviews. It's always better to have someone else brag about you. Then you've blowing your own horns. So implement customer testimonials. People may be looking for them on your website. They don't see them on your website, so they bounced from your website. How is social proof? Social proof is a powerful conversion rate driver. Social proof is key. If you don't have social proof, then you may be missing out on a huge swath of your market, especially with the early and late majority groups. While you may be asking what is social proof, isn't that customer testimonials? No, not necessarily. Its stuff sing, we have 3000 happy customers. Are we serve as 45 cities or this is how many employees we have. It's a way to simply show to your audience were popular. People love us and you will love us to. Now, as you can imagine, again, there are many, many more barriers to conversion. But these are just some of the ones that I constantly come up against again and again. People using really poor stock photography that just looks cheap and it's misplaced and it's not the target audience in the stock photo. Or I see things with unsecured URLs or poor SEO. These are just some things, again, to get your juices flowing when it comes to conversion barriers, you just gotta go through at least this list, if not more, and start making just a checklist. Do I have the proper CTAs? Is my usability in place? Do people actually trust me? Am I a trustworthy looking website or would I not buy from my own website? Again, once you've gone through these lists of barriers to conversion, the maybe start coming up with a few of your own to help identify possible barriers to conversion. Remember, the goal of analyzing the data in this stage of CRO is to find the leaks in your funnel and then ask these important questions. Is it helpful or even necessary? Is this stage necessary? Funnel journey? Secondly, is it a delightful experience? Is it beautiful? Does it make sense? Or is it confusing? Is it frustrating? Is it not answering the right questions? And if that's the case, how can I improve it? Right? If you continue to ask these three questions about every stage, every element, and every piece of content in your funnel and on your website, then you're going to naturally start to draw your own incorrect conclusions. Keep in mind you can't do this isolated from your consumers. You have to bring them into this process. Ask them, did you find what you're looking for? Was it Nice? Did it make sense? Did you understand it? Did we lead you to the next stage appropriately? So again, ask these three questions of your consumers about everything you're producing and you will start to draw the right conclusions. This is why both qualitative and quantitative data play a big role during the stage. Now, although you can dive much deeper, answering these three questions will set you up for the next stage of the CRO feedback loop. And that is strategize. 75. STEP 3: STRATEGIZE: The third step in the CRO feedback loop is strategize. Now that you have gathered data in the measure stage, and I've started to outline the large list of areas to optimize. In the Analyze stage, we now come to the strategize the third stage of CRO. Now consuming CRO, there are two primary stages of strategy. The first stage is hypothesis and the second is prioritize. 76. Hypothesize: Since you have already analyzed the data and insights, and I've learned how customers behave on your site. It's time to brainstorm a variety of different testable hypotheses with the help of these questions. In light of the data, what does your website appear to be lacking? Secondly, what key pages of your conversion funnel on your site have the highest exit rate? And thirdly, what ideas are you going to implement to improve this certain page? This is the brainstorming phase. Now, there are two ways to arrive at testable CRO hypothesis by using deductive thinking or inductive thinking. Don't want to get too heavy, but let me, let me just dive into the definition of these two really quickly. With deducted thinking, you are starting with observing your visitors. You start to see a pattern that's common among them. This usually comes out of the analysis stage and then writing down some questions based on what you observe that you can form into a testable hypothesis. So, when you think of deductive, think of these four things. Observation, looking for patterns, developing a tentative hypothesis, and then you develop your theory in that order. This is how we have modeled the CRO feedback loop. But it's important to note it's not the only way to arrive at hypothesis. The second method, the other method is inductive thinking. Now with inductive thinking in your starting with the theory up front, usually from intuition or an already solid understanding of the customer. And, and some of you in your industries, you have a really good understanding of your customers and you can develop theories right away. They're fairly sound theories. Then using observation, you confirm that your theory is worth testing, which you'll finally form into a hypothesis to test. And so the four stages in inductive thinking is theory first, then hypothesis, then observation than conformation. Now you can see the obvious downfall of this method. If you start with the theory, then sometimes we try to find the numbers that substantiate our theory. Now, I have been involved in more than one team that loves is cherry picking methodology in order to prove our opinion. That is, we put our opinion or reputation at stake and we have to somehow prove it, and so we find the numbers that substantiate our own theory. However, if you're working with a team that you trust, then this can be a great way to brainstorm some ideas that help narrow down your CRO before you begin the process. In either case, deductive or inductive, the question comes first. That is, before you make a hypothesis, you have to clearly identify the question you're trying to answer. Remember, CRO is a discipline that is scientific but not perfect. You're trying to solve a question that you probably don't immediately know the answer to, right? If we knew what was immediately wrong and how to fix it perfectly every time, then we will be operating as autonomous beings who build websites for robots. The reality though, is that the combination of your audience, your website, and your company are unique. The hypothesis stages, you simply making the best possible educated guess at what can be improved and your conversion funnel. Now if you remember from your school days in science class, you may remember that a good hypothesis is made up of certain elements. And those primary elements are the independent variable, dependent variable, and control. Now the independent variable is the one that you are going to alter or change throughout your experiment, identified usually after the word if in a typical hypothesis, for instance, this can refer to a title, a paragraph of text or a CTA. We're going to expound on this more, but let me go through these definitions quickly. Secondly, is the dependent variable. That's the variable you are measuring, identified after the word. Then in a typical hypothesis. It also includes the operational definition of how you will measure your dependent variable. Think of things like click-through rate, scroll rate, time on page, bounce rate. Those aren't things you're changing, those are things you are measuring. And so these are dependent variables. Third is control. And that is kind of the baseline. This is what you're using for a comparison. It's often referred to as the original. Now the control condition can be thought of as the normal or current condition that you want to improve from. So let's take a look at a sample hypothesis to see how this works. Again, if you're familiar with year-old middle school or high school days, you probably have seen this, at least in this version or some similar version many, many times. Now, there are few things you need to know when developing a hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an answer to the experimental questions. That is, it's an educated scientific guess. Taking into consideration the background information you already have through experience and or research. Remember you are industry experts, you have a product, you have a service, you know, your customers. And so you take all of that background experience into account when you develop your hypothesis. Secondly, a hypothesis is a proposed statement. Not a fact, it's just a Proposition. Thirdly, it's made on the basis of limited evidence. That is, yes, you do have some knowledge, but it's not perfect, which is why you are going through this process, the CR owed feedback loop and you're developing this hypothesis. Fourthly, it can be proved or disproved. That is, a hypothesis has to be something that you can link AB test for instance. And you can say, yes, the hypothesis proved to be true or not, or we need further testing. And so number 5 is usually a hypothesis is usually used as a starting point for further investigation because you may lose or win the AB test. That's okay. Because the primary purpose is to learn and to constantly improve. Remember the reason we call it a CRO, feedback loop is because it's a loop, it should never be ending. You should always be improving upon your content, upon your design, upon your campaigns in your delivery and your tactics. Because your customers are constantly changing, your market's constantly changing. There are constantly new competitors that are being introduced. So as you see here again, sample hypothesis, if independent variable, then the dependent variable because, well, your reason why That's the summation of a hypothesis, a simple one, but a hypothesis nonetheless. And you can actually refine this simple hypothesis a bit more. This is one that I use often. I am going to be changing this element. Fill in the blank from blank to blank will increase or decrease a conversion metric. Very, very simple. So a sample hypothesis would be this. If I add a demo request form on the footer of every page, then the conversion rate will increase by 20 percent because of the improved user experience through reduced friction. Do you see do you see what I did there? I talked about a conversion metric. I was going to change from one thing to the other. I was going to introduce a new element and there was going to be an increase in that state and conversion metric. So when you begin to write hypotheses such as this, Here's a helpful checklist to go through. Number one, make sure the hypothesis you are developing that your writing is real. Does your hypothesis focused on something that you could actually test? For instance, in that example I just gave, I can test adding a demo request form and the footer. That's something that's logical, it's practical, it's real. Secondly though, make sure it's something that's going to have a real impact. What impact will this recommendation have on the business? If the answer is you can't tell, then it's probably not a good idea to test find something that is going to have a real impact. Or how many things will change if we tested this idea? If the answer is a lot, then you have a lot of hypothesis to work through. Make it simple, but makes sure that simple hypothesis has real impact. Number three, make sure it's testable. Is there enough traffic to test your AB test or this hypothesis? You can test low traffic pages, but the approach is generally different. Number 4, make sure it's measurable. How are you going to measure the results? If the answer is, I don't know, then you probably should do some more research and find a conversion metric or any sort of metric that you can have as a baseline in order to see if your hypothesis is successful or not. Fifthly, evidence, is there evidence to support this idea? If not, choose another thing to test that you do have evidence for meaning, just don't make something up because the highest paid person's opinion says you should be testing this. Well, your job may be on the line and so you probably should. But is there something that you do have evidence to say? Yeah, here's a drop-off point. We have a high bounce rate or high exit rate. We have a low conversion rate on these funnel pages. And so we need to test some things here in order to have the greatest amount of impact. Number 6, learn. Will you learn something even if your hypothesis is incorrect? Right? Because if your hypothesis incorrect, well, hopefully you have learned something. You've learned what not to do or what to avoid, not just there but across your website. So some quick simple tips is make sure you always write down your hypothesis. And when you do make it clear, use simple language. This should be something you share it not just with yourself, but with your entire team or the people you're working with. It should also be something that you can look at a year later and know exactly what the purpose of this hypothesis was. Four, remember, the point is that you clarify to yourself and others your thought process and the why behind what you are doing. In other words, if if someone was to ask you why you are testing, changing or updating, you have a simple, clear answer based on at least some sort of data. Plus, it simply makes this process that much more scientific, which is always good. So then once you've come up with a series of hypotheses based on data and experience, then it's time to prioritize your optimization efforts. 77. Prioritize: As we said at the outset of this stage of the CRO feedback loop, prioritize is the second step of the strategize stage of the feedback loop. A lot of words, a lot of complication, I get it. But strategize has two primary stages. First off, hypothesize which we just looked at and secondly, prioritize. Now as you understand, the reality is you cannot optimize every area of your site at the same time, right? So when you develop your hypotheses, you then have to prioritize the hypotheses. Now the four tips you see here show the most important elements for filtering and prioritizing. Firstly, you will typically want to begin optimizing the portion of your conversion funnel that receives the greatest amount of traffic or generates the greatest number of conversions. Other potential places to start prioritizing include your highest value pages. For instance, if you have multiple products, we'll start with your more important products first, right? It's kind of common sense or pages that are significantly and obviously underperforming compared to the rest of your site. For instance, if you have four primary pages on your website and the pricing page is way under-performing. Well, biological reason that's an important page. And therefore you should probably start with that one. Now, during them prioritize stage, you will want to firstly think of key website pages or your funnel pages. These should be fairly obvious as you probably spend most of your time editing these pages don't. Probably, I would say, avoid things like the blog pages or certain resource pages that just don't get a lot of hits. Start with, start with the most important ones. It is important to remember that even though your about us page may need a lot of optimization, it probably doesn't play a large role in conversions. Now an example of primary pages that fits within one or both of the first two keys listed here are your homepage, pricing page or your request a demo or similar landing pages. Optimizing these KEY primary pages first, we'll often yield the greatest return on investment. But also think outside of your website as well. For instance, if your Facebook pages where you garner the highest quality leaves, then this may be the top priority for optimization. Your goal is to research and study how to gather the right data and implement the highest value changes for each specific platform. Again, the point of prioritization is improving the areas that can have the greatest immediate impact on your conversion goals. 78. Homework 3: CRO WORKLOG: In this homework section, we are going to build out your CRO tests. Now whenever you create a Test, it is important to keep a backlog of your tests because you want to see if things are getting better or worse. You also want to keep a record of what you've already done. So maybe you don't repeat tests or you learned from them over time. It's also a great thing for a leader to have. You should have this. So if someone comes up to you and says, what are you doing or what tests are you running? Or for someone on your team who's actually running the tests. You can have them fill out this information so you can look at it as a leader and say, yeah, things are going well and we're on a regular cadence of running the CRO tests. Now let me just run through this for you. Again, you can create more columns and here you can delete some if you find them unhealthful. But I've really paired this down to the fewest amount of columns that are still going to be helpful for you as an organization. Obviously, the date, when is this test going to start? And so you'd prioritized by the date. The status of the test is simply what's going on here. So you put the data out here. Most of them are not going to be started, but then you can launch them complete and maybe some are paused because you signal another one took importance. Let's say you're running a test on the homepage. You started it, you're running it for three or four days. You don't have statistical significance yet. But then you realize, wow, there's something else I need a test that's much more important. Pause this one. That way you know what's paused, what's launch, what's complete instill on. Now, these three columns here are really a way for you, in your own words. They don't have to be super fancy, but just in your own words. To answer these three questions. Number one, what are the questions prompting the test? Like what's going on? Do you do think that you can get a higher conversion rate? Do you think people are dropping off the bounce rate is too high, the exit rate is too high. That the messaging needs to change, that the images are too ugly. Whatever it is, put it in here, in your own words. Here's the hypothesis. Now as we just went through the hypothesis, I created a sample one appear for you. This is from the video course, and you can copy and paste this or create your own. But basically what you're trying to do is create a hypothesis here that says we're going to change this element. This one thing on this one page. It is originally this, but we're gonna change it to look like this or like this or the messaging is going to change it, whatever it might be. And it will increase or decrease. And then throw in your conversion metric. We're gonna see a 15% game. Again. You're not going to nail this first time, but hopefully over time as you run more and more of these, you're going to be able to create more and more accurate hypothesis, especially if you start to understand your target audience and their behavior. Now this is just the proposed test description. This is where you say on this page, I'm going to change this button text to say this instead of that. Or I'm going to introduce a whole new section on this page because I don't believe people are being satisfied by the current content. Whatever it is. Again, in your own words, keep it simple, but make it explicit. Now these three is simply a way for you to prioritize your CRO tests. First off, is the impact, is it going to have a low, medium, or high impact on your conversion and on your business as a whole. Is this really a game changer or is this just one of those nice to haves? I don't like the way this thing looks, so I'm gonna change it and it might have some impact. So I'm going to measure it nonetheless. Here's confidence. Now this is your confidence of understanding your target audience. Yes, what I know about the change is going to have a huge impact or I don't really know, I'm just gonna kinda wing it. It's going to have a huge impact, but my confidence is low that actually chose the right test or the right image or the right messaging. Now the ease, again, just an easy way to prioritize. If you say I don't have a lot of time, I'm going to choose one of these easy ones. Then you can do so, or medium or difficult. Now, when we get into these fancy color codes, then you know, this is where the actual testing goes on. First off are the variables. This is pulled from your hypothesis. And if you remember, the independent variable is the variable that you are going to alter or change throughout your experiment, identified after the word if, right in your hypothesis, for instance, this can refer to a title, a paragraph of text, or even a CTA. That's the independent variable. The dependent variable is the variable that you are measuring, identified after the word then in your hypothesis. And it also includes the operational definition of how you will measure your dependent variable. Is that the click-through rate? Is that the scroll rate is that the time on page? Is it the bounce rate? Right? This is often more a number that can go up and down. These are all dependent variables that you are measuring. Now, you want to put both of these in here. Let's say the conversion rate, 10% and the independent variables, a CTA, just a button. What we get into a little bit more detail here. And this is where we have the control or the benchmark of your test and then the experiment, this is your hypothesis, this is what you're going to change. And so we only have one-to-one here. If you have, if you're using Optimizely is gonna do this for you. You can actually run them 50-50. You can run four experiments, ten experience, all at the same time. And it's going to divide it evenly between them all. And you're going to see the numbers for all of these. So you can put the control here and then just run the experiments down here. Again, I would just keep them in here as well as Optimizely because there's gonna be a lot of tests that you just don't use Optimizely four. Meaning you would say I need a quote on this page. Well, that's not a kind of before and after. That's I want to see if the squirrel rate increases. And that's not something you would usually use Optimizely for. That's something you would just use on your website and then measure in google Analytics or Crazy Egg or what have you. So let me run through this really quickly. You have the dates of the control. How long did this control run was at two weeks, was at three weeks, was that a month? Now the value end goal completions is a relationship set of numbers, goal completions, let's say form fill out. On your landing page. This would be 11000 visitors to your landing page. That's the value. And 15 of them filled out the form. That's a 1.5% conversion rate. Hence, you can see the very basic formula here, goal completions divided by value. That's the formula. Now the experiment is saying I'm going to take the same amount of time as the control, or at least a relationship. So if this ran for four weeks, I'm gonna run this for two weeks. But preferably it would be over the same amount of time. You can generally get this information from one of the tools that you use, maybe even Google Analytics. If you've installed Google Tag Manager and you have events running and you know exactly how many form fill out. You can just look historically and then just make a swap and say I'm just gonna make this swap. I'm just going to see what's going to happen over the same two-week time period. How many people landed on the landing page, how many people filled out the form? You're gonna get your conversion rate automatically with the very basic formula. Now the end of this, you're going to have an even fancier formula. Not really as simply going to say, what is the improvement from this conversion rate to this conversion rate? Did I improved? Did I not improve? Now, statistical significance, you can go online and there are some online statistical significant calculators where you enter in some of this information. How many total visitors goal completions for the control of an experiment? And then we'll tell you if it's statistical significance. But you should also be able to take a look at this and say, yeah, I had a 3% conversion rate here and now I have a 6%. Well, that's definitely statistically significant. There's a huge number, a 100% improvement. But if you see like a 1% improvement or maybe a 2% improvement on huge numbers, then maybe, maybe not so much. Again, I would use a calculator is online because they're often able to deduce a lot more information from the numbers then we would, and we would say, that doesn't mean anything, but statistically, it actually maybe something. So my goal for you is to start to think about all the changes that you're going to make on your website or in your campaigns based upon a form like this. You want to think of it as conversions. You have a set of conversions already. If you have a business with different channels in website, your goal is to simply increase those conversions. So make sure that you are measuring the before and after of each one of the changes. Otherwise you don't know what worked. You have no metrics to back it up. You have no historical log of what worked and what didn't. It's going to just be the wild, wild west on your website and hippo, the highest paid person's opinion is going to be the one who always wins. And so if you run something like this as a leader, then you're going to have something that you can point to and say, hey, you know, we've tried this, look at the result. It actually took away from some of the conversion rate that we had or people didn't appreciate it. And over time you can look back through these and you can start saying, wow, I'm getting better. I'm I hypothesis of my target audience. No matter what you're changing Bigger, Small, try to run a CRO test. Just entering this basic information, it will take you literally about two minutes max. You're just filling out some of these basic elements, selecting some of these drop downs, maybe looking at some historical numbers, that's it. But you will find over time it's actually fun to go back through and show off your excellent CRO test to your colleagues, coworkers, boss, whoever it may be. So have fun with this again, be very detailed with this. Don't neglect this and you will thank me for it later. 79. STEP 4: DESIGN: The fourth stage of the CRO feedback loop is designed. Now when we say design, we mean the design of any CRO test including AB testing, multivariate testing, optimization, or any other test where you are measuring the results from a defined hypothesis. As you can see from this chart by Rand Fishkin from us, there are so many inputs in a conversion decision and therefore many opportunities for designing tests. As we have covered in the last session. Before beginning, any optimization strategy, you have to know what you're measuring and attempting to optimize. It's got to be defined. It's also important to understand what drives these conversions for testing purposes. Is it testimonials from satisfied customers, adds on specific social networks high-quality video on the homepage, headline or CTA. Fewer form fields on landing pages. Remember, no matter what you're designing, whether it's the CTA, the content, interactions, landing pages, forums and social posts, whatever it is, it should be based on the analysis stage. Your users are unique. So take small doses of the so-called best-practice pill. For example, copying the competition and design your own tests based on what you have prioritized based on the data. However, having said that, let's take a look at some good places to start. But first, let's look at an obvious example of how negligent we can be of data. Do you remember this chart from 2014 and the endless discussions of the mobile revolution? Well, if you spent any time around marketers or conferences, you will have heard all about this many times. Well, the mobile revolution thankfully came and went and didn't basically what experts said it would do. Although I do understand that each website has unique visitors. Here's the point. Even though the mobile revolution has come and gone and now there are more mobile users than there are desktop users. I am still amazed at how many people and organizations still leave mobile. To the end of a project as a must have checklist item. Let me, let me make this point by asking if you're getting your website redesigned, how are the designs delivered to you? Now for 95% of you, if, if not more, you would probably say in desktop format, there are some understandable reasons behind this, but it's still underscores this incredible inability in myself included to change based on trending data. I started designing websites back in the mid-1990s, 96 be specific on a really old cruddy desktop and laptop with some sort of dial up connection that made a screeching noise. Yeah. It was like the old AOL stuff where I was painting for every megabyte downloaded. Now for nearly 20 years, I designed and developed on a desktop. For a desktop, however, things have changed and this old dog has to learn new tricks. Now, I design on a desktop or laptop for all devices. This is a fundamental change in my thinking, but it's based on data. Meaning now we are designing for today's audience based on today's data. If we neglect relevant information like this, because we think we know better than we will be spinning our wheels, not just with CRO, but with our entire business. Here to ears the point, always be willing to set aside what you think you know for actual reality. So since we are already looking at mobile, Let's use this topic as a launching platform for great places to begin our CRO testing. 80. Mobile Design: So since we are already looking at mobile, Let's use this topic as a launching platform for great places to begin our CRO testing. First off, and this is really an important CRO point. Bounce rates on landing pages are often much higher on mobile than on desktop. Y. Well, space's limited and designs can look awful on mobile. Did you know Google research showed that 96% of smartphone users have encountered sites that weren't designed for mobile devices, right? Obviously, you're going to balance and people don't like to type on a mobile phone. So if you have any sort of forms or any sort of data entry, minimize it, and reduce it as much as possible. Some common mistakes I see with mobile is having one landing page for all devices, even though it doesn't fit all devices. I've also seen slow loading or heavy imagery. Remember, mobile users are often outside of Wi-Fi using data. Think about this small screen size to, you've got to be careful of below the fold call to actions. How about being too wordy or even using the same font sizes desktop? Remember people don't read, they scan. And so you have to take that into account when developing content or file downloads. File downloads can often be too large or forms are too long. And there's so many of these common, the stakes that we make when we don't take into account the size of the small mobile screen. There was a HubSpot case study while ago, where they minimize their landing page form from six fields down to one field with a simple layout. And just because of that, they got five times the submissions with the smaller form and the bounce rate was cut in half, not obviously. One form field versus six, but that's the point. How many do you absolutely desperately need to have? So here are 10 quick tips for mobile CRO that you can analyze and test with your new CRO design. And of course, like all the lists that I've been sharing with you, it's not definitive, it's not the be all end all of Linux. But this comes from years and years of experience and working in these environments. Make sure it's accessible. Make sure people can access every part of it, and it all works. Make sure it's fast. Remember, as I said before, people are often outside of WiFi. And so reduce the size of imagery and downloads and stuff. Be orderly, right? You want to have some sort of order to your formatting. Make sure your brief. And people loved this scroll. It's true but people don't love to read. So not just being brief but be legible. The call friendly on people love to call on the mobile phone. I mean, they're on a phone, remember. And so if you have your phone number there, make sure it's it's front-and-center and people can easily click on it. Also be thumb friendly. Think about the way you hold the phone. Your thumb is 72 pixels wide. And so people will want some big buttons that are accessible with their big scrolling thump. Also be local B-form, simple beam action compelling in and add on a bunch of your own list here. But the, but here's why this is so important. Because of content is not optimized on mobile devices. 79% of users will search for another side to complete the same task. Plus look at this. Mobile users are five times more likely to abandon the task if the site is an optimized for mobile, right? I've also heard stats about 48% of users Sydney feel frustrated and annoyed when on sites that are poorly optimized for mobile. Let me ask you, how likely will you convert a frustrated or annoyed visitor? Would you convert if you're frustrated or annoyed by an experience on mobile because it doesn't work or you can't click through or the images are too big or the form is too long. I've also heard this debt. 52% of users said that a BAD mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company as a whole. Now, this is important because 60 percent of consumers use mobile exclusively to make purchase decisions and that is only going to increase. In other words, this is not something we can ignore. The numbers show us mobile is the most important device and yet so many businesses and business decisions neglect this. So let's not make the same mistake when designing CRO tests. Here's another area that we can start with when it comes to potentially low hanging fruit. 81. Buzzword Compliance: Buzzwords, Ru, buzzword compliant. Meaning is your messaging and content loaded with meaningless buzzwords. Now this list is from Factiva and it shows the most used buzzwords, impress citations. Now, does this look like any of your content? For instance, on your homepage? Do you have a robust, world-class, easy use product that is groundbreaking and cutting edge? Well, the point is that we could be talking about any product in any industry. The reality is if we use these words, it shows that we don't know how to communicate about our product with our target market. This is where the belief framework from Session 2 is the necessary groundwork. Let, let me ask you, does this look or sound familiar? We just have to amplify digital experiential transformational social influencer engagement. If we want to dot, dot, dot, weight. What do we do again? Because entice, I love this because when we use vague and meaningless buzzwords like this, then we take the cowardly approach of never having to think about how our product actually benefits the target market. Another area that would be a good starting point for CRO tests is UX. 82. User Experience: Now, when we talk about user experience or UX, we're referring to the totality of visitors experience within your site. That is, more than just how it looks. User experience includes how easy your site is to use or how fast it is and, and how little friction there is when visitors try to complete whatever action it is they're trying to complete. Now as it applies to funnel optimization. And the importance of UX cannot be overstated. By carefully crafting your user experience, you can ensure the user stays on task and keeps moving through the funnel. Having been given just enough information and options at each step. Now, a couple quick and easy ways to test this is number one, use an easy service like usability hub.com to get immediate feedback. Generally, the information that comes back from these anonymous visitors is fairly accurate. Secondly, have a few people you know with good design skills who have not use your website to go through your website and provide authentic, truthful feedback. You'd be surprised how brutally honest friends and family can be and how much you can learn just by watching someone else use your website for the first time. Now, in your funnel optimization efforts, you'll be focusing primarily on two aspects of user experience. First off is reducing friction in the form of wasted clicks or excess pages. False, start going into the wrong page, slow page loads in other friction points that causing users to simply just give up. Secondly, though, is reducing cognitive overhead. Another version of friction, right, that puts doubt and indecision into the mind of the user, causing them to waver over whether to convert. Now, if you'd begin by looking at the objectives of the user and the business, you can begin to sketch out the various flows that need to be designed in order to achieve both parties goals. Here's what I mean. The user might be looking to find a fact or a product, learn a skill downloaded document, write whatever, whatever your major objectives or goals are for the user. Know the business objects as though could be anything from getting a lead, a like a subscriber, a buyer, and so on. Ideally, you'll design your phone away that meets both user and business objectives. Now in addition to an awareness of user objective, It's important to account for the different traffic sources and levels of knowledge and engagement in your user base, right? You must map those inbound user flows to conversion funnels that provide value to the user, obviously without neglecting those business objectives. Remember, in each of these cases, the user comes with his or her own needs, expectations, and level of knowledge, and they need to be treated accordingly. So the plan is simply get to know your user and give them a delightful experience tailored for them specifically to the point that they were actually glad they visited your website. 83. Consumer Focus: For the next couple of minutes, I want to take a look at the difference between being a product-focused versus a consumer focus brand. Now, as we discussed earlier, it's easy to be product-focused because we're so excited about our product and rightfully so, right, we built it or we're selling it. And so we should be stoked about telling people about our product. The challenge though, is that applying the benefits of using our product to a target market. Remember, the purpose of the analysis stage we looked at earlier is to focus on the consumers wants and needs and pain points with the goal of marketing your product or service to the consumer in a way that is beneficial and meaningful to them. And for them, for instance, take these two ads on your screen here. Coca-cola, obviously the marketing master, staying true to its very first tagline in 1886. Delicious and refreshing. This is a great example of a consumer centric add, right? The consumer comes first. You can tell because the consumer can see themselves in this situation. How about though this ad I found on the right? I'm actually not sure what it's about. Is it for the blast so that the top or the carton of delight on the bottom is the lighter liquid that I can use like sugar. This is almost an entirely product focus add the reality is, I can't see myself using it because it just looks like your typical marketing collateral. Now, I want you to notice, just because you strive to be consumer focus does not mean you don't talk about the product. In fact, it is actually more real, reliable and trustworthy and it's more consumer centric to stop telling customers how your product changes the world, but rather tell them how much they are going to love your product and why. Make every effort to figure out what keeps the customer up at night? What are their desires, wants, passions, needs, and pain points. Once you figure that out, then you're able to design for the customer and not your product. 84. What's Missing?: As we're in the design stage of the CRO feedback loop, one of the questions I often need to ask is what's missing? That is, what element during the buyers journey may need to be introduced in order to satisfy a customer's needs. You see, as people and marketers, we are experts at making content. And often that content is described as just noise. And so when we talk about CRO, it's often not removing noise, refining journeys and optimizing elements, right? It's what we've been going through this entire lesson. However, we rarely stop to ask if there is something missing that could help optimize a journey for a user. Let's start with this basic example. Let's say you have a website with some great resources on it. Now, in a given month, you have 10 thousand visitors to your website. Of those 10000 visitors, 5 percent or 500, end up downloading your primary lead generator. It's a beautiful thought leadership piece in your industry, whether it's a PDF or a white paper or ebook, whatever it is, it is your primary lead generator. However, you notice that only 1% of those that consume this great content and converting later on. Now, as you can imagine, this is a very low conversion rate. At this point, I have seen many, many organizations try to optimize the CTA, changing button colors, upgrading the CTA text, and improving the location of the CTA. Because the philosophy is that we can somehow strong arm consumers in a clicking on the CTA. But here's the reality You have to catch. If consumers are not ready to buy, then they are not going to buy no matter how bright or big or simple your CTA may be. So your primary questions should be at it at a point like this, with a scenario like this, what do we need to do to get the buyer ready for the purchase decision? Well, one idea would be to create a piece of content that will do two things. First, it will be content that supplements your primary content piece. That is, it will move beyond just addressing the consumers needs, which is still important, right, in order to establish yourself as a trusted authority. But secondly, it has the goal. It has the purpose of getting the consumer ready to purchase by positioning your brand and your product as the solution to their need. Now in a scenario like this, you see on your screen, then you're much more likely to see numbers like 10 thousand visitors to your homepage. 500 or 5% of visitors are downloading content a. But now, because you have tailored another content piece for consumers of content a, you could have up to 70% of consumers who downloading content a to be interested in content, be It's along the same lines. But because content B is getting consumers ready for a purchase, when you offer the CTA on content be, you now have the possibility of consumers who are much more ready and willing to purchase and engage. Instead of five original demo requests you have now the possibility of something like 35. Now, I've seen this take place more times than I can count. Chances are what's happening in your conversion rate is a lack of the right type of content, rather than just the button color needs to change. That's why developing the belief framework is so important. Because if you know the consumers needs, then you'll be able to develop content that satisfies their means at each stage of the buyer's journey. And as you reduce the confusion in their mind by providing solutions to their needs, you will have position yourself in their minds as they go to authority and solution. When it comes time for them to make a purchase decision. 85. STEP 5: IMPLEMENT: We have just spent a fair amount of time talking about CRO, measuring, analyzing, strategizing, and designing. Now we come to the fifth stage of the CRO feedback loop and one of the most crucial steps and that is implementing. Remember that a fundamental element of CRO is data. We create tests based on the data that we already have or are gathering. But we also implement CRO tests in order to gather more data. The goal, the end goal, the primary purpose is to learn. However, when it comes to marketing, I have noticed one of two primary methodologies. First off is implemented and leave, and secondly, implement and optimize. Now implement and leave is the far more common methodology that I've seen way too many times across organizations of all sizes. That is, take for example, you write a blog post and you push Publish, and you move on to the next blog post. And then maybe if you're lucky, once a month, you view your most popular blogposts and Google Analytics and you were poured on it. And you all applaud on how well you did and that's about it. Or you post a social several times a day and then repeat from day to day to week, month to month. And then, of course, at the end of the month, you then generate a report, your most popular social posts and you all applaud if one didn't really well. Now if you're really dialed and then you will schedule out your repetitious post because quantity is the key to success for this methodology. And often, if you're in a position where you don't need to get the higher powers to sign off on new test designs and wireframes, then you can make flip it changes to your website directly without any substantiated care to the effects. That is, you have a gut feeling that something's going to work so you make the change, you implement your great design idea based off of gut instincts or best practices, or the CEO said so. And then you move on. The implementation is done with, without much pair or purpose to the end result. That is, you implement and leave. And again, as I said before, I see this again and again of organizations of every size. Let's write the blog posts, Let's publish that resource. Let's create that new website or that new design, or that social post or that email. And what we've got to move on to the next one because it's all about the numbers. How many emails we send, how many resources we produce every month? Well, there is a better methodology. Thank goodness. And that is the implement and optimize methodology. This is the belief that all implementations across all channels should be done with specific purposes and goals in mind as part of the optimization process and with established tests that determine if it was a success or not. Again, the goal of this methodology is to learn and improve. Its not. The methodology that says More is more. Eight blog post is better than seven. That's the implement and leave philosophy. The implement an optimized philosophy says, we need to find the right resources, the right webpages. Once we find them, well, let's invest into it. Let's optimize them over and over and see if we cannot improve upon it. Every optimization tests should set out to answer a research question based on a hypothesis before any tests are implemented. As we begin to take a look at implementing CRO designs, I wanted to share just a few kind of common industry standard terms that you're going to hear thrown around in kind of a CRO world, things like treatment or variable or value, you, you may not enjoy using these words, find words or terms that you can agree with. But I wanted you to just be educated. Nonetheless, treatment, Each CRO tests that we design is called a treatment and consists of both variables and values. A variable is a general element that you intend to test. For example, a headline and image page layout form copy the words on the page of button, et cetera. So this is the variable, if you remember from the hypothesis stage, is the independent variable, is the one that you intend to change. Value is the specific version of the variable that you intend to test. If the variable is a headline, then your values would be different versions of that headline. Value a, value, the value C. Those are your independent tests. A treatment is the display of your new values for the variable you are testing. In other words, each treatment is quite simply the unique version of the element you are testing looks like. Ideally, each treatment would consist of multiple values for a single variable. Let's take a look at an example to make this more practical. In this illustration, there is one control page and one test page or one treatment page. But a typical CRO treatment would be something like testing for different headline values on a landing page or six different text values. The primary homepage CTA. The benefit of separating and CRO test or treatment out in this way is in order to separate out the result into distinguishable data columns with the appropriate conversion rates. Write something like value a resulted in a 1.2% conversion rate. Value B resulted in a 1% conversion rate, and value c resulted in a one-point six conversion rate. Now you know what worked and what didn't, and you are able to sort and prioritize the results. So here are the steps again, as just a reminder of what the sort of AB test looks like. Number one, identify the test and define how successful be measured. Secondly, create a hypothesis on the outcome. Thirdly, use this hypothesis to determine the input needed to achieve statistical significance using like a calculator resource tool, for instance, what does success look like? Fourthly, establish a time span for testing based on the numbers needed for statistical significance. Generally a week two will do the trick. But if you have low traffic on your homepage or whatever page you are testing, then you might have to build it up to three or four weeks long. And then fifthly, always maintained a control group that's the original as a baseline to measure against. I like to always have the original displayed at the same time as the treatment because of seasonality. Let's say you're testing over the holidays or during a slump or during summertime or high point or low point during your typical selling period. You want to make sure that you have the original baseline measuring at the exact same time as your treatment. Now to make this easier, there are some great AB testing tools on the market. And I've used a couple of these religiously, especially like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer. But I've also used Google Optimize, even Google Analytics with kinda split page testing. No matter what platform you use though, just make sure that once the split testing platform is in place, run through and verify that everything is set up properly. Then for each split test, following basic procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is, why you're running it, how it fits into the overall site, how it aligns with the business goals and objectives and how you'll measure success, right? The goal is to get everybody on board and excited to see the outcomes of the treatments. You should be getting a lot of input for these treatments. And therefore you should have a lot of people invested in interested as see the results of them. Now, over time, these experiments, plans, and treatments create a valuable archive of your businesses evolution. You're going to start to find a best practice for your company. Now, I would never suggest saying, Okay, we're done testing. We've done enough, we've learned enough, we never need to do this again. But over time you're going to start to figure out what works and what doesn't work for your target market. Now, once the test is started, this is where the software takes over all split testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page generated significantly more conversions from a statistics perspective than the other pages or the other treatments. At this point, you can end the test and implement the changes by promoting the winning version to be your new control or baseline. Let's look at how simple this can be in this basic test, Michael add guard, the conversion copywriter of content verb, conducted a series of tests on his clients websites. He learned that even when the word spam with negative connotation is used in a positive context, it's still reduces conversions for his client. This is a powerful lesson learned, right? All of the control one that's test on the rest of the site. This lesson can be applied. Avoid the use of the word spam even in a positive context. So the test, if you can tell here, is just done in one environment, but the results are spread across the entire brand. However, there may still be something that needs to be said on this form in order to reduce a visitor's concern. So the testing goes on. And that's the goal. You're testing should never be done. Looking at this form, you can say, is there's too many fields. Do I need more fields? Is this the right call to action at the top or on the button? Should I put more text around this form field? How about the landing page in entirety? Should I be putting in there some really great photography that resonates with the user. How about the color scheme of the overall layout of the webpage and maybe the header and footer, right? You can carry this on and on and on, which is why we call it a CRO, feedback loop. You should never be done. And because of the implementation stage, you're going to gather more data that will then feed back into the CRO feedback loop, generating more tests and more results over time. 86. STEP 6: LEARN: As I said at the beginning of this session, CRO is built on the foundation of data, because without data you're just guessing, right? But great CRO is based on the data you already have and the data you are able to gather by running a number of different tests. After a period of time and multiple tests, you should begin to learn about your users motivations, concerns, and pain points that will then inform future tests. Remember your prospects and customers, the Internet and technology, even your own company. It's all changing and developing and evolving. To be successful, you will have to be committed to also constantly learning. A good rule of thumb when it comes to CRO, is this phrase you see here. And that is you can learn just as much, if not more, from a failed test as you can from the successful one, as long as you understand that the resulting data is an opportunity. Remember, the goal of a test is not just to get a lift, although that is nice, but rather it's primarily to get a learning. When it comes to CRO y is the most important thing to learn about web visitors. Why did they search? Why did they buy? Why don't they buy? Why are they bouncing or clicking? Why are they filling out this form versus app form? Figure out the why. And you will begin to develop an experience that is satisfying to the right customer on the right platform at the right time. Now here's some important questions to ask at the end of a CRO test in order to learn and gain some more enlightenment. Things like, how did this work with your hypothesis was successful, yes or no. Learn from that. How about your end goals? Did this actually improved the end goal, which by the way is the true measure of success, right? Getting more clicks isn't necessarily the measure of success. The one thing you want to look at is did those colleagues earn me more money and y or was there something that didn't make the CRO test? In other words, are there some other areas that you would like to test? I'm a huge fan of AB testing, but not so much of multivariate testing. Because in a multivariate test it's difficult to know which element was the most successful. Save each variable for its own treatment. Or how about this? What will you measure next? You would be surprised at how many tests will reveal other areas or variables or values that you want to test. So learn your lesson and then repeat, which is why it is a CRO, feedback loop. Or how about this? Inform and repeat? Can this be applied across your site to different pages? For instance, is there certain terminology that doesn't seem to resonate with your users and certain terminology that does learn from one test and see if it applies sitewide. You may be pleasantly surprised at how much you can learn from the simple tests. Now an example of this would be personal pronouns. I was working on a website recently where we found using the word my in front of certain main titles and navigation elements spike the click-through rates. We ended up implementing these personal pronouns across the entire site because this seemed to resonate more with this target market. It's my account, it's my industry. Remember, if implementation is part of the optimization cycle, then the results will inform future changes and tests. And this is why CROs considered an ongoing never-ending cycle. As we've said many times, CROs should be iterative. Subsequent experimental plans we base on the outcomes of the previous experiment. Each improvement built upon the success of the previous ones. Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to you compete. Also, Azure conversion rate grows more opportunities present themselves. Because after each split tests, it's important to zoom out. And you look at the whole conversion funnel again to determine which part of the business you should focus on. Next, CRO creates this virtuous cycle that accelerate your business growth through smart and measuring, analyzing, strategizing, design, implementation, and learning. 87. Key CRO Takeaways: And that brings us to the conclusion of the CRO feedback loop. Now before we go, let's draw out some of the most important points and a few things to remember as you embark on your optimization journey. Number 1, you're never done testing. This is called a CRO, feedback loop for a reason. So as you cycle through each stage, you will gain more experience and learn more lessons about the motivation and behaviors of your target audience. Secondly, guesses in hunches are great starting places. But to create tests without knowing what the real problems are is like a plumber trying to uncover and pipes without knowing which pipes are blocked in the first place. I hope you've learned a stop guessing an operating from myths, but rather start investigating what exactly are the reasons why visitors are not converting. So you can start implementing the correct solution. And that goes for each of these points you see here, I have them up here because these are often common business and marketing practices for most organizations, unfortunately, so like data rules don't let opinions getting a way of facts, right? This, this falls under the reality that the most important persons opinion, hippo, is all that really matters. And this is still the way many organizations run their marketing campaigns. Or let's just post Dalian and hope for the best. That's that spray and pray philosophy we've talked about before. Which mind you is still extremely popular. Worse yet is spending money on advertising without a game plan for measuring success or even optimizing. And lastly, don't take anything for granted. Be willing to admit that you don't know everything and therefore everything, including the sacred cows in your organization are on the chopping block. If they simply don't measure up. There's a lot more to CRO then what we can quickly go through here. So as we wrap up this session, just remember to place your visitor at the center of your CRO plan. You need to know your customers and your visitors. Objections, their motivations, their personality, their communication style. So you know that your messaging is going to resonate with them. Their stage in the buying cycle. If they are ready to buy the note, speak to them as though they don't know your product yet. Their goals and expectations which they do have them. In other words, the more you know your customer, the more you are able to knowledgeably satisfy them. Conversion rate optimization CRO, needs to be an ongoing process in your organization because there are always things that can be improved upon across your business. Look for the opportunities to test everything. Follow this process. And you will make a big difference to your top priority and goal. 88. Session 4: Welcome to session four, where we will take a look at search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO. You may have heard of it. Seo is an infamous, yet very important marketing discipline, encompassing both the technical and creative elements of a user-centered website that does result in increased rankings, more organic traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. Now in this lesson, we will dive deep into the weeds of both the theoretical and practical elements of modern SEO while dispelling many of the modern myths and confronting some of the black hat techniques that unfortunately are still practiced today. As such, the homework lessons in this session are intense, but will we view well-equipped on your journey to SEO perfection? Now, having started my SEO career in the mid nineties, I look forward to uncovering the many layers of modern SEO that today's marketing leaders need to know. 89. End of Session #3: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass. 90. Introduction to SEO: We now come to session four of the modern marketing course for liters, and that is the topic of SEO or search engine optimization. Now SEO is a topic that has changed so dramatically over a short life span of just two decades that it's important to start this session with a question that many debate today. And that is, is SEO still relevant today? Well, I hesitate to use this example because it's not true SEO. But let's start with a simple story. I recently worked on a site where to begin, I only addressed the lowest-hanging technical, classical SEO factors, things like URL, page titles and identical page titles, Meta descriptions, header tags, duplicate content. A real quick fly over the site to address some obvious pain points, right? Not a lot of stuff, but just kinda these simple SEO elements. Well, within a few weeks, ranking on this site went from the bottom of the fifth page to the top of the first page. It was a massive jump in ranking. Now, obviously it wasn't a competitive keyword by any stretch. But we saw this again and again for the keywords at this site was targeting. Well, the question is why? Well, because Google was finally able to understand the intent of the page before, it was just a puzzle. It was a blur that there wasn't any clarity. I just simply went in and brought clarity to these pages. Now, is this the entirety of SEO? Absolutely not. We will spend much more time on this topic during this session. The point is this though, SEO is absolutely relevant and necessary if you want to drive traffic for your most important channel. And that's organic. Now, I will admit SEO has had a bad rap for a number of years now and obviously for good reason. One of the reasons SEO is one of the most misunderstood disciplines and marketing world is probably due to SEO having been around since the dawn of the search engines. Remember, once legitimate search engines came along to start indexing all of the myriad of webpages online. There had to be a way of ranking them. That is a way of prioritizing the most valuable pages. Now naturally this introduced a host of spam written techniques like cloaking, stuffing, bait and switch. And personally having built a ton of websites during the mid-1990s, I am embarrassed to say that a high two is very good at some of these techniques. Now, over time, these shady practices became known as Black Hat SEO. We learned our lesson and today thankfully, many of the original ranking metrics have either been replaced or improved upon in things called algorithm updates. But many still view SEO by its original metrics and black hat spammy tactics. Nevertheless, SEO has evolved over the years. Now, here is a silly illustration of the evolution of SEO, but it tries to sum up the early years in archaic methodology of SEO. Now, again, personally having built so many of these websites in the nineties, I had a front row seat into this evolution of SEO from just classic white hat SEO Meta tags, code, alt tags, keywords back linking, manual Indexes, link farms, bullet deport, all of those things, right? If you're around back then, and of course we won't even mention the black hat techniques. But now it's involved more modern SEO that includes factors like context, usability, mobile responsive design, one of a kind, content, authentic and earned, backlinks, user experience. This is modern SEO now. So don't just think Meta tags, which it absolutely is, but that's just a small part of what SEO is today. What you need to know is that modern SEO is becoming synonymous with a holistic, great user experience. On every level. That is, there's no longer a simple catchphrase like good unique content, please do not say, Could you need content that as kind of a vague, meaningless term. Rather, it takes into account every element of the user's experience and seeks to delight and inspire and inform better, much better than anyone or anything else. Now, despite the progress SEO is made over the years, one of the biggest challenges is still breaking through the historical knowledge, which as accurate as it is, it is now kind of a misunderstanding, but still breaking through the historical knowledge of SEO. Let me illustrate one of the major misnomers of SEO today with a story. Now, pretend you are an engineer, a smart engineer, and you have the title of speed engineer, right? So made-up title, but it sounds cool. Now let's say you work at the Tesla factory. No, you don't own a Tesla, you just work there, so don't don't get excited. This is just a story after all, No. One day a finished, completed Tesla rolls off the assembly line and your boss comes to you and says, they had been working on his car for the last five years and now it's mostly finished. There's just one thing left. They needed to go fast. So your boss says, Now it's your turn. I need you to make my finished product go fast. Now, this is your first response, something like these faces, right? Because fast isn't something you do to a finished car. It's a way of building every part of a car. Engineers building the engine need to be educated and thinking about speed. Or the design of the frame must be with the intention of speed. The exterior must be designed, tested, and redesigned in a wind tunnel and computer animation for speed, I'm way out of my home in here. I don't know anything about cars, but you get the idea right? Speed is not something you do to a car. A car either has speed because of the entire process or it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Well, SEO is similar. Seo is not something you do to a website. You either optimize every part of the user experience for both the user and search engine. Or you don't, please let me underscore this point. You don't just walk up to a pre-built website and do SEO as if you're switching a few buttons. There are some basic changes that can help with a little boost, as in my original example. But SEO is much more holistic than that because users are more holistic than that. Let me use another example. Remember this website from the CRO session. Now, let's say this is your websites. I'm sorry if it is, but it's a great example nonetheless. Well, one day you decide to optimize your images. How do you think your users will now feel about your site? Is your user satisfaction going to all of a sudden skyrocket because you optimize your image sizes. Does Google all of a sudden comprehend your site significantly better? Know because again, SEO is holistic, meaning everything needs to be touched. Imagery, content development, information architecture. What this means is SEO is every buddies job. No, we'll optimizing the images, help with potential ranking. It's possible. But the reality is it's still a holistic experience in if you want the real effect, then you have to be willing to dive in, jump in with both feet and attack every different element on this website. Now before we get too much further, let's define SEO. 91. Defining Modern SEO: Let's start this lesson by defining SEO. Seo is a marketing discipline encompassing both the technical and creative elements of a user-centered website that results in number 1, increased rankings to more organic traffic, and three, increased awareness and search engines. Now if you notice, I didn't say anything about keywords. If you were asking people how you rank for a keyword, Please stop. Not that it is horrible to do, but it's like going to Paris in one into C, a really cool green park bench. That's nice, but there are probably much better things to look at. First, the piece, SEO is not about keywords, it's about the people searching for them. Now, Michael King from IPL rink defines SEO as the intersection of these four elements. Intent, interests, demographic, and network. We must take all these factors into consideration. Notice the holistic element of these factors, but also notice something about these factors. They are all user-centered. Now if you remember the persona session we went through, then this should look familiar. Because remember Google's number one goal is to provide the best experience for its customers, not for robots. Now, bots are necessary to scan sites, but search engine algorithms are getting much smarter, taking into account far more ranking factors than ever before. Things like searcher intent. That is, when you type in Big Apple. Well, do you mean New York or do you mean enlarge apple? Well, based on your historic searches and potentially location, google is comprehending you as a person and delivering a tailored experience. Now, does this sound like Black Hat SEO from 20 years ago? Absolutely not, right? The world of the Internet is changing rapidly and it's our job to keep up if we want to be successful. Meaning these four factors should be taken into account when you are building every part of your website. It's also important to know what part SEO plays in your website traffic. Now as defined by Google, there are four primary types of site traffic. Direct traffic, referral traffic, social and organic traffic. Now, direct traffic is measured by visitors who visit your site without any online source directing them to it. For example, if the user types in your URL directly or clicks on one of their bookmarks in the browser. It's considered a direct visit. Now, direct visits generally come from one of a few types of customers. They could be people who've heard about your brand offline. Current customers who login through the homepage, repeat visitors who wanted to come back or even your internal staff clicking around on your site. So be careful measuring success based on site traffic because direct traffic can be quite misleading. Number two is referral traffic. Referral traffic includes any visits that came from outside sources. If links to your site are available on external websites or partnership websites, well, users can follow those links to find your site. Now link building a topic we will look at in detail later on is valuable for this. As you can imagine, not all referral traffic is ranked the same. If you get a link from a valuable website or a.gov or.edu, then you're going to garner more authority or what's called link juice. Then if your friends blog or your mom's blog link to your site. Thirdly is social traffic. Now socio traffic can refer to any inbound users from social media sites. So the more active you are on social media and the more attractive your links are. Well, the more visitors you're liable to get. For instance, think about providing value to users rather than advertising your product and brand only. Now over time as you build a following, I have seen this numbers skyrocket. Now. Last but certainly not least is organic traffic, or as many people call it, SEO. Organic traffic refers to in-bound visitors who found your site through search engine results, not the paid portion of search engines. Now any traffic from being Google and other search sites is counted in this data. This traffic is extremely valuable as we're going to go through later. Because it can mean that searchers found you as a result of their search for their query. Meaning, you were served up as these solution to their question or problem by the authoritative search engines like Google or Yahoo or Bing. However, branded searches also count towards this total, meaning if your site is new, this figure will undoubtedly be low. But you can increase this number by optimizing your site, producing regular content, establishing relationships with outside authorities, getting active on social media. Many things that we're actually going to look at in this session will help boost your rank. As just a quick side note, it does take time to develop the domain authority necessary to earn this type of traffic, organic traffic. But this will likely be your most lucrative source in the long run. Let me illustrate with a chart by Marketing Sherpa. Now, this chart shows the value of traffic from different channels based on the revenue earned. Now two channels should stick out to you. Organic and e-mail. E-mail is often underutilized among the small organizations with many who simply do not use any email marketing and others run minimal or sporadic campaigns through new Mail Chimp with really bad email layout. We're going to talk more about this in session six because it is so important. Email has its benefits, but it is a very limited and often over taxed audience. Now what I want you to notice is that organic traffic outperforms, PPC, display ads, referrals, affiliate marketing, and so on. I point this out because a lot of money can be spent on these other channels for less valuable and less effective traffic. But also notice they are all useful in their own right. Okay, SEO is part of the larger marketing game plan. We have to catch that. Now, I would argue it is one of the most valuable channels, but it is still one of the many pieces in play for a successful organization. Now because this topic of SEO is so varied and can be quite confusing. In the next lesson, we will identify the five primary keys of SEO. 92. The 5 Primary Keys of SEO: If you've heard of the SEO before, you will have heard of something called ranking factors. Currently there are hundreds of ranking signals that makes it into Google's algorithm, meaning SEO can be quite complicated. For instance, let me, let me just use an example of everyday life. Let's say one day you decided to pick up running. And a friend of yours said, Yeah, Hey, that's a great idea, but did you know there are hundreds of things you have to learn in order to run successfully. Otherwise you do, you'll constantly hurt yourself. Now if you heard that pep talk, how eager would you be to learn running? Right? So to an SEO, I often hear SEO as this really complicated discipline that only true experts can master. Thus, obviously putting it out of reach of the normal lay person. Well, I'm here to let you know that doesn't have to be the case. Yes, SEO can be complicated. However, most of the hundreds of ranking factors can be simplified into these five primary keys that any organization can digest and implement. First off is technical or classical SEO. Right now, Google must understand your site. And again, I'm going to constantly saying Google, even though I'm referring to all search engines is just over the years, most of my traffic is coming from Google. So search engines must understand what your site is trying to say or to sell or to portray. So there is a part of your website that you have to format in order for bot, search engine bot machines to be able to understand. Secondly, our keywords or phrases, right? People are searching for something. The question is, do you know what they are searching for? Do you know which phrases will lead to the most dollars? This is an important part of SEO, may not be what you think from 15 years ago, but it is still an important part. Number 3 is content. The purpose of content is to satisfy this searchers intent while establishing new as an authoritative, trustworthy expert in your given industry. Number four is user experience or UX. Ux ensures that users have a predictable, understandable, and pleasurable experience on your website. Remember, design and UX are strong trust signals. Without trust, consumers simply don't spend, they bounce. And that will affect your ranking. Number five links or backlinks. Now, this is the dreaded backbone of the original ranking algorithm. Don't challenge a search engine has when ranking right is trying to figure out which websites should rank higher. What search engines figured out early on is that links are like votes. The more links you have from a high-quality source. Well, the more popular you are and the higher you should be ranked, plus the more high-quality sources you have, the better. But it is a way for your content also to be amplified. Hence, building brand awareness. Authentic links can be difficult to earn. And I know so many people dread the word building black backlinks. But they are extremely important for ranking and can be valuable as a great source of quality traffic. So we're definitely going to dive into that a lot more and hopefully dispel some of those fears and myths. Now, good and effective SEO takes into account each of these five primary keys. However, before we get into the details, like most marketing disciplines, Let's start with some common sense. Good SEO starts with some basic fundamental questions, as you can see here. Let's just quickly go through these because what it does is it helps us think about SEO correctly. For instance, what questions and concerns do your target market have, right? We have to be consumer centric. They're the ones searching. We need to be the ones providing the solution. And therefore, number 2, what innovative, unique research can we perform that answers that question before they ask, or what format can we display that answer in? That is easily yet properly digestible. How about your website? Is your code well-written? Is the site digestible by search engines? Or how about the UX? Does this site provide a high quality user experience? Does the content even satisfied the user's wants and needs while answering pain points? People even like the content, can you answer that? Or they linking to that? Are they sharing it? And by the way, you should also be asking multiple people who can give an objective opinion to some of these questions. Now you can obviously garner some of it through quantitative metrics like balanced rates, exit rates, time on page, but also reaching out through surveys or people, you know, customers or prospects or family members, they generally give a really good direct answer, sometimes a little too direct. Now, here's how you have to start thinking about your site. When visitors type a keyword or phrase or query into a search engine and land on your site. Will they be satisfied with what they find on every level? Not just the content, but everything. Does the title makes sense? Dizzy images? Do they resonate with the user? How about the formatting? Is the font-size good? How about the colors of your website? Right? All of this plays into the holistic user experience. But plus remember, this is the main question that search engines tried to answer billions of times each day. Remember the search engines primary responsibility is to serve irrelevant results to their users that satisfy the users. So as you can see, ask yourself what your target customers are looking for on every level and make sure your site delivers it to them. Remember, we're happy visitors is a huge step in the right direction. What you want to be careful of, though, is assuming how to optimize your site based on a random so-called expert blog post or a conversation with a co-worker. As I have seen way too many times, SEO myths are still very much prevalent in all levels of an organization today. In fact, let's take a few minutes and look at a few of these myths in order to equip you better in the next lesson. 93. Common SEO Myths and Misconceptions: Now I want to take a few minutes and address some of the SCO myths and misconceptions that do exist across our industry today. Now some of those myths you can see right here on your screen. Now the greatest SEO myth of all time is we need more content, right? In order to rank, we just need a lot more content. But the result is that you end up becoming a content mil, or you pay for content, or you turn out low-quality content. What's worse is a leader who has heard enough about SEO that their version of perfect SEO is unique, rich, and valuable content. What does that even mean? Right? Like esoteric vomit that makes the speaker sound really smart, but avoids any ownership or dedication and pursuing what the user really wants or needs. Now, we're going to talk about content in much greater detail when we discuss developing a proper content strategy. In Session 5, how would this one search engine submission? Now in classical SEO times, late 90s, search engines had submission forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters. Yes, we were called the web masters. But if you're really cool, you are called a web servant. Lame, I get it. Webmasters inside owners though, we would what we would tag our sites and pages with keyword information, all sorts of Black Hat ways. And then we would submit them to the search engines through a form. Well soon after the submission, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Write simple SEO. Now, I point out search engine submission because you can still sometimes find submission pages and even agencies, online consultants, freelancers, whoever who promised they will submit you to multiple indexes and search engines. But these are all remnants of the past and are unnecessary in the practice of modern SEO. So if you hear a pitch from an SEO or agency offering search engine submission services, run, don't walk to a real SEO. Even if the engines use the submission service to crawl your site, you'd be unlikely to earn enough link juice to be included in their indexes or rank competitively for search queries. Plus, I mean, with Google's doing right now and being and others, they crawl your site so quick you don't have to be submitting regularly. Even Google Search Console allows you to submit your pages. I haven't personally found any real benefit from that either. Number 3 is made a tags. Now, once upon a time, Meta tags in particular, he made a keywords tag. We're an important part of the SEO process. You would include the keywords you wanted your site to rank for and, and when users typed in those terms, your page could come up in a query. Now this process was quickly spammed to death, including by yours truly, and thankfully was eventually dropped by all the majors engines as an important ranking signal. In fact, some experts point out that if you have a native keyword tag, it can actually hurt your site rankings since it is nearly a clear signal that you are a spammer. Now, other tags, in particular the title tag and made a description tag, are crucial for quality SEO because these show up in the search engine ranking and we're going to talk about these in just a little bit. Additionally, the meta robots tag ins important tool for controlling crawler axis. So while understanding the functions of certain Meta tags is very important, they are no longer the central focus of SEO number for keyword stuffing. Now, a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the concept that keyword density, that is the number of words on a page divided by the number of instances of a given keyword is used by search engines for relevancy and ranking calculations. Now, despite being disproved time and time again in our industry, this myth still has legs for some reason. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density isn't important metric. It's not ignore it. And use keywords intelligently and with usability in mind, right? You are writing for human beings who are going to eventually read your content. So making good, Go, make it spammy. The value from an extra 10 instances of your keyword on the page is far less than earning one good editorial link from a source that doesn't think you're a search spammer. So avoid keyword stuffing. And that brings us to number 5, which surprisingly is still a common SEO conspiracy theory. And that is spending on search engine advertising, pay-per-click or PVC, improves your organic SEO rankings. Now, no reputable agency that I know of has ever seen evidence that paid advertising positively affects organic search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo have all erected walls in their organizations specifically to prevent this type of crossover. In fact, I'm in Google, it's even in a separate building for this very reason. I, I assume it's for that reason or other reasons. Then of course there are the many Black Hat SEO techniques at just have to be avoided. Things like keyword stuffing, manipulating valine gain, cloaking are tiny text, hidden text, hidden links, or have a low value pages. Things like doorway pages are Gateway pages or duplicate content or a mirror site. Oh my goodness. The number of times I've heard, just create a mirror sites I can duplicate, but all we're going to get twice as many links and clicks. No, you're not. Or a spam blog, otherwise known as blogs or many more of these black hat techniques. Now, why do I put this in here? Because believe it or not, on a regular basis, I still hear about some newbie SCO who ran across an old SEO book like SEO for dummies or a blog post. And now evidently knows all there is to know about SEO. And to boot men, they're super stealthy. The advice comes across sounding really good, like hey, if we do some manipulatives linking or low-value pages, but they don't say low-value pages. That they do say things like a content farm or we outsource content and create tons of content. Well, we're going to we're going to rank number one. Well, no, you're not, right? There's a saying in the SEO world, build for users, not for search engines. And if you're trying to hack and spam and manipulate, you're going to be found out by today's smarter search engines. Search engines have to interpret absolutely, but the user is the ultimate consumer. And search engines are taking a closer look at what the user thinks of your content. 94. Why is SEO Important?: So here's generally what's happening in search. You have a product that people want to buy. Number two, there are competitors with a similar product. So your primary objective is to get the right people to buy your product. No point in bringing in all the wrong people, right? Number four, when people search for your solution, you want to be number one. And when they visit you, you must satisfy them with an expert, authoritative, and trust with the product. Be it content, a service, or a tangible product. One of the reasons SEO is still an incredibly important part of your marketing effort is because of the competition. Now it is important to remember that SEO is the long game. But even still, as you can see from this chart, being number one really matters. Now this chart from slingshot shows the organic click-through rate for Google and being, for instance, on average. Now keep in mind that's the operative words and you'll see lots of variations to this chart online. But on average, the first position in Google's organic search result gets about 18.2%. But look at number three, that only gets 7 to 2%, right? This chart reads like the money one at a golf tournament, and we all know how much we envy the winner with that big check. Not only is it big, but the prize money drops off fairly quickly after that. So to an SEO, we don't want to be left behind. As an example, people are often stoked when they get on the first page, right? Let's say you're in position number 7, and that's great. And everyone in your office celebrates. Well, you're only getting 1 tenth of the clips as the person in first position on average. Now, hopefully, this underscores to you that ranking really does matter. On top of that, take a look at the stats. Google gets over 100 billion searches a month. Now, notice this is 2015 when they actually reported that. In other words, there are a lot of people looking for a lot of solutions. Do you want 18 percent click-through rate or only 1%? Plus search traffic is among the highest percentage of all referral traffic on the web. So whereas social traffic sends approximately five to 6% of all the web's referral traffic. Search engine send about 28 or 29 percent of all the web's referring traffic. Now, this is data according to similar web was a large clickstream panel. Then they look at plus, organic search is more than 90 percent of all the clicks that come through search results. So 90 percent of the clicks are going to the organic search results. 10% are actually less than 10 percent are going to the paid results. Companies around the world are spending 4050, $60 billion a year or more on Google's paid search results alone. This SEO stuff we're talking about, is it competitive advantage because it means lower cost of customer acquisition. It tends to mean higher retention rates and higher conversion rates. And frankly, it is usually very attractive traffic because of this last item I have appear. And that is, searches are a specific request from the user that says, I want this thing and I want it right now. That's some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web. And as a result, the startups and organizations that get their product or their service, their company, their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsize impact. But in order to rank highly, you need a strategy. And so that brings us to the crux of this session on SEO, which we will see in the next lesson, developing your SEO plan. 95. The SEO Plan: As we have seen, SEO can be confusing. So that's why we always start with a plan. Seo is really an iterative process, meaning it's never complete, it's never done, it's never finished. And it's an iterative process of these three primary steps that you see here. Now, wait, you may say I thought you said there are five primary keys. Well, there are. But I wanted to make it even simpler and wrap them up into these three primary parts of the SEO plan. First step is technical. That is, there is absolutely still today a technical foundation upon which all content is served. If you mess up the technical, that content can be very difficult for a search engine to interpret and understand. Secondly is content. Now this is where we wrapping keywords and content and UX, three of the primary keys. Now, content is what people are searching for, how you are providing answers, and then asking the question, well, does it look good? Thirdly, is links. Now, links, as I mentioned before, still very much an important part of SEO today with one big difference. Rather than purchasing links, like we may have done many, many years ago. Now we earn links. In the remaining lessons, we're going to take a look at each one of these three primary keys. First off, technical than content, and then links. 96. PART 1: TECHNICAL SEO: We now come to the first step in our SEO plan and that is addressing the technical aspects of your website. Now with the constant technical revolution that we appear to be in, it is no wonder that in today's day and age, we hear this common question. Can't Google? Just figure this all out? Well, the answer's no. Google absolutely cannot figure out jumbled at messy code. Ever tried to use Google Search Console Markup Tool? Well, if you ever have, then you begin to realize that Google still has a long ways to go and understanding the concept and topic of a pages. Even though google has come along way, we are still capable of helping Google's serve up the right content to the right users by conforming to some standard of uniformity technically. Now, if we ignore technical SEO and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in SEO. While Google will not just figured out that has never happened to anyone who has made SEO a true competitive advantage in their startup or, or in their companies marketing channels. As just not how search engines in SEO works. Rather, it's through a thorough understanding of the needs and requirements the search engine set Ford that accompanies able to succeed organically. Let's take a look at some primary technical elements that need to be addressed on your website. Now these are just some of the elements of technical SEO. Now, obviously, coding is very important when it comes to SEO, but that is not the purpose of this class. Again, and this is a marketing class for leaders. You need to understand why rather than just the how. Now I simply want to show you what is important. So you are better armed to ask the right questions as a leader and keep your team or agency accountable. This should also underscore the importance of having the right agency or freelancer, or a contractor or a consultant develop and design your website. Now, can I say this really quickly? Generally speaking, not always the case, but generally speaking, if you hire an agency, then you will get agency kind of work. There is rarely a strong sense of ownership when it comes to an agency working on your site, right? Because you pay them by the hour or by the month or by the project. Once the project is done well, they move on to another one. If not at the same time working on for 56 on their websites, there's right, There's not a lot of sense of ownership. And you can tell this is true because when the project is complete, the updates and fixes seemed endless, right along with the inability to do a sitewide update very easily. And reality more often than not in my experience, when I've used just in generic agency. At the end, I am left with more problems that I had at the beginning and I end up spending countless dollars. So here's the point and why I bring this up. When you find an employee or agency, make sure that they have a fundamental understanding. At least of these most important SEO factors. For instance, do they know why and when a title or metatag are important, or how to write and test the perfect title tag. How about header tags? This is like SEO 101. You should have one and only one H1 tag on your page, not 0 and not 10. And I see this old. In fact, I ran into this again yesterday. And you would think that I just wouldn't see this anymore. How about crawl errors? Now this is a big one. You need to be able to find and fix your website errors regularly. Now there are some important crawling factors like the robots TXT file canonical tags null follows and having proper redirects. But I install amazed at how many sites launch with the entire site being blocked from the search engines because of a bad robots.txt file, or simply because the site was blocked lockdown during development stage. Or how about this? The amount of duplicate content because of inadequate canonical tags or 301 redirects. Again, this is, this is elementary SEO stuff, but you'd be surprised at how many agencies simply neglect this. Now you should be able to find a person or agency who can speak knowledgeably to each one of the topics concerning technical SEO. As you see here. However, there are many more factors than obviously just this list. In fact, here's the most recent list ranking factors. Now if you've been around SEO for any length of time, then this table has probably come up. This is the periodic table of SEO factors at Search Engine Land, just recently updated. Now I've attached a link to a search engine lands periodic table in the homework section so you can print it off, study it, and learn it. It's a great tool again, it's, it's super high level, right? Isn't super in-depth, but it is a good understanding of on-page versus off-page SEO, the different categories, what's important and what's not so important. Now, this, as you can understand, this isn't the Bible for SEO by any means. But again, it is a helpful resource. Now as a quick side note, you can see that the ranking factors are separated into on-page and off-page SEO, as I just mentioned, underscoring the fact that both signals are still important for rankings today. Now, one of the things I like about this recent update is that there's this little plus and minus sign on the top right of each factor. Meaning this table ranks elements that are becoming more or less important, right? Because the Internet is constantly evolving as counseling growing, it's constantly in flux, meaning things change. And there are trends. Trends invoke this idea of movement, which is becoming more popular, which is becoming less important. For instance, some factors with weight increases include things like mobile, right? Google continues to push for content to be mobile friendly. Now this should be no surprise given that more than 50 percent of Google searches are done on mobile devices. We've already gone over this. Also. As you may know, Google uses a mobile first index, even for desktop users, mobile is important. How about speed? Do you notice that one, the little AS symbol there, Google has continued to emphasize the importance of speeds ranking factor, including wildly implementing the AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages format that it, that it backs and didn't even exist in 2015. And yet Google is showing how important of a factor it has become. How about direct answers? Both Google and Bing are increasingly showing direct cancers that are cold from like webpages above regular listings, something Google calls featured snippets. Now we'll look at this during the content strategy session later on. That is, you are able though, to format your content in such a way as to anticipate users questions so you can take advantage of direct answers. Now what I also want you to note though, our factors with weight decreases, things like site and personal search history. Now this is crazy too SEO today because it seems so important just a little short time ago. For instance, Google seems to have downplayed in public statements or a lack of them. The importance of a site, age, or history versus yours past, or also someone's personal search history seems to have decrease in importance recently. Again, this is astounding because of how much importance Google and SEO experts have placed on it in the past. Well, there's also a couple that I think are important to note and not as factors that were dropped. First off, his identity. Do you remember Google authorship? Google office, she was the primary way identity seemed to have made an impact. Now it's no longer supported. This was huge when it came out and then it just disappear. Remember the little face next to blogs and those type of things? Yeah, gone. Well, what about social? Now Google Plus was the primary way Google was using personal social sharing to influence someone's search results. Google Plus might continue in name, but its impact on Google search results seem all but gone. Along with the users and brands that were active on the service. Not to say that there is no benefit from using Google Plus, but the effect it has on your rankings seem to be gone. There are plenty more ranking factors that you can look through here just for sake of you being able to wrap your head around SEO. And I think there's a lot of benefit to that. Now it's important to note many of these factors are outside of classic technical SEO, but it is still important from a technical standpoint to see how the ranking factors measure up. Now since we have talked so much about meta tags, Let's start there. Because marketing and business leaders still need to know the role of Meta tags in their business. 97. PART 1: TECHNICAL SEO: If you've been around computers or websites or SEO or anyone technical concerning Internet-related stuff over the last couple of decades, then you will hear the word Meta tags dropped. Now it's not some mythical technical code creature. It is simply a way for search engines to read your website or parts of your page. Now here's a quick reference list for you concerning which Meta tags are important. Which ones don't really have an effect on your site and which ones should be avoided. Now rather than obviously going through each one individually, that would take forever and that's not the purpose of this course. I want to walk you through some of the important tags and why they are not just important, but imperative. You get them right. 98. Meta Tags: If you've been around computers or websites or SEO or A1, technical concerning Internet-related stuff over the last couple of decades, then you will hear the word Meta tags dropped. Now it's not some mythical technical code creature. It is simply a way for search engines to read your website or parts of your page. Now here's a quick reference list for you concerning which Meta tags are important. Which ones don't really have an effect on your site and which ones should be avoided. Now rather than obviously going through each one individually, that would take forever and that's not the purpose. Of course. I want to walk you through some of the important tags and why they are not just important, but imperative. You get them right. Now let's use this example search engine results page, or what's known as a syrup. Let's say you are searching for Nike golf clubs. You like. Most people start by scanning the titles of the pages, right? Then you maybe look at the description and then the URLs. If it is in bold because it matches your search query. That is, there are only for the most part, three elements visible sometimes, for sometimes a few more. But let's just, let's just say there's three for the sake of this discussion, title and description, and URL. As I mentioned before though, certain results like site links do show up. Then of course there are multiple different formats, right? There's AdWords, shopping, result, knowledge card. There's a news boxes, sometimes pops up, featured snippet, image pack on and on. There's a bunch of these different formats that can pop up. Now for our discussion. Now, again, let's just say there are three. I want you to note that two out of the three elements displayed on a search engine is an HTML tag, that is the title and Meta description. Although they have, maybe I've lost their power compared to other ranking signals, Meta tags are still an important factor on search engines and rankings. Now a couple of things I want you to catch. First off, there is a lot of competition for certain search terms. And you only have a few words to really capture their attention. Why would they click you more than the competition? What is your offer that addresses their specific pain planet and why is it better than the other options out there? And remember, people are generally just looking at the first few results anyways. Now as we begin this discussion on Meta tags, it is important to remember that your title description tags should match. It will be coupled with the actual offer on the page. That is, make sure you are not deceiving searchers through some clickbait title, or description or URL. Otherwise, you'll fall prey to this decreased rankings due to pogo sticking. On what is pogo sticking? Well, as this graphic shows you pose sticking is the user behavior clicking on inorganically ink, stain for a brief time, then bouncing back to the search engine and clicking on another link. Well, why is this important? Because Google is measuring user satisfaction. If the user goes through several organic results and then is satisfied or stays with the fifth result. Walton, Google knows the first few science did not meet the user's needs. Like the last slide did. This is a tricky part of the user experience at Google appears to be wrapping into their ranking algorithm. Remember, Google doesn't measure interactions on your actual website. It measures interactions on the search engine itself. And therefore, it has to measure how users interact with your site, by how long they stay on your site before they bounce back. How many different cliques they go through, how many different pages they visit. Now, as you can imagine, one or two visits is not going to yield a lot of great data. But Google is measuring billions and billions of visits, not just obviously to your website, but across all keywords. And over time, Google's start to figure out, oh, this site is more popular because people are clicking through the first two or three results, but they're really satisfied here because they stay here are two minutes or they never bounced back. Now the goal for you is to understand your searchers intent. Then provide the right cues that gets him to click and then deliver the correct content that is satisfied, if not extraordinary, right? Because your goal is to keep users on your site. But you only want to keep the right users on your site. So make sure that you don't over-promise or you don't manipulate. But you tell people through made a tags exactly what they can expect to find on your site and then man delight them, give them above and beyond what they would expect. Now pogo sticking, generally speaking, is the opposite of that. The opposite of happy customers is people who come to your website. They're kinda disappointed. They don't really like what they find. It didn't answer that question and then they jump back. Now, over the next few videos, we're going to take a look at four very important technical aspects and elements of SEO. Most people and orgs are able to control and fix. So what we're going to do over the next few videos is take a look at the major made a tags and why they're important. And you as a leader, understanding how to format them and why you format then in certain ways. And the benefit of each. 99. Meta Tag: Title: The first Meta tag, we're going to look at our title tags. Now the title tags is the title element of a page. You can see it there with a little brackets on either side. Now it's meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page's content. As we've just looked at. It is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. Ux, in the form of persuading users to click on your search listing, right? It has to stand out. It has to be exciting to some degree in really match the searchers intent. But SEO in the fact that this tag is used by search engines to identify the content of your page. Hence, it's a ranking factor. Now it's titled tags are such an important part of search engine optimization. Let's look at a few best practices and critical steps when creating your title tag that makes for good low-hanging SEO and usability fruit. Now the first two elements here should be obvious. Just make sure you have all of your title tags in place at each page has a title, and make sure that they are not duplicated across your site. That is simply not helpful to the search engines or your users. In other words, if you just have your brand title as the title on every page, fix it. If it's an about page, let people know what's an About page. If it's a blog page, then put the title or potentially a more concise title on that page. Thirdly, be mindful of length. Titles with less than 30 characters, especially for sub pages on your website and generally not that helpful. However, search engines also display only the first 65 to 75 characters and realities about 512 pixels of a title tag in the search results. After that, the search engine show an ellipsis, right? The three little dots to indicate titled, title tag has been cut off. So try to keep it under 65 characters. This is also the general limit allowed by most social media sites. So sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you're targeting multiple keywords or an especially long keyword phrase, and having them in the title tag is essential to raking. It may be advisable to go longer. Fourthly, place important keywords close to the front. Now UX experts continually point out that most users only read the first and last three letters of a title or three words and last three words of a paragraph. And in reality we don't really read them, we just kinda scan through them. In other words, website users don't read, right? When you look at this list of Nike Golf Club results, you don't need you skim the text. Therefore, the closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful there'll be four ranking. And the more likely user will be actually able to read and click on your result. Number 5 include branding. Now my strong belief is that every title tag should end with a bar and then your brand name, as this habit helps to increase brand awareness and create a higher click-through rate for people who like or familiar with your brand. Very rarely does it make sense to place your brand at the beginning of the title tag such as your homepage. I would advise it there. Now since words the beginning of the title tag carry more weight, being mindful of what you're trying to rank for. And again, looking at these search results on your screen, you will actually see that over and over. I typed in Nike, Nike golf clubs. So look what I get. The result number 2, result number three, and then it starts to break up a little bit into other results. Number six, it's got to be relevant to the content. We've just looked at this, but make sure the title matches the content that is delivered or your ranking will suffer from pogo sticking in. Google's algorithm, number seven is really just a word to the wise. Avoid using words that infringe on trademarks unless you're really confident with your legal team that you can. Because otherwise it could get you into trouble or just give you a headache. So make sure that you really pay attention to that if you have a competitor that you're trying to outdo, it might not be best to say, Hey, we're better than so and so or whatever. Number 8, consider readability and emotional impact, right? Title tags should be descriptive and readable. That title tag is a new visitors first interaction with your brand. And therefore she convey the most positive impression possible. And creating a compelling title tag will help grab attention on the search results page and attract more visitors to your site. This underscores that SEO is about not only optimization and strategic keyword use, right? It's the entire user experience from the very first step all the way through to the last step. Which leads us to this all important titled tag question. How do you test the best title tag? Do you implement one and wait for a month, gathered the metrics and then switch to another title on your page and then gather more metrics. The sounds tedious and it is tedious. Testing title tags organically can be very slow to test. There is, though thankfully, a much faster way. So as a pro tip, my suggestion to you is to use Google AdWords or really any ad platform to AB test content and see how to increase click-through rates. Now the benefit is that paid ads offers immediate results. It does cost you money. That's the downside. But you can see which add title will result in the highest click-through rate in a fraction of the time that organic takes to measure the effectiveness of your title. 100. Meta Tag: Description: The Meta description tag exists as a short description of a page's content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tags for ranking, but Meta descriptions are the primary source before this snippet of text displayed beneath a listing on the syrup. Now, unlike the title tag, the meta description tag is not a ranking factor and has not been so since 2009, probably because it was way too much opportunity to spam users. The Meta description tag, does those serve the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the result, right? It's an extremely important part of search marketing. So craft a readable, compelling description using important keywords. Notice how Google bolts of search keywords in this description. Because this can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page. Now mid and descriptions can be any length, but search engine generally will cut snippets longer than a 160 characters. So it's generally wise to stay within these limits. Now, in the absence of meta-description, search engines will create this search snippet from other elements of the page. Now for pages at target multiple keywords and topics, this is a perfectly valid tactic. So when writing your Meta description makes sure that you include keywords. Often search engines will highlight in bold, where it finds a searchers query in your snippet. Makes sure that your Meta descriptions are readable, they're unique and interesting. This is essential. Don't be boring with your copy. This is your one opportunity to woo a new visitor. This is your first interaction. So write your description as if a real human wrote it and we'll be reading it. Avoid also the tendency to keyword stuff and ramble on with the useless business jargon. Remember, website visitors, skim content they don't read, so wow them with something engaging or interesting, at least make it interesting. As I mentioned, less than a 160 characters. Now all those numbers fluctuated. Anything really longer than that will probably be cut off. Remember this is for your webpage. Ads don't have to be long. In fact, some of the most compelling ads are short into the point. As an illustration, how many Google search results do you read the full description, right? I didn't think so. Most most results you just skim over what are the first three words. Be sure to avoid duplicates. The meta-description is provide value for the user who's reading it. For instance, what if every search result for a Nike products did something like this? Nike makes the best products for true athletes. Really. Not only is that ridiculous, but having a generic description will decrease the click-through rate because it decreases the value you provide for users. And also like the title tag, make sure the Meta description is irrelevant to the content. In other words, this is something called coupling. Whatever your title, tags and Meta descriptions say the actual page has to resonate with that. It has to deliver on the promise. Otherwise, you will find that people will bounce. Now if you have great unique content on your actual webpage, try having no made a description. As you can see in this Google search console screen, There's an aerospace for missing title tags, but not for missing meta description tags. This is something that I am careful to suggest that very often because I do believe in taking the time to write a short sentence, especially when your pages targeting only a few key search terms. But it may work in the case of other pages like a blog or download or articles. Now the reason for the suggestion is simple. When search engines generate their own made a description from your website, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases a user has searched for. If you write emitted scription in code, the texts you choose to write can actually detract from the relevance of the engines making naturally depending on the query. And as a side note, in some cases, search engines may actually overrule your meta-description to generate their own. It's hard to say when this actually happens, but it may be worth removing Meta descriptions for a little test on click-through rate. No matter what, just make sure you don't neglect Meta descriptions, login to Google Search Console or whatever tool you choose to use and make sure everything looks okay that you don't have duplicate meta description, that they're not super long or obtuse or boring. Really, that's kind of my main advice here. Just make sure they're not boring, just make sure they're engaging. That people would be interested in reading what you have on your website. Think of the Meta description is again like an ad. This is your opportunity to woo and to wow new visitors. So spend some time doing it. It can pay off in great dividends. 101. URL Construction: Now we come to URL construction, as we have already gone over, there are three primary elements to a result in a search engine results page or a syrup. There's the title, there's the description and the URL. The URL is important as it displays to the user the page that they will actually end up on. Now, research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click. Keep in mind accessibility and readability becoming more and more important as the internet grows over. How ever readability can be a subjective topics. So let's use this illustration. Which URL on the screen right now on the left part of your screen is more engaging to you. The first one or the second one is readable, the other is not. Which one would you click on? For me, I can trust the first URL, but I have no idea where I'm going to go or where I'm going to land with the second URL. The requirement isn't that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean, imperfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and hopefully compelling to those seeking its content. So let's look at some best practices to help you understand what to look for in a good URL. Let me start though by reminding us to keep the user in mind. What are they searching for? What keywords are they using? Can they understand the URL? What is their intent? So as we go through this list, keep that in mind. So number 1, obviously employ empathy. Place yourself in the mind of the user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you would expect to find on the page while your URL is appropriately descriptive, you don't need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point. Keyword use is important, but overuse is dangerous, right? If your pages targeting a specific term or phrase makes sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff and multiple keywords for SEO purposes because overuse will result in less usable URLs in trips on spam filters. Match URLs to titles at least most of the time. If the title of your page has to be 20 or more words than it would be best to shorten the URL to something just as valuable and meaningful. I do strongly recommend keeping all three elements, URL, page title and visible headline on the page as close a match as possible. The URL and page title creates an expectation on the search engine result page and the visible headline delivers on it. It can be quite confusing. I click on a link that says Nike golf clubs and land on a blog page about the top ten golf, golf clubs. That's a little spammy, that's a little manipulative. So make sure that they all match as closely as possible. Try going static, right? The best URLs are human, readable and without lots of parameters, numbers, and symbols. Using technology like modern rewrite for Apache or ice API rewrite from Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs with lots of parameters into a more readable static version like the top few results on this page. If you're using any sort of CMS like WordPress, it's done for you automatically so you don't have to worry about that. Even single dynamic parameters in Europe can result in lower overall ranking and indexing. So just pay attention to that if you're looking through your site, how do your URLs look? They read like normal human language. Use hyphen to separate words. Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscores or plus signs are spaces which is like a little percent 20. So instead, use a hyphen character to separate words in a URL. You'll see this all the time. In fact, you'll see this in the Nike golf clubs listing here on this page. This also goes for capitalisation. If you're using Microsoft IIS servers, you should be fine. But if you're hosing with Linux or Unix, which are case sensitive than you can get into trouble. So my suggestion to you is just go all lowercase, don't do camel casing or get really fancy with different capitalisation in your URL, just go all lowercase also. And lastly here on this list, shorter is better. Now while I descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste. And emails, blog post tests, text messages, and will be fully visible in the search results. Plus it's also readable, right? Shorter URLs are generally speaking, preferable. Now you don't have to take this to an extreme. And if your URL is already less than like 50 to 60 characters, don't worry about it. But if you have URLs pushing a 100 plus characters, which I still see all the time. There's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. Now again, as a leader in your organization, what you wanna do is just have a cursory overview of your URLs. Paste out your URLs. You can get tools like Screaming Frog that will list out all the URLs of your website. What you'll wanna do is just scan through them. Can you read each of them? There may be opportunities here for you to shorten some URLs are mixed, some other URLs, more descriptive. 102. Duplicate Content: The last technical element that I want to go over is duplicate content. Now the engines are picky about duplicate versions of a single piece of material for obvious reasons, right? To provide the best search or experience that they will rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and instead choose which version is most likely to be the original. The end result is all of your duplicate content could rank lower than it should. Now if you have two URLs that are very similar content will consider canonical Ising them. Canonical quantization happens when two or more duplicate versions of webpage appear on different URLs. This is very common with modern CMS like WordPress for example, you might offer a regular version of a page and then a print optimized version. Well, canonical orientation is the practice of organizing and content in such a way that every unique piece has one and only one URL. Duplicate content can even PER multiple websites. Now, for search engines, this presents a big problem. Which version of this content should they show to searches? Which one was their first? Alright, duplicate content is one of the most vexing and troublesome problems any web second face. Over the past few years, search engines have cracked down on pages within or duplicate content by assigning them lower rankings. Instead, if you have duplicate content, you can take your duplicate pages and 301 redirect them. Then the search engines would have only one strong page to show in the listings from that site. But the point is this and why we're discussing this. When multiple pages with the potential to rank well are combined into a single page, then not only will they stop competing with each other, but you'll also create a stronger relevancy and popularity signal. Overall, this will positively impact your ability to rank well in search engines. So 10, 20 years ago, one has really popular to make multiple mirror sites or multiple pages based upon each nuance of a keyword. Gone are those days make one page and make that page stellar. And as I mentioned, this is where the canonical tag in the header of your webpage can become very handy. You place the canonical tag within the page that contains duplicate content with the target of the canonical tag pointing to the Master URL that you want to rank for, right? From an SEO perspective, that canonical URL tag attribute is similar to a 301 redirect. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as 1301 does, but without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL. This has the added bonus of saving your development is to have considerable heartache. The point is, is if over time you've developed multiple pages, or as in the example here, you have pages for different reasons, such as it's on a partner site, or you have a print version of the page, or there's a different copied version of the page just through some sort of CMS snafu. Well, then this is your opportunity to make sure that each of them have a canonical URL. You can keep them. Just make sure they have the canonical URL. And point back to only one URL. This is going to save you from getting any sort of errors or things against you because you have duplicate content. So make sure that again, as you pull all your URLs from a tool like Screaming Frog, as I mentioned in the last lesson. And you go through each of the URLs, just make sure that content on each of those pages is unique. If not, well, you have an opportunity to combine two pages of content and make a much better page that has the potential for ranking much higher over time. So again, this is, this is more technical SEO, but this is still a very, very important part of today's ranking factor. 103. PART 2: CONTENT: Now that you know the structure of your site is more readable to Google and search engine users. It's time to move to the meat of SEO, and that is content strategy. Now as we approach this topic of content strategy, it is to remember that content is anything consumable, including but not limited to just text. Content also refers to imagery. Video interactive content pulls anything consumable by the user. Therefore, when it comes to content strategy, the goal is to be strategic in the implementation and optimization of that content. To do this, we need a workflow or feedback loop for content strategy. Now you may notice right off that content strategy is an iterative loop. That is, it is not a one and done method. Meaning you should avoid at all costs, creating processes in your organization for content creation, that's simply identifies how employees create content and then move on to the next piece of content. Why? Because there's always going to be new competitors, new customers, new searcher intent and keywords and phrases. You have to be constantly ahead of the curve, learning, researching, and optimizing the content that you already have. That's the purpose of the content strategy. Find and define the opportunities that you know you can successfully step into by identifying what the target audience desires and then provide the solution. Remember, the best content is content that was created to satisfy and delight a specific target audience on a specific defined topic. If we don't take a user-centered approach, well, this is what happens. You end up creating products like thirsty dog. This is from 2008. Is his dog, water is so humans have bottled water and dogs have yes, their own flavored water. And you read that correctly, it does say crispy beef flavor. Now, obviously this company tank because does your pet really need its own bottled water? Or how about this one? Lifesavers soda? Well, guess what? Even humans get their own disgusting drink. Now this was launched in way back in the 1980s and some of you say that's not that way back, but okay, For me, it's way back. Now you can imagine why this bombed. I can't imagine who would want to drink liquid candy. I mean, Mountain Dew is about as far as humans Shingo, but this, wow, obviously not very consumer centric. Let's move to something a little more practical like the Ford Edsel. Now Bill Gates sites the Edsel flop as his favorite case study. Even the name Edsel is synonymous with marketing failure if you've ever taken marketing courses or gotten a marketing degree. Now what's amazing about this as Ford invested $400 million into this car, which keep in mind it was introduced in 1957. But Americans literally weren't buying it because they wanted something smaller, more economic vehicles. Someone forgot to do market research, and so is taken off the market a few years later. Now, developing content obviously isn't as expensive as producing a new vehicle, but it can still be a waste of time and finances. If it is done carelessly without doing your market research, without talking to consumers or your target market. Rather, what often ends up happening is people simply say, well, this is what we think the audience wants. This is what we like. This is the design we like, this is the content we like. This is how we think it should be delivered without doing market research. Well, in the next few series of lessons, we will walk through what it means to have a smart SEO strategy when it comes to content. 104. Stage 1: Keyword Research: We now come to the first stage and the content strategy iterative loop, and that is keyword research. Now let's start with this important question because I get this question every now and then even today. Why are keywords important? While keywords are fundamental to the search process, even today, even though Google has removed the keywords in their Google Analytics. I get it. It is still a fundamental part of the search process. Now, keep in mind, he words are not as important as searcher intent. That is what the user is hoping to find. But he words or what the searcher uses in order to find his or her solution. Now is the search engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web. They keep track of those pages in keyword-based indexes rather than storing billions of web pages all in one database. Millions of millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword, term or phrase, then allows us engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second. Have you ever wondered why it takes Google just a small fraction of a second in order to return all the results. Well, this is why it's keyword-based indexes. The other words like Nike shoes or shoes, Nike spelling, punctuation and capitalization provide additional cues that the search engines use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them. Now, search engines also measure how keywords are used on pages to help determine the relevance of a particular document or a query. Keep in mind the Google algorithm is just getting that much better. It's not just keyword-based indexes. It's what's around the keyword, what's in that same paragraph? What other keywords and spellings are on the same page. Now, naturally one of the best ways to optimize a page's ranking. It's one sure that the keywords you want to rank for our prominently use entitles text metadata without obviously keyword stuffing. The challenges in knowing which keywords we should be targeting for our product market in industry. Because the reality is searcher intent, keywords and phrases are only getting that much more complicated. And this is mostly in part due to semantic searching or searching with your voice on your phone. And this is why it's important to understand the long tail of keyword demand. Now, most of us want to rank in the area here entitled The Fat head. That is, we want to rank number 1 for the most popular keyword in our industry. It's not only sometimes very difficult, but also not exactly always desirable. Let me explain. It's great to rank for keywords that have 5000 searches a day or even 500 searches a day. But in reality, popular search terms actually make up less than 30 percent of this search is performed on the web. The remaining 70 percent lie in what's called the long tail of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day. But when taken together, comprise the majority of the world's search volume. Now, according to HubSpot marketing stats, 20% of search queries on Google's mobile app and an Android devices are voice searches that can make up a lot of this long tail. And according to the same HubSpot stats, 21% of mobile voice search users do so because they say they don't like typing on their mobile. And so you can imagine with the misspellings and voice searches and just the way people talk semantically. There's some really long crazy keywords that are entered in as search engines nowadays, which takes us to this chart. Another lesson search marketers have learned is that long tail keywords often convert better because they generally catch people later in the buying conversion cycle. For instance, a person searching for a generic term like shoes is probably browsing and not ready to buy. They want to see what kind of shoes are out there. On the other hand, someone's searching for best price on Air Jordan size 12. Well, they practically have their wallet out, right? It's a longer phrase. Now, understanding this demand curve is critical. As you can see from the chart, long tail is less cost, but there's a much higher probability of conversion. But the challenge is that there are more keywords goes to show what's more important than ever to figure out what your users are searching. So you can dominate the bulk of online searches. To underscore this point, Here's a list of statistics as to why understanding the long-tail keywords of your target audiences important. 100 billion. That's less than the total number of searches Google gets in one month, and that was back in 2015. How about 50 percent of search queries are four words are longer. These are the long tail searches. Did you know that 15 percent of all searches performed on Google every day are brand new. Meaning Google has never seen that search term or four, understanding your users desires and questions will help you identify their search intent and then provide the solution before they even start searching. 61% of marketers, say improving SEO and growing their organic presence, is there top inbound marketing priority and that number is only increasing, meaning the competition for organic search results is only heating up. Meaning you have to know your users search intent even better. 12 searches. B2b researchers do 12 searches on average, prior to engaging on a specific brands site. That's from Google's own research. That is, people are looking for solutions, but they often don't even know what to type in. So they search and they research and the research again, this is why understanding keywords, or more importantly, searcher intent is invaluable. Without this research, then you are often limited to product related search terms only. What if your target audience doesn't know about your product or how to even clarify it. They're simply typing in their problems or their pain points or their wants and needs. And again, this should all be review. We've talked at length about these things in the belief framework. As we take a look at the topic of keywords, it's important to understand that there are three types of search queries people generally make. First off is the do or transactional queries. I want to do something such as buy a plane ticket or listened to a song. This is where most people thrive because it's product-centric. Secondly, though is no. And this is informational queries. I need information such as the name of an artist or the best restaurant in my city, or what time a sporting game begins. This is getting deeper into the mind of the user. How will they search? What will they enter? What are they going after? Number three is go. And these are navigational queries. I want to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL. But what happens if they don't remember your brand name or even your product category? So you have to spread your net wide when it comes to keyword research in order to take into account all the variety of ways it can, Sumer, could find you whether it's doing or knowing, are going transactional queries, informational queries or navigational queries. Now in the next set of lessons, we will tackle this seemingly endless topic of keyword research. 105. 4 Steps of Keyword Research: Now we come to the fun part of keywords in this content strategy iterative loop. And that is, now we're going to focus entirely on keyword research. So you and your team can get on the same page and you're targeting the same phrases. So out of the four steps, the first one is make a huge list, right, with billions of searches happening every day. The challenges in identifying which keywords and the most important for your product market and industry. Now, obviously, this is going to be messy as you get started. But what you want to do first off, it's just brainstorm. Create a list of keywords surrounding the topic you would like to target. Remember to think like the user. So you semantically connected terms in terms that are in the format of questions. Again, think messy. Just throw whatever you can up on the board or in a spreadsheet. Secondly, you want to get a list of keywords you're currently ranking for from either Google Search Console or Moz or Searchmetrics or any other tool that you may be using. You just simply want to go through those tools and download the largest list possible. Thirdly, get a list of keywords your competitors currently rank 4. Again, you can use SEM rush spy, Fu, Qi, compete in a tool like that and see which keywords are your competitors ranking for. Because chances are there are gaps in your ranking that your competitors are doing well. In. Fourthly, you've probably experienced how Google help searches by filling up popular queries, such as on Google's homepage. And we'll explore that Google is auto suggesting for search queries, write it, start typing in a certain keyword and see if there's some phrases that pop up that you haven't thought about before. In fact, you can get even more granular and detailed by using a tool like Uber suggest that's just going to show you dozens, if not hundreds, of similar suggestions based off of words that you've started to fill out. Fifthly, what you wanna do is now take the current list and enter it into AdWords Keyword Planner. Now Google AdWords Keyword Planner is an excellent resource of keywords and keyword grouping ideas as well. The goal here, again is that you come up just with this massive list of keywords that you enter into Google AdWords and then export from AdWords into a tool that you can start to filter through. You can do this in Excel, you could do it in Google spreadsheet, but find a tool that you can then paste all of these keyword ideas into. So you can get to the next stage in that starting to group and organize these keywords. Again, the purpose of this step is just to have a massive keyword list that you can start refining. Now that you have this massive list of keywords, step 2 and keyword research is gathering metrics. Now, first off, you want monthly search volume. Now you can get that from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. It will export it for you. And you'll be able to see that in your spreadsheet. Or you can use a third party tool like SEM rush and Moz's keyword explorer. Both fantastic tools. I love Moz's keyword explorer gives you so many good metrics around how to organize and prioritize your keywords. You'll want difficulty. So you want to know how hard it will be to rank. Now this is not the same as the competition score that you get from AdWords, competition and AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results. It's not the same thing as how difficult that will be to rank in the organic search results. However, if you don't have a tool that gives you the difficulty score again like Moz, then competition score, we'll just have to do. Thirdly, you're going to want to know the click-through rate opportunity. If there are lots of ads above the fold, if there's a knowledge graph, if there's an answer box on the top of the circle, that's going to drive clicks away from the organic results, right? You've probably seen this where it's no longer 10 blue organic links anymore. It's, it's down to seven or it's down to even five. And you do need to know that before you choose to target a specific keyword. Again, this is all part of this research stage of gathering metrics and attaching the metric to each one of the keywords. Step 3 is the fun but slightly tedious part, and that is grouping keywords by intent. Now, I, I prefer to start with a do know and go queries and then dive deeper. For instance, some searches may be targeting the applications of your product, while others just the benefits, while others still just the features of your product. You can see that if you have a list of 500 keywords, you may come up with 30 to 40 different keyword groups. And again, there's going to be so many keywords that are almost identical. Some that are plural versions of the singular. So you might want to get rid of a bunch of those. Just try to narrow them down to a several dozen different keyword groups at the max. Now, Google Keyword Planner already helps sort and group keywords based on common topics. But you'll want to be a little bit more granular than what Google Keyword Planner does in AdWords. Remember, Google is a machine. You are a human who was an expert hopefully in your product category. So learn from Google. But remember you have the final say. Also remember, the goal is not to create a page for each key word. The goal here is to create a page concerning a specific topic or a topic, or in this case, a group of keywords. So group the keywords into small enough groups that you know you can have a page to satisfy that search. Fourthly, you will now want to prioritize the keywords and keyword groups. There are a lots of different factors to look for, but let's just keep it to these three that you see here for now. Syndrome or close to the product and have a good understanding of your target audience and the marketing general. Make sure you prioritize by the importance to you and to your accompany. Remember you are the expert. No machine or formula will be able to filter through this keyword list as well as you prioritize number 2. And based on the difficulty of ranking for a keyword grouping. For instance, you may want to rank for best running shoes. But as you can imagine, this would be very difficult to rank for. You'll want to set your sights on something achievable so you can gain momentum through a series of small wins. Thirdly, take a look at the traffic. Remember, this is why you're doing this research in the first place. If a keyword only gets 10 clicks per month, well on unless you're selling commercial jumbo jets, then that is probably not a keyword you want to go after initially. The idea is that you want to find a combination of difficulty, click-through rate opportunity, and the traffic volume in order to choose the right keywords to rank for. Now as a final word of advice when research and in prioritizing keywords, ask yourself some common sense questions. Things like the keyword relevant to your website's content. Meaning look beyond the large numbers and metrics and traffic volume and be realistic concerning what you offer specifically. And if this keyword or a queue or a group is really something you can satisfy users with. Because secondly, we'll researchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords. Do you already have the content developed or are you able to develop the content? Thirdly, will they be happy with what they find? Or is it just bland content that was produced to try to get a ranking? Remember, your goal is to delight, not spam. And Google is getting much smarter at determining the difference. But keep this in mind when researching keywords. Will the traffic you earn result in financial rewards or other organizational goals? Is this key we're going to move you forward? Or is it just marketing noise? Now if the answer to all these questions, is it clear yes, then obviously proceed with that keyword in keyword grouping. Once you've prioritize your huge list of keywords, now you're able to know what you can effectively target and in what order. Again, this is setting us up for Session 5 when we will create content that targets those searchers and serves them well. Again, it's important to remember, it's about getting the right kind of customers to visit the right kind of page. Remember, traffic in general is not an indication of success because that is a metric that can be spammed and manipulated. In fact, you can even force your current customers to login through a link on your homepage to manipulate traffic signals and metrics. So internally, it looks like, Wow, you're doing so great, but in reality, you know, you've just manipulated traffic. That's why you want to look past traffic into other key performance metrics like engagement. The process for many users though, starts with the keyword. Think about if you're going on vacation in pairs, what is your go-to? Knowledgeable research? Maybe friends and failing. But ultimately, for most people, you will eventually go to the search engines. And that's when you start to type in all sorts of phrases, refining and perfecting your search phrases in order to get the information you desired. That is why keyword research is one of the most important, valuable and high-return activities in this search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website again, the right people to the right page. By researching your markets keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, also learn more about your customers as a whole. Remember, it's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence that you generate from your keyword research cannot be overstated. With keyword research, you can predict things like shifts in demand. You can respond to changing market conditions and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively searching for and seeking. This is why I love marketing today. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers and virtually any industry. So when you engage in your keyword research, again, the goal of this stage is to understand your users. What are they searching for? What are their goals, What's their intent? What are their needs and pain points? Your goal here is to understand your users and group their needs and their wants and their pain points into large topics, at least topics that relate to your product that eventually we will make content for. 106. Homework 4: KEYWORD LIST: In this homework section, we are going to get very practical by building out a keyword list. It's something every leader should do because as you understand your audience And as you want to communicate that to your team or through your marketing messaging, you need to know what terms your audience is using and how you want to communicate it back to them. And so that's where the keyword research comes in, or really the topic research or semantics research use whatever term you want here, I use keyword because that's the historical term, use for something like this. But I also throw in a bunch of different words depending upon the audience. So choose what works for you and then go back through the videos. And as you remember, step one was just make a huge list. What you wanna do is take a document like this, converted into Excel or use Google Sheets, whatever works for you. And just get a long stream of keywords, as many as you possibly can that relate to you and your industry. You can brainstorm about this. You can use your current search traffic analysis, which can be a Google Search Console. You can use competitive analysis when our competitors ranking for whether they bidding for. You can use Google auto suggest or Google AdWords Keyword Planner here. So there's lots of different ways to maybe even other tools that you have, right? The idea is how big of a list can you make? Secondly, is when you want to start to gather metrics. This is when you start to input all this other information over here because you want to start to rank. And so as we talked about, one of the things you wanna do is throw all of this list and the Google Keyword Planner. When you do so, it's, Google is going to give you a refined list, remove some duplicates, or suggest a different list of keywords based upon all of your input. The idea is you want to swell and compress this keyword list over and over, refining while adding and then cutting back and then expanding until you start to find a list of keywords that works for you. Once you do, keyword planner is actually going to give you these three other metrics here. Average monthly searches, competition, suggested bid. Now there are other metrics here that are given in Google Search Console. It may not work for all of your keywords, but it may be a good idea for some analysis or for some ranking. In terms of projects that you wanna give yourself down the road. You may have another tool like moss and they have a keyword difficulty score. Or you could use Searchmetrics or SEM rush, a conductor or BrightEdge or whatever tool you're using. Just add as many metrics as you want that are going to be helpful for you for sorting your massive list of keywords later. Because remember, when we get down to step four, we're going to prioritize. Thirdly though, is grouping the keywords. As I mentioned, that's where Google Keyword Planner works out. Use a spreadsheet to sort, sort it based on topic and intent. This is where your expertise is going to come in. If you have two keywords that are very similar, they may be addressing the exact same topic, will then combine them, right? Figuring out are these keywords essentially the same thing, just seen it two different ways. Running shoes and jogging shoes, right? It is at the same thing or for your audience, is it really two different topics? You're the subject matter expert, you know? So you wanna start grouping your keywords, start refining them through the Google Keyword Planner. And then you want to prioritize based upon the metrics here. Now I have a couple other columns that should be helpful for you. As you look at the metrics, you want to start then ranking, because metrics aren't everything, your insight and your experience speaks volumes into a subject like keywords or topics or semantics. And so you order them, right? Is this a high priority keyword, yes or no? Also, you want to take a look at funnel stages, right? It may be a top of the funnel keyword, or it may be bottom or middle, or just refers to everything. You're gonna find a lot of your keywords kinda refer to everything. But as you get into the long tail keywords, you're going to start to identify, hey, there's some specific keywords here that is very specific for middle of the funnel. They are looking for a solution, or it may be bottom of the funnel. They're looking for you as a solution or your product category as the solution. So you want to identify which key words and which funnel stage. Lastly, as you see here, I've got a notes section. And this to me is one of the most important because organizing the keywords, grouping the keywords, prioritizing keywords, that's all good. But what are you gonna do with it, right? And so you want to make maybe some gentle note saying, hey, this keyword goes with this other keyword or this is nice that competitor is ranking for this keyword, but it really doesn't have to do with us yet. We might introduce a product down the road that it does. But this is the big one. What action are you gonna take? Are you going to change a URL, maybe a page title? Are you going to create a new page? Are you going to flag this and saying we need to create content around this because there's a lot of search volume, our audiences really interested in it. And we have nothing that satisfies them. Everyone's going to our homepage for this keyword search. So you'll want to identify in there exactly what action you want to take for this keyword that you have already prioritized. Now as you can imagine, this list is gonna get very long, very quickly. So keep it simple, right? Start with a 100 keywords, not 3 thousand keywords. Start with maybe 300 keywords in the refined to a 100, refined to 60, whatever it may be dependent upon the size of your organization and the number of products you offer. But try to keep it simple so that you have one URL for each keyword. And again, that would go into the Notes section. This keyword is directly linking to this specific URL. Because what you wanna do is satisfy each user search with a specific solution or a specific piece of content that directly answers their search. And so the goal here is not just to get a big list of keywords, is to say, what are our searchers? What are our target audience searching for? And do we have the content necessary to satisfy them, yes or no? And are we ranking? How's the competitor is doing for keyword tool, for keyword rankings such as this. So all that to say is have fun with this. Take your time. Again, make a huge list and start refining over time. Start grouping keywords together and prioritizing. And the end result is you're going to have a pretty solid game plan of topics and searches that you want to tackle based upon what your target audience is searching for. 107. Stage 2: Content Audit: We now come to the second stage of the content strategy iterative loop, and that is content. Now you may have heard this common phrase, content is king. And the reality is the underlining content of a site will always be king if the content fall short, so will the SERP rankings. Google's aim is to deliver the most relevant results in the quickest manner possible. And that has much to do with delivering the best possible content. If the content is no good, how can it be relevant, right? Recent research points out that 72 percent of marketers say relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic. And that is why we place this as step number two after keyword research. Remember, when it comes to doing anything on the web in today's day and age, one of the steadfast rule is, is that quality trumps quantity every single time. Rather than focusing on doing something and gazillion times like blogs and articles and social posts and e-mails over and over day after day. What you should focus on instead is doing it the right way as much as is needed. For example, don't worry so much about pushing out a certain amount of content every single day. Focus more about creating an optimizing the right evergreen content in order to satisfy user needs. That's what Google cares about. Quality. When Google launched its Panda algorithm update in February 2011, followed by the Penguin algorithm update just over a year later in April 2012. Google is really going after quality through the user experience. Most importantly, it was looking for poor quality user experiences or sites that were simply meant to garner traffic and then deceitfully push visitors through some means to buy a product or a service through an affiliate link or to bombard them with advertisements. You may remember these pages where you land on a page and all of a sudden it was like an infinite scroll of just random content. And every fifth page, as you're scrolling down was a big Buy Now button with a customer quote which, you know, they're all fake, right? I don't know if you remember those pages, but they were awful. Well, thankfully, they don't appear very much anymore, do they? Why? Because Google is after quality, not just quantity of words anymore on these kinda single-page websites. So let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you know the quality of your current content? Do you know how to identify the right evergreen content? Now if you don't know evergreen content is content that will be relevant for a long time. Most industries have a wide range of evergreen content. For instance, if you sold running shoes, what topics do you think are always going to be relevant? Well, these would be your evergreen pieces of content creating satisfy user needs. For instance, what are the most popular running shoes? That's something that's going to last forever and you constantly obviously update that list. But that's a great topic and evergreen topic. Or what are the lightest running shoes or what are the best trail running shoes are different running shooting materials. Now you can quickly see how far you can take this as you focus not just on the product, but all the things the product is used for. Different training, different races, different purposes, running clubs, etc. Therefore, before we even address content strategy, which we will in Session 5, we have to understand how to do a content audit to see how we are performing and where we can improve. Because chances are there are pages on our site. That's just quantity, just noise, marketing noise that provides no value for the end-user. So the goal is to strip away the noise. So all that remains is high quality content that is valuable to the user. And that Google, as a look at, it says, yes, this is a good user experience. This is delighting users and this is what searchers are looking for. So as we start to talk about the topic of content audit, when you are conducting an audit on your site, you're focusing on three primary issues. First off is quality. What is the quality of each piece of content, and can it be improved? Now ideally, you would do this in order of priority based on simple metrics like traffic, at least to start off with. Secondly, is duplication. As I stated a couple of times already, all similar keywords should have one and only one URL. The old days of creating one page for each keyword are out. That is a poor user experience and aid. And can you imagine the amount of work that it would put on your own shoulders? Again, let's use the running shoe analogy. Let's say one keyword is best running shoes while you create a whole page on the best running shoes. Well, someone else types in the greatest running shoes, so you have to create another page on the greatest running shoes. Well, guess what? Thanks to Google synonym engine. Google is able to determine that best and greatest are probably referring to this same topic in light of the larger topic of running shoes. So take a look at your content and see if you can't consolidate some of your current pages. Thirdly, is relevancy. Does your content match the user intent of the keywords you're targeting? If your webpages about hiking Everest, are you actually talking about hiking Everest? Are you trying to sell a hotel in Katmandu? In other words, look for integrity on your pages. 108. Conducting a Content Audit: Now before we get too theoretical and into the weeds, Let's get a little practical so you can understand how a content audit works. To start off, you'll want to pull all the content URLs from your website and include the following columns that you see here on your screen, if possible. Things like along with the URL, the title, the pages description, traffic over the last 30 or 90 days. The published date, internal links, external links, that is the number of internal links pointing to that page, and external links pointing that page. The average time on page, the page speed, and then the action. So this is, this is where you start leaving yourself notes. Do I leave this page as is, do I remove this page? Do I improve upon this page? And then any extra details? Now in the Google Sheet in the homework section which will go through shortly, you will actually find this content audit worksheet built for you already. Now there are different ways you can pull this information. Google Analytics may be the most popular for some of these metrics. You just go to Google Analytics under the behavioral insight content, All Pages. And then you can sort by most popular pages and export into Excel or Google Sheets. Again, I like to export by the most popular pages, so I prioritize based upon what the traffic is like. Now just to make sure you have the secondary column of page title so you can check the page title and your altogether That's really important. Because sometimes you'll know a page by g where all sometimes you'll know it by its page title. But seeing them together will help you identify if there's any discrepancies. As I mentioned before, screen Frog is another good tool that will pull all your URLs and give you a bunch of this information already, including things like errors and links and so on. Now, I have mentioned other paid tools such as search metrics and Maus. They will also do a site crawl and give you a bunch of great information that will help you sort your pages. Now that you have all of your content though, after doing this audit, which will have run through in the homework, you will want to run through a simple checklist. Now this is not an exhaustive list, nor are each of these items stand alone. They all intersect. Remember the purpose of a content audit may be vary, but the desired outcome is still the same. And that is quality, trustworthy content that is easy to consume and relevant to the searchers intent. Therefore, one of the topics that you want to tackle our priority. Now that you have this long list of URLs, figuring out the best way to prioritize the editing or removal of content. Remember, you can't take every page on the same time. Help content and gap opportunities. Remember as you do a content audit, you'll probably find that there is content that you are missing, that you could fill a stated need based on your keyword research, based on competitor research. If you find your competitors have some really great pages that you don't, that might be an opportunity to fill a need if you can do a much better. You'll also find out which content is ranking for which keywords using tools like Google Search Console or a paid third-party software. For instance, you may find that your homepage is ranking for most terms. As we will see, this is not always ideal. Therefore, a content audit helps you identify which content should be ranking for which keywords. You will also find write-off the strongest pages on our domain and potentially see how to leverage them. As you may already know, every domain has an associated weight or authority attached to it. So too does every page within a domain, it's called page authority. In fact, page weight is often in good indication of how you are progressing in your SEO efforts for a specific URL. Now I often find undiscovered content marketing opportunities. When performing an audit. For instance, you may find certain partnerships or campaigns at your competitors are doing that you haven't yet thought of, as we mentioned earlier, a content audit will also help you escape a content related search engine ranking filter or penalty. As you're going through your content audit, look for the Uber spam written content that is sending off all sorts of red flags, which by the way, Maslow is really great for the SE got some sort of spam filter there that will let you know on a scale of like one in 17 or something like that. Hey, this is really good content or this is really spammy content. A content audit will show you which pages might get you into a heap of trouble and so you can edit them or just delete them. Or sometimes you may have content that is not spam, but definitely could do with copywriting, editing for improved quality and hence increased ranking. Or you might need find content that is outdated and you just need to bring it into the current year. So keep an eye for this type of content as well. For instance, if you sell a product that is governed by numerous regulations, then make sure you are always on top of current state or federal or country, wherever you're at, regulations or you will lose the trust of your audience. The very thing you were hoping to achieve with your content, right? So if you only have regulations up to like 2010. Well, that doesn't show you're really that much of an authority or at least you're not with a time, so make sure it's always up to date as much as possible. You may also find that you have a number of pages or articles that should be consolidated due to overlapping topics. So do your visitors of failure and really everyone for that matter, and consolidate the pages into one great piece of content. You will find you will rank higher and received better traffic in the long-term for that one great piece of content versus several lower-quality posts. So, so keep an eye out for pages that are really similar. You may also find content that should be just removed from the site. This happens every time I do a content audit. Inevitably, I will share all the content pages with a site owner, with my team. And we will say something like, why do we still have this piece of content on here? I, I, that was an old one I thought we deleted at long ago, which means roughly translated. Both the content and design have been neglected for the last few years and now it looks reads and feels awful. So in cases like that it's best just to get rid of it. Remember, there is no rush to get through all of your content today. Quality is better than quantity. So prioritize, take your time and do it right. While each of these desired outcomes and insights are valuable results of a content audit, the overall purpose is the same, and that is to improve the perceived trust and quality of your site, not just with users, but also with search engines, the end result is happier users and increased ranking for your pages. Now as we talk about content auditing, it's really important to talk about poor content signals. Now, in the past, poor content was just poor content. That was it. No real penalty. Not any more. Poor content can actually hurt you. So I do want to bring your attention to some poor content signals that are easy to brush over. But you should be looking out for when you do a content audit. Things like typical low-quality content. So this refers to poor grammar written primarily for search engines, including keywords stuffing. It's unhelpful. It's an accurate, It's old. It's just typical low-quality content, So red flag it. Some of you may delete, some you may be able to update, or a completely irrelevant content. Now, this is okay in small amounts, but often entire blogs are full of it. A typical example would be a link bait piece from like 2010 or, or whatever. And so if it is irrelevant to your product or your brand, it may be a good idea, just pulled the plug on that one. Or even thin or short content. This is where you just kind of glossed over the topic. There's too few words or it's all image-based content. You basically did it because he said, I need a piece of content for this URL or this keyword or this phrase. Therefore, I'm going to write a 200 word, peace and Thornhill, a bunch of stock photos. It's not valuable, right? This is where you're going to get a high bounce rate, lose page authority. People aren't going to be happy with it. Curated content with no added value. Now this refers to content that's comprised almost entirely bits and pieces of content that exists elsewhere, right? You just kind of copied and pasted. If this was a college course, you would flunk because of plagiarism. So if you find that you've got a bunch of content that you just copied and pasted from elsewhere. This piece is not unique, it's not valuable, it doesn't add any value to the users. And search engines are smart enough to spot this misleading optimization. This refers to titles are keywords Targeting queries for which content doesn't answer or deserve to RNC. Now that's generally not providing the information that visceral was expecting to find. And so really you're just using some black hat techniques to try to rank. Again. It's a waste of time. Just deleted duplicate content as we've already covered. And this refers to internally duplicate content on other pages, such as category pages, product variance, archives, technical issues, that type of thing, as well as externally duplicated. So that refers to a manufacturer or product descriptions if you're just copying and pasting from another site. Product descriptions duplicated on in feeds used for other channels like Amazon shopping comparison sites, eBay refers to just outright plagiarized content. If you didn't do the research and it's not really valuable content, then get rid of it. Stub pages. These are the words you land on a page and it says, oh, no content is here yet, but if you sign it and leave some user-generated content, then we'll have content here for the next guy, by the way, want our newsletter, click an ad, right? This is awful stuff. And again, you can be hit for things like indexable internal search results, too many indexable blog tag or blog category pages. It was just as a repetition of content found elsewhere. Most CMS's will have the ability to turn these types of empty content pages off. But the point is make sure quality pages are ranking and not these meaningless pages, right? That's, that's where we can continue to talk about. Again, quality over quantity. If you have empty and meaningless pages ending up in the index, that will reflect on your domain and other pages as a whole. However, I am not saying that you should just take an ax to your website. For example, here's a very valuable lesson from Rosalind God realists about what happens when you prune your content without doing the research above that we just talked about. The result is that you risk pruning valuable content from search in GIN indexes without realizing it's valuable. So take it in stride, right? Be bold, but make highly informed decisions. Printing too much can hurt your overall visibility and ranking. 109. Stage 3: Competitor Analysis: The third stage of a content strategy after a keyword research and a content audit is the competitor analysis. And as you can see here, it's actually an ongoing loop, just like a content strategy, just like keyword research, just like a content audit. This is all iterative. Everything you should be doing should be lots of minor little steps over and over again. So you optimize. It's this idea of being more agile versus waterfall, where you spend one year on one big project and then you just push it over the edge of the waterfall and hope for the best. And then you move on to the next. Well, this is much more agile where you take smaller steps, but you repeat it over and over. So it says constant incremental gains. So too with the competitor analysis loop, these, as you see here, are the four primary step to conducting a thorough competitor audit. Now, we're gonna go through them one at a time. But the reason that's a loop is because you are constantly having new competitors come into your market and industry. There are always new competitors. And the competitors that you have are constantly improving, right? That's why they're called competitors. They are coming up against you. They see what you do and they tried to improve. So you look at what they do, hopefully learn from them, and improve as well. So let's go through these four steps. The first step of a competitor analysis loop is to identify. Now the goal of this phase is to always have a pulse on all the potentially relevant competitors. That's the purpose of identifying, right? You're identifying competitors, not just your current competitors, but what new competitors are there out there. Now the first step is to gather all your keywords and keyword groupings and see what are the highest performing competitors for each keyword grouping. You do so by aggregating. All right, there's industry competitors. These are competitors you already know about. There's researched competitors. You can use tools like Alexa or similar web to find potentially new industry competitors. And then there's ranking competitors. Using a tool like SEM rush, you can find competitors that are competing for the same keyword. It may be a different industry and they're targeting a different market, but they're still competing for the same keyword. This happens all the time with things like companies like Amazon or eBay or Wikipedia, right? That they're dominated some of your key words even if their audiences Different. Because remember, these competitors don't have to be offering the same type of products or services. Seo competitors are sites that are competing with you and ranking for your selected targeted keywords. Now, don't forget the point of all this. Google is ranking what works. Your goal is to study what is working and hopefully learn why it is working in the first place. Again, we don't copy, but we do learn from our research. Secondly, you'll want to prioritize the competitors and URLs that you pulled from your research. Think of the website rankings a little more holistically than keywords first, then competitor. The reason you identify your competitors versus because these are the companies that will be targeting the same audiences. You, you may find that there are sites ranking for keywords that are actually not your competitors, as we just talked about. By all means, learn from them and why they are ranking so hot. But don't treat them as a competitor. Remember, just like I mentioned, Wikipedia, Amazon, and eBay. Now over the years, these three companies have consistently held high positions from many of the long tail keywords that I personally was going after. However, they are not necessarily my direct product or service competitor. They may just be ranking really well because their domain authority is through the roof. And they have a page that offer similar content, but not the same product or service. Therefore, at this stage, you should begin to match the highest performing URLs and content with each keyword grouping. You can use tools like similar web SEM rush or mas to do a lot of the groundwork for you. Once you have your list of targeted keywords, upload them to one of these tools and you will see how you start to compare with certain competitors. You may find that you are still finding new competitors at this stage. The end goal is for you to learn why certain competitor's content is performing well for certain keywords, as well as potentially identify new keywords or phrases that are being used that you just simply haven't thought of before. Remember, we're trying to provide this search and with a satisfying and delightful experience. But if we're not using the relevant or even correct terms, the not only does it make us look silly and out of touch, but we're not going to be ranking for what our searchers are looking for. So at the end of this step, you should have the top competitors for your primary keywords prioritized. But once you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords prioritized, then you can gather, list and compare your site to your competitors. That's the third stages, compare. And you can do so using all of your relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. Remember you're trying to find out why something is working welfare competitor and then learn from them. Now during this stage three primary areas that you are looking to learn from. Our first off is a list of keywords and their relevance. The current rankings, search volume, et cetera. Are your competitors using the same keywords or is there something for you to learn here? Secondly is rank content. As you look through the top URLs, ask yourself, how are the competitors satisfying their customers? How are they keeping them on the page? What is it about this piece of content that makes it rank? Is it the title is if the URL is irrelevance. How about the optimization of the page? Are they're high-quality videos and images that engage the users. What are the, what are the social metrics for this page? What about the length or formatting of the content? Are there multiple subheaders? Is it well organized? Is it really well-researched? Is there lots of eternal external links pointing to this page? And you can see that there's a lot to glean from just looking at the competitors again, don't copy just one primary competitor because you like their design. That's kinda foolish. But rather take a look at 345 of your top competitors and see if there are trends. See if there's similarities that you can learn from. Thirdly, ranked page metrics. Each page has a bunch of metrics that may shed some light as to why it's ranking well outside of just the content. It can be the page authority or domain authority. But there's also the number of external links and external linking domains pointing to this page. Both of these are powerful metrics that we're going to look at shortly in the back linking section of SEO. But there's also social links. Although this mostly has indirect results. It is still powerful because of word of mouth. Influencers have to get their information from somewhere. If your competitor is making waves in social media for a piece of their content when, then they potentially, uh, maybe getting links from influencers and powerful sites and say, Hey, there's some really great content out here. Now at this point of your competitor audit, you should start to see similarities and commonalities among the top URLs for each given keyword that you can learn from. And that brings us to the final stage of the competitor analysis loop. And that is learned. At this point, you want to be able to learn from all your data and put together a chart of content that you are able to create with the corresponding keyword, keyword groupings. You will want to sort this list in order of priority of ease and impact on your business. Now, keep in mind, this should go alongside the keyword research that you have already completed. This is just one layer deeper. For instance, if you find that in order to be competitive for a keyword in your prioritized keyword list. It may mean that you have to do a ton of research, ride a lengthy article, and try to get a ton of external links. Well, it may be a good idea to identify lower hanging fruit, right? So that's how you have to prioritize. As an example, let's say you sold car tires. All of the keyword phrase car tires would be great to rank for. This may be too far out of reach or maybe too many tough competitors that have much greater domain and page authority. Well, then you have to ask yourself the question, what about tackling a more reasonable keyword phrase like the benefits of all whether tires. Now this may be a category that is more reasonable and will also allow you to practically compare and analyze the top content for that keyword phrase without getting way out of your depth by trying to own a keyword or a phrase for an entire industry. Now, during this stage of the competitor analysis loop, I strongly suggest that you don't just start typing out an article. Rather start a little smaller by outlining what seemed to work with all the competitors. What key words would you like to utilize on the page? Imagery and video do you need to gather to add value to the page for your readers? What about the title, page, title and URL, as well as the basic outline of the content. Think in terms of bullet points. Again, the content development is Join Session 5, which is the next session. But we're still building up our analytics, are understanding, we're still learning from our competitors and from our research. Again, at this point, you don't want to create the content. The point of this stage of the audit is to brainstorm how you would like to be competitive for a specific keyword phrases and groupings. Once you've gathered all this information, then along with the belief framework of session 2, it makes the creation of content that much easier. Now I've recently been asked, why should I look at my competitors? We are our own brand, our own company, and yeah, that's all true. But really this should be an obvious one. We all have something to learn it generally, but more importantly, we all have something we can learn from each other, especially competitors in our own industry targeting the same market. They have things that we can learn from. Whether it's the research they've done, the pages, they've developed, the insights that they've garnered. We all can learn something from each other. That's why Picasso so eloquently put it. Good artists copy, great artists steal. That is you don't steal the exact painting or the exact idea, but you learn from them. And if this philosophy is good enough for Picasa wall, it's good enough for me as well. Or is one person puts it in a like this milk, a lot of cows, but churn Your Own butter. The point of a competitor audit is to look around at what may be working with competitors and across the entire relevant landscape and then learn from it. We should always be striving to be learning more understanding, seeking, researching, aggregating milk, a lot of cows. But the end result should be uniquely you and your brand. 110. Homework 4: SITE COMPARISON: In this homework section, I would like to introduce you to the site comparison matrix. And this is where you can also do your competitor analysis. What this is, is it really a historical log of use, simply charting down and keeping track of sections of sites and overall sites that you like and appreciate over the years. Now, I started doing this 10-15 years ago and my matrix of, of sight comparison is massive. I've over a 100 sites on there. I've really gone into a lot of details. I've added a lot more columns for me personally. I've refined this down to make it as simple as possible just to demonstrate what this could be for you and how it could be useful. So let's walk through this really quickly. There's obviously going to be a company and a link to their website. That's what you want to input here. Now, I made the link small because you don't necessarily need to see the whole link. I use it as just an opportunity to click on it in case I wanna go to that website, title of the company. And then you're going to have these drop-downs and you notice the drop downs all over the place? There are three options. There's a yes, no, and kind of for every one of these. Now, the purpose of the yes-no kind of is for you to go through and for most of it is just going to yes. Right. As you see here, I put it in a few yeses already. And then everything else is blank. The nose. Or if you're really passionate about something concerning a great site, they may have a great blog, but absolutely not. Their overall site is horrendous, you know, something of that sort. I also have this same thing underneath competitor. Now, you are going to have a lot of companies in here that simply are not competitors. Some are, and some are kind of competitors. Think of Amazon. Let's say you're selling the same products that Amazon has on their website. Well, they're kind of competitor, they're a competitor in the rankings, right? Seo rankings, but they're not a competitor that you would necessarily learn from. You're not going to look at their product pages or the product category pages and saying, wow, these pages are incredible because really they're not, they're obtuse, they're long, they're confusing. So that's a kind of competitor. Maybe Wikipedia is another example. Yeah, they're beating you in the search engines, but they're not really a competitor. So obviously you're not going to put those websites in here. But there may be in your industry something of the sort a website or some sort of shopping cart aggregation system that combines all these other websites together that may be a kind of type of competitor. So having said that in this section, the best of you can add more columns, you can take some of these away. But the idea is as you go through sites, whether you're surfing websites, looking for competitors, looking for industry experts across all industries. Or whether you're just shopping, no matter what it is. If you come across a web site where you say, wow, I am blown away by this homepage hero and how they do their messaging and buttons and form or animation, whatever it is. You would simply come here and say Yes. Now over time, you're going to have more and more rows. And you're going to have more and more yeses across this entire matrix. Meaning, if one day you say, I don't have a blog yet, but I want a blog and we need to design a blog. What should the blog look like? What should it feel like? Where you can come right through here and you can say, well already, already know exactly kinda look and feel and the design that I want. Now, as Pablo Picasso said, remember, good artists copy, great artists steal. You're not stealing their actual design. You're stealing the idea, the feeling that tone, maybe some of the layout and how they used imagery or the style of imagery, right? You're getting the feeling of the website so that you can tell your designers. These are the 3456, whatever URLs that I want my blog to look like. This is invaluable to me over the years of designing because I can keep coming back to my own site comparison matrix. And when I want to do a blog, I can quickly scan through the ones that I've liked in certain industries, both B2B and B2C. Now this last section here or this next section is language. Sometimes I would like to see what other people in my industry are using for, let's say a demo request or a primary CTA can be free trial. It could mean by now, could be request a consultation, whatever it may be, or maybe the hero page, The Hero text on the homepage. Or it can be the partners or testimonials. Like how did they introduce their partners? We are trusted by so-and-so testimonials. People love us, our customers love us. Here's what people have to say about us. What are other people using? Because when you have to build your own website, you don't want to be very generic and say, these are our partners. Maybe that works for your industry, maybe not. Maybe you can learn something from the other people in your industry or across other industries. That's what this section is. Four, this is the language section. And again, add as many pieces of content or columns here as possible that match your needs. Lastly though, are the notes. What did you like and what do you want to introduce? This is really your takeaways when you look at a site, let's say you came across a site, a B2C site, you were shopping for your kids and his Forever 21, for instance. And most of the site you're just saying, I don't like it doesn't relate to my industry. It's shopping for little girls. Well, there may be something in there that you did like. And you said Yes, the blog section and the resources section were amazing. I loved how they formatted it into three columns. I love how it was a Mason grid and how things just flowed in the imagery that they used. That's what you would enter here. What do you want to introduce? Well, that's when you can say, well, I do want more that responsive Mason action on my resource section. Or I really liked the style of imagery they use. They use certain filters, that type of thing. And so again, the site comparison matrix has been invaluable to me over the years. Especially as you want your site to continually improve. Keep tabs on your competitors. You can even include another column in here that says date updated because your competitors are constantly updating hopefully like you are. So when was the last update? You can keep all of those notes in here. Because sites change, your sites should change as well. It should constantly improve. It should meet user expectation and really it should delight the user's. Ideally a competitor of yours would come here and say, yes, this is a site I like. And yes, I love every one of their sections. Can you say that about your own site? Maybe, maybe you should put your own site here first and foremost, is it a great cycle, not so much. And rank your own website across all these different categories and, and put your language in there and see how it measures up. Again, the idea is to make a lot of cows, but to churn your own butter. 111. Stage 4: User Experience: The final element of the content stage of the SEO plan is user experience or UX. Part of Google's philosophy has always been focused on delivering the best user experience. Now with recent technological advances in Google search algorithms and other search engine algorithms, they are now better place than ever to deliver this vision. Generally high-quality sites and pages have several UX traits in common. They're easy to use and navigate and understand. They provide direct, actionable information relevant to their query. There are professionally designed and accessible to the most modern browsers and devices, and they deliver high-quality, legitimate, credible content. Let me be clear, though, it does not appear that Google presently rank for user experience directly, that would insinuate that Google knows your emotional state when visiting and navigating through a website. However, Google is paying more attention to your websites user experiences than you think. For instance, landing page experience has long been a key factor for ranking ads in AdWords. However, as we already saw, UX can be an indirect ranking factor. Usability and user experience are known as second order influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a sights external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is a phenomenon known as no one likes to link to a crummy site, right? I think we all agree that normal people do not like or trust a site with poor UX, It's confusing, it's irritating and often associated with spam. Things like tabbed content or infinite scroll or really bad stock photography or just a confusing layout. And since Google measures of sites relevance with things like pogo sticking and backlinks. A site with poor UX will simply rank lower. By definition, UX is about providing the best possible experience to the consumer. And it shouldn't be confined to a specific journey commencing at the homepage. Instead, it should be data-driven, taking account of the vast range of entry points into a website. So let's take a quick look at a UX checklist. Now, as we look through this checklist, remember, search engine algorithms are simply getting smarter. They are able to measure and analyze far more information on a website today than they ever have been able to. The common denominator in every Google update is to provide your users with the best experience possible. If you keep improving your website with that goal in mind, you should not have to fear any future Google algorithm updates. Now if you're struggling with site UX or even understanding the topic, this list is simply a quick UX checklist of some things you can improve upon. For instance, optimize for all platforms. That is just make sure users on mobile tablet and desktop versions of your site can access all of your content and find out what thereafter. Too many sites look good on desktop but horrible on mobile. So think of everyone, just, just check out your website right now. Check it out on mobile checkout on a tablet or different desktop screen sizes. How about delivering high-quality content? Alright, we've talked a lot about this already and we're going to talk about it more next session. But it's simply means fixing thin content, low-quality content, replacing it with high-quality content, helpful articles that engage your users as much as possible. Again, the point is to benefit your users so they leave better off than when they arrived. Seo can't just be making a term rank or getting a bunch of additional traffic and a vacuum because nothing else will happen. If the UX is bad, no one will engage, No one will convert, no one will link. Thirdly, eliminate UX barriers. Keep your site clean and easy to navigate, right? Reduce load times as much as possible. There are plenty of online tools like GT metrics, for instance, that help identify some obvious technical issues. Also eliminated intrusive ads and those interstitials that seem to always get in the way it may work by providing some income. But maybe in the long run you're going to find the bounce rate increases. People just don't stay on your site as long so keep aware of those elements as well. Make your site structure more logical. That is key pages relevant in URLs that reflect your site structure. Don't have a huge menu. If you can reduce it to just a few choice links. Think of a supermarket, right? Most supermarkets are easy to browse through because they make sense. We'll do the same with your website. Make sure you put the Milton next to the eggs and the apple's next. But bananas, again, common sense that isn't so common in the design or development stages of website will pay off in dividends. Spend some time thinking about the user. I was just talking to someone a few days ago who showed me a website that they would that they would like their website to look like. The website example they gave was awful. There was icons down the left side of the page, that was the main menu. Then the right side of the page was kind of like a website page, but not really. It reminded me of something 15 years ago. It was a bad user experience because it was confusing. Tried to make sense with your site structure, make it more logical. Use XML sitemaps and RSS feeds, right? This is just some common sense advice that will help Googlebot easily find an index your content. You schema markup. This tells users what to expect from your site when they find you through search engines just helps the search engines understand your webpage. And then page layout and design. We know that Google can understand Page Layout recently Google's Pierre far share to a post on Google Plus telling publishers to make sure that they expose JavaScript and CSS files to Google. Why? Because Google's going beyond just the code. They're trying to understand how the end result looks. And if it makes sense. Now in looking at this UX checklist, it is important to remember the role UX plays in SEO. And Rand Fishkin from modest sums it up nicely. User experiences greatest impact to SEO is through the increase it creates an organic sharing and distribution. Remember real people, real human beings are visiting your site. Respect them. Don't be a disappointment. People have short attention spans and if you can't solve their problems quickly, they will leave. So address your audience's needs and questions better than your competitors and good things will happen. People will share it. They'll say, Hey, you've got to check all this site. Not only does that look good, but then the answer my question really well. And so they'll share it on social. They may email it, they may copy and paste the link to their fellow co-workers. Whatever the case may be, good things will happen. Ux can be a tricky element in SEO. So when it comes to us, here are a few key metrics that you should be measuring and analyzing to keep track of user satisfaction and success, right? You want to know if what you're doing is working or not. Load time. Remember people are impatient. Most users will give your site about two seconds load, that's it. So don't disappointment. Invest in things like reliable hosting that can support heavy traffic. Watch for image sizes, right? E-commerce is a visual businesses so sites can get slowed down really quickly. Use image optimization tools so that visuals load fast while the quality remains intact. Also, don't forget browser caching to save time on every new page opened. You can do things like compress your CSS and JavaScript files. And you can use things like Google's PageSpeed Insights tool and gt metrics when you're building your site in order to check out, Okay, are there elements that are too slow? Are the things that I can fix bounce rate. Now, as we've talked about before, not every one page visit to your site should be considered a bounce, even though it's measured as a balance. Remember the point is to convert or to complete the desired action. And visitors may complete these goals on one page. For instance, if you have a blog, the goal for that user may be to read the post. In the process, you become a trustworthy resource. Well done. Just be sure to read the bounce rates accurately because after reading a blog post, so on may go back to the search engine after you've already delighted them. So that's a success even though it's measured is about navigation. Navigation is there for a reason. And it's definitely not to confuse or frustrate visitors, right? You can measure navigation use by using a tool like Crazy Egg or hot jar, or just by tagging the menu was something like a Google Tag Manager or Kissmetrics. Regardless of what looks better or is modern and UX, you should first focus on making your menu functional and intuitive for your visitors. Do you really need a hamburger menu on desktop? Or a could you make it clearer? Do you need eight items or a whole sub-menu? Do you need to rewards some of your navigation elements, measure the clicks and adjust accordingly, and this is a great time to do AB testing. There's a lot of times when AB testing may just not be as effective a test. But when it comes to the main menu, I use it all the time. I changed the words a little bit, I change the order. And you'd be surprised how effective this can be in the long run. Page views per visit or otherwise known as sessions. Now, while not so important on its own, this metric does show the effectiveness of the experienced flow. When designing a Shopify store, for instance, you probably have a desire to experience flow in mind. How many pages should it take for a visitor to complete an action or conversion? Is it six or is it 10? If users drop out earlier, that is, they make fewer steps? Will your engagement may be bad and you might have problems with traffic or credibility. If, on the other hand, the customer journey wines back and for taking too many steps, your navigation is not working properly and users are becoming confused. So take a look at that pages, page views per visit, session length. Now in addition to pageviews, the time spent on those pages is important for conversions. This is the benefit of imagery and videos. All right, people are more prone to consume the content, stay on the page and be satisfied. However, there may be pages you don't want your users spend too much time on, such as filling out a form. If you see that they are spending too much time on certain pages that they shouldn't be, then the user could be confused. This is where a recording tool like Hot Jar is really helpful. You can actually record the user's session and you can see where their mouse is moving and what they're clicking on. And you can figure out really quickly if people are confused on certain pages. Number 6 or conversions, right? Usually spending a lot of time analyzing everything on your conversion pages is the title right as the form F to many fields. Does the imagery look like bad stock photography? Measure and analyze these pages using every tool in your arsenal. This is where the funnel comes into play. If you have a ton of people landing on your conversion pages, but you have a very low conversion rate, then chances are something that's going on that it's not a good user experience or something's confusing, or something doesn't make sense. Now despite amazing technological advances, search engine still can't yet understand texts, view images, or watch video the same way a human can. Search engines don't have emotions, but they can measure behaviors that insinuate emotions. Speaking of emotions, let me ask you, would you spend your money here? Now the primary SEO element that is missing on the site is user experience. Again, good SEO takes into account all five primary keys we introduced at the beginning. Technical keyword in phrases, content, UX and backlinks, links, which we will again look at next. Now, although Lynn's cars may take into account four out of the five primary SEO keys, which they do by the way, neglecting user experience would result in lower conversions, higher bounce rate, and potentially lower rankings. However, let me quickly note, you're also able to get bumps in your own ranking by starting to take into account each of the five primary keys individually if you choose. My suggestion would be to start with the technical, just like we've ordered this lesson, to make sure your site structure is legible first in the search engines. Then move on from there to the user experience. Believer not lings cars does have a solid technical structure. Therefore, in a case like this, lean may want to focus on fixing other SEO keys first. However, in every instance the point is always the same. Focus on the user. Because Google's goal is to focus always on the user. That is, when visitors type a keyword phrase or query into a search engine and lands on your site. Will they be satisfied? Right? Yeah, as I mentioned before, this is the primary question that search engines try to answer billions of times each day and they tried to make that a more accurate answer all the time. That's why rankings are constantly adjusting. They're trying to serve the very best result for their user. They're focusing on the user. Remember, the search engines primary responsibilities is to serve relevant results to the user. So ask yourself, what are your target customers looking for and make sure your site delivers it? The challenge is that nearly everyone thinks they are a great designer or they're a great content writer or whatever the case may be. Just like most people think they are good singers, right? That is why it's good to take a realistic step back. Study the user, make them Central and deliver the best possible experience for them. The rules of SEO or becoming more clear with every passing year, deliver a great experience to both consumers and search engines. And you'll be rewarded with a higher ranking. Because if you don't respect your users, google will take that into account. 112. PART 3: LINKING: We now come to the fifth primary key to SEO, and that is a linking or back linking. Now backlinks are the original ranking factor. It was a way of voting for a site or attributing authority to a site. In the beginning it was a ranking algorithm called PageRank. Now according to Google and this is a direct quote, pagerank works by counting the number and quality of links or backlinks to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. Pagerank is basically an algorithm used by Google search to rank websites in their search engine results. Pagerank was developed at Stanford University by the founders of Google. As you can see here, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 96. It was actually named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, hence page rank. Now, PageRank was simply a way of measuring the importance of website pages by counting links or votes and determining which pages are more important based on them. Now there used to be a toolbar, if you remember, a while ago in browsers, that would show PageRank. And frankly, PageRank was the gold standard for website authority. And obviously SEALs used to obsess over their PageRank. Thankfully, in 2016, google has confirmed that they have completely and forever shuttered PageRank. The reason, if you know, SEO history should be obvious. Pagerank was riddled with link spam, including paid links on high PageRank pages, black hat tactics, leading farms, et cetera. The question is, how will Google rank websites with backlink? He now, well, as you should know, PageRank was one of many algorithms used by Google to order or rank search engine results. Thanks to many of the recent algorithm updates, which are far better than PageRank, google is much, much more sophisticated than just relying on page ranked ordered sites. For instance, Google is able to analyze the linking domain and page to understand things like relevance, quality, contexts, and texts. In other words, Google is attempting to now verify that a user will be satisfied when they click on a link from one domain that takes them to another domain. Now, if you're a content isn't a relevant or high-quality standard, Google adjust the value of that link appropriately. So goodbye, PageRank numbers. Hello, artificial intelligence. I say that tongue in cheek, kind of. Nevertheless, it's cool to know that PageRank is the first algorithm that was used by Google. And it is often the best known and most fear because it brings up the same question. How do I get really good backlinks? Well, first, let's point out that there are actually two types of links. And those two types of links are basically internal and external links. Now both are important. External links will show who is interested in your site. Think of it like high school. If popular kids like you and hang out with you, guess what? You'd become popular by association. However, if the slackers and Draghi's like eat well, you may end up getting a free pass to detention. Same thing with websites. Internal links though we're same, but different. Internal links are most useful for establishing a site architecture and spreading link juice. Remember, Google is looking for content that can be indexed and ranked and a crawlable site structure that highlights your most important pages. Too many sites today in a mistake I see many organizations make is they neglect the basic navigation and site structure and thus hinder search engines from properly crawling and ranking their webpages. So let's spend a few minutes in the next couple of lessons and dive into these two different types of links, internal links and external links. 113. Internal Linking: Now as we have been talking about, links are like votes. Internal links are basically you voting for the most important content on your site. You are telling the search engine which pages are the most important. Now the optimal structure for your website is shown here. That is, every page is accessible by a link. In fact, a good site structure will end up looking like a pyramid with the homepage being top and center. However, you may have some extremely key articles or sub pages on your website. And these pages will link to each other appropriately. You may end up finding that certain sub-pages will have the most amount of links. And therefore based upon your own site structure, you are telling Google, hey, these pages are more important than the other pages. Now as a quick pro tip, you can actually log into Google Search Console and they will show you which pages you have identified based on your internal linking structure as the most important content on your site. So all you have to do is open up Google search console and click on internal links. And Google will show you the most important content on your site based on internal links. Now, make a note of this. If these are not your most important pages that you see in Google Search Console, then you will want to rethink your linking architecture. Because again, what you're saying to Google is, these are my most important pages. And if they're not, then you need to make the appropriate changes. Now here are a few quick tips concerning internal linking. Number one, make sure all of your pages are internally linked to within your website. Unless of course there are some dummy pages. But if you feel like, Hey, there are some pages I just don't really want to link to. They're not high-quality, then remove it, right? Because chances are, you'll find it somehow whether it's somebody linking to an old page from another website or you accidentally have it linked to on a website. If you think it's low quality and it doesn't need to be there. Just remove it. Otherwise, make sure all your pages are linked to internally. Secondly, make sure your most important pages have more internal links and other pages, right? If you're constantly linking to maybe an About page, and Google's going to think, hey, this page is really important. But if your product or Features pages, the one you want linked to most, then statistically it should be linked to from all over the place. You should be linking to it from your blog or resource pages. It should be in the footer, shouldn't be in the main navigation, should be on your primary web pages. Because you want people to know about your product or features or pricing or whatever those pages may be. Thirdly, please check that your page can be linked. And now you would be surprised at the number of sites that block the search engines from crawling their site because the robot's TXT file restricts certain pages or even the entire domain. Now this often happens right after a new launch when developers are working on a site, they don't want it indexed or crawled. So they will block the search engines from crawling the site and they forget to change that feature when they launch. It. Also makes sure that links to key pages don't have a rel nofollow attribute in the link tag. That basically means a don't follow this link to this new page. Also make sure your key pages don't have a no index tag on them. This is a tag that happens in the background like a Meta tag. But it basically says to the search engines, don't index this page. Now most of these cases that happens because of too many cooks in the kitchen or a team member switch or whatever, it may be, just be careful that your site can be found. So scraped through or have your developers scraped through this site, make sure they can be found and they can be indexed. Remember, you may have great pages on your site, but if Google can't find them, then they simply don't exist. Things like great content, good keyword targeting, competitive research and smart marketing don't make any difference at all if the search engines can't reach the pages in the first place. Now that we addressed some of the basic elements of internal linking. In the next lesson, we're going to move on to the more foreboding topic of external backlinks. 114. External Linking: Now we come to the topic of external links or backlinks. Now for search engines that crawl the vast landscape of the web links, both internal and external, or like the streets between the pages. A backlink is also called an inbound link or incoming link. And it's created when one website links to another. You should all be familiar with this. Now, the link between the two websites is the backlinks so named because it points back to the linked to page. As we've already looked at. Links aren't everything in SEO, but search professionals still attribute a large portion of the engines algorithms to link related factors. Now using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways is we've looked at previously. And through links. Engines can not only analyze the popularity of web sites and pages based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them. But also metrics like trust in spam and authority. Remember the high-school analogy that I used before? If you hang around with popular people, you tend to be popular as well. We'll trustworthy sites tend to lead to other trustworthy sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources, the same principle applies. You become like those who are linking to you. Now I know what you're thinking and yes, links still matter. Backlinks are still critical for rankings. Basically, they represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. The more links from good places that are editorially naturally pointing to your content into your website, the better your rank. In essence, backlinks to your website or a signal to search engines that others vouched for your content. Now if many sites linked to the same web page or web site, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to. So earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site's ranking position or search visibility. Let's take a look at how search engines use links. And as we do, let me preface this section by saying a couple of things. First off, we know search engines are getting smarter, much smarter. Hence, original ranking algorithms like PageRank or history. Secondly, we don't fully understand the proprietary metrics of search engines like Google. Be nice if we did, but alas, we do not. Nevertheless, based on research and experience in testing and patent applications, we can draw some intelligent assumptions into the primary linking signals. For instance, global popularity. The more popular and important A-site is, the more links from that site matter. A site like Wikipedia has thousands of diverse sites linking to it, which means it's probably a popular and important site. Now to earn trust and authority with engines, you'll need the help of other link partners. The more popular, the more authoritative this site, the better local topics specific popularity. Now the concept of local popularity suggests that links from sites within a topic specific community matter more than links from a general or off-topic sites. For example, if you sell appliances, then link from other appliance websites or DIY stores like Home Depot or Lowe's will be more beneficial than if you receive links from your grandma's online quilting store, right? Because it's the same topic, anchor text. Now one of the strongest signals the engines use in ranking is anchor text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, well, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrasing that anchor text. You can see examples of this in action with a Google search like click here, were many results rinks solely due to the anchor text of inbound links. When people say to visit my website, click here and they actually link click here as if we don't know what to do anymore. Come on the websites. Inner has been around for over two decades. We know what to do with a little blue underlined link. All right, I'm off my rant. Therefore, if you want to rank for a specific topic, make sure people use that text or phrase as the link instead of click here or something silly like that. Trust right? Now It's no surprise that the internet contains massive amounts of spam, right? We've all seen it. Some estimate as much as 60 percent of the web's pages are spam. Now, in order to weed out this irrelevant content, search engines use systems for measuring trust. Therefore, earning links from highly trusted domains can result in a significant boost to the scoring metric. Universities, government websites, and non-profit orgs represent examples of high trust domain, something called Trust Rank link neighborhood. Now spam links often go both ways, right? A website that links to spam is likely spam itself and in turn often has many spam sites linking back to it. By looking at these links in the aggregate, search engines can understand the link neighborhood in which your website exists. Thus, it's wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally selective with the sites you attempt to earn a links from because you will choose your own link neighborhood based off of those metrics. Freshness. Now, link signals tend to decay over time. Sites that were once popular often goes stale and eventually failed to earn new links. Thus, it's important to continue earning an additional links over time. This is commonly referred to as fresh rank, which is a basically the freshness signals of links used by search engines to judge current popularity and relevant. Current is important. Social sharing. Now the last few years have seen an explosion in the amount of content shared through social services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Know, all of those search engines treat socially shared links differently than other types of links. They still notice them nonetheless, somehow, there is much debate among search professional as to exactly how search engines factors social link signals into their algorithms. But there is no denying the rising importance of social channels. If you have content that can be shared, make it easy on your visitors with a simple showing plug-in or buttons. 115. Link Flywheel: Now in this lesson, I want to underscore a very important point. Before you ever create content. Ask the question, who will help me amplify this and why, right? If you don't have a great answer to that question and I mean a specific list of people or a specific list of outlets, then you shouldn't hit Publish. Go and do that work first in every piece of content that you create will have more success in terms of amplification and reach and linked potential and the potential to earn an audience. Otherwise, why are you creating content if no one's going to see it early, she don't know who's going to see it. Now this is where a link flywheel comes into play. You want to choose a link flywheel that's going to early links over time. Now, there are a few different structures you need to be aware of. First off, his news and press. They tend to be a good structure that earns links over time in a flywheel sort of format as well as content marketing partnerships, social and embedded content. Now the purpose of a flywheel is to invest in a certain channel and tactics that yield self reinforcing results, right hands, a flywheel. For instance, in social media, I think what happens is you earn more fans and followers. Essentially your social influence and authority goes up. And now as someone looks at you, you're more likely to get suggested on the sidebar. If Twitter, more people are likely to find your pages, more people are we sharing the content and liking your content, which means you appear in front of more people. Now, if you do things like Facebook advertising, you can appear to a broader audience because you already have so many people who are your fans, if you'd like your pages or your popularity is making you more popular. That's the concept of a flywheel. Now, these four suggestions that I'm going to mention and go through are just ways to get the marketing fly wheel spinning in your favor. But bear in mind, five wheels have this critical concept that as I turn the flywheel, getting it started is incredibly hard in those first few fans, those first few followers or links or shares, whatever it is, those pieces of content, they're incredibly hard to get going. Don't expect immediate results obviously. But after that we'll start turning. You will push just as much as you push them in the beginning and the wheel begins to go much further and much faster. It's self-reinforcing. That's why backlinks are so powerful. You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to leaks. Social sharing is one of the big ones that we will look at in Session 6. Word of mouth is obviously important and can lead to high-quality links, as well as other forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness. Now, here are just some basic ideas when it comes to obtaining quality backlinks. Pr, yes, it still works. There are a number of influencers who receive PR feeds and if your content is up in their Alley, well, you may receive a lot of link juice from some high-quality sites. Citations. A local citation is any mention of your business on the web. It is any combination of your company name, phone number, address, zip or postal code, and website address. Citations and SEO are a key factor in improving your local search results. Now citation establishes credibility, which also is more important for local businesses. Now when it comes to bloggers and guest blogging and sponsored content, etc. Just please keep it real, right? I don't want to see Mary Kay sponsoring extreme outdoor adrenaline sport. This is insincere and frankly has nothing to do with the brand. However, if you sell dog washing products that any site or blog that has to do with dogs is fair game and frankly a good idea. Let me also warn you from the infamous backlink hustles of the bygone black hat era. Hustling bloggers for link placement or trading links is not a good idea, right? Search engines are just too smart nowadays is we've looked at hustling journalists by always trying to do New and Noteworthy things that may not work for your business either. Sometimes the hustle results in sponsoring bloggers, paying them to write for you. A good idea, though, is to just be genuine and authentic. The challenge lies and thinking about how you can do or leveraged something. Others are not. Find avenues where your target market exist and deliver stunning content in a way that others haven't, then watch what happens. A great example of this is the Dollar Shave Club, which you may all be familiar with. They took an ordinary product and made it shareable, likable, linkable, or, or the dog photo by Seth Castiel. Rather than just taking photos of dogs, he found a new way of taking Don photos that it's clever and random and frankly stunning. How can you not share the same content, right, is beautiful. Remember, when I use the word share, I am referring to backlinks. 116. Link Types: Link building isn't art. It's almost always the most challenging part of an SEO is job, but also the one most critical to success. Link building requires creativity, hustle, and often sometimes a sizable budget. And since it's an art know to link building campaigns are the same. And the way you choose to build links depends as much upon your website and product as it does your personality. Now, since there is no real formula for link building because it is so creative, what I have here are just a few basic types of links that you can acquire and adapt to your own product and service and brand and personality. First off, are self-created, non editorial. Now, hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links to guest book signings form signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value and can often result in negative results in today's search engine ranking algorithm. So I strongly advise against doing this. And general search engines continue to devalue most of these types of links and have been known to penalize sites that pursue these links aggressively. Again, these type of links are often considered spammy and should be pursued with extreme caution. So if you have someone in turn or yourself going from form to form and putting in your link and the comment sections. This may be a good time to stop doing that. Secondly is manual outreach link building. This is where you create links by networking, right? Emailing bloggers your links so many insights to directories or pain for listings of any kind. Now in such cases, you often create a value proposition by explaining to the link target why creating a link is in their best interest. This is the type of backlink building that most of us dread, right? It's like cold calling of back linking. Now again, I would strongly suggest reach out to people you have already networked with. Otherwise you're gonna get some low quality backlinks that really doesn't do you much good. Again, this kind of manual outreach link building is what many people think of backlinks, right? They think of I have to dial someone up. I have to send these cold emails. I gotta reach out on LinkedIn and just somehow persuade people to link to me. Well, thankfully there is a third type of links and that's the natural editorial things. Links that are given naturally by people's sites and pages that want to link to your content or company are these natural editorial links? These type of links, they'll require no specific action from the SEO other than the creation of worthy or epic materials such as great content and the ability to create awareness about it, right? You want it to be sharable content. Now, this is the gold standard of backlinks because it's natural, it's authentic, it's real, and it's often really trustworthy. These type of backlinks generally are received because you have earned it. That is what you should go after, right? These are the type of backlinks you should go after earning them. If you find that a Post article or download is starting to get a lot of shares, likes or length then. And this is in my strong opinion, only then would I started do some manual outreach. Right. In my experience, you only have so much collateral and persuasion when it comes to manual outreach. You don't want to burn your bridges too early. So use that lifeline only if it's going to benefit the person or site who is sharing your link, then they will be much more prone to share more of your content in the future, especially since they know other people are already sharing it and liking it and appreciated. Now, having said that though, again, it's an art. It's up to you to select which of these will have the highest return on the effort invested. And as a general rule, it's wise to build as vast and varied a link profile as possible as this brings the best search engine results. Remember, and here's a final warning. Any link building pattern that appears non-standard, unnatural or manipulative will eventually become a target to be red flagged by the search engines. 117. Link Building Strategies: So as I mentioned before, to help get your creative juices flowing, here are four sample link building strategies that you can learn from. Number 1, get your customers to link to you, right? If you have partners you work with regularly or loyal customers that love your brand, you can generally easily capitalize on this by setting up partnership badges such as graphic icons with text that link back to your site. Like Google often does with our AdWords certification program, right? People can't wait to put this on their site because it adds value to them as well. Just as you would get customers wearing your T-shirts over, sporting a bumper stickers, whatever it is, links or the best way to accomplish the same feed on the web. So try to think of ways that add value to the customer as well. Secondly is building a company Blogger, article directory or collateral downloads, whatever it is, but make it valuable, informative, and entertaining resource section. Now this type of content and link building strategy is so popular and valuable that it's one of the few actually recommended personally by the engineers at Google. Write blogs or article directories have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, participate in conversations across the web and earn listings and links from other blogs and social networks. So think of how you can contribute to maybe some unique research or consistent content that you create, whether it's a weekly or monthly or whatever it is, that adds value to customers. Create these sections of your websites or entire websites alone that just give value. Because if it is a valuable resource, people will likely share it. Thirdly is create content that inspires viral sharing a natural linking. Now, in the SEO world, we often call this link bait. Now there's tons of examples of this across the web. Each viral campaign leverages aspects of usefulness, information dissemination, or humor, right? As we saw in the Dollar Shave Club, she create that viral effect. Now, users who see it once want to share it with friends while influencers and bloggers who see it, we'll often do so through links. Again, these high-quality editorially earned boats are invaluable to building trust, authority and rankings potential. The challenge with this strategy though is it often takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Most people don't have access to Epic research or they're really not that funny in the first place in, when they tried to do something that's humorous, it lands flat. So only approaches strategy if you think you can nail it. Fourthly, is be newsworthy, right? Because earning the attention of the press influencers, bloggers and news media isn't an effective, time honored way to earn links. Now sometimes this is as simple as giving away something for free or releasing a great new product, or even stating something controversial, which I would use with caution, right? We have Hollywood and politicians to thank for their stellar example in this way. But the, but the reality is, is try to find something that is news worthy that would appeal to your market or your industry that again would add value to them, that would be beneficial. Now, there are plenty of other examples out there, but hopefully you'll start to creatively think of how you can add value to your target audience and the internet as a whole by developing quality content that inspires and informs and educates in a way that is creative and unique. 118. Social's Impact on SEO: Now if you've been around SEO at all, you will have heard this question proposed, does Social Media impact SEO? Well, the answer is yes. But indirectly, as we have seen, when you do good things on social media where influencers hangout. It can lead to good links, right? Can also lead to good engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google. And it can lead to word of mouth which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic to your site, and similar metrics that you can see. So if you want to have an impact on SEO through social, here are a few quick tips. First off, develop real relationships with influential businesses and influencers who are related to your product market in industry, right? This takes time. So don't farm this out to a software BOD or overseas freelancer whose English is dodgy at best, it will be painfully obvious. This is the approach you have taken. You are trying to develop real relationships where it's give and take. Secondly, engage with them that is like their stuff in a sincere, purposeful way, comment on their posts. Now no doubt they are posting loads of content and are really eager to see who was liking sharing and commenting. I have found personally that most influencers are fairly narcissistic Lee, most humans and contend to port over each comment, each like in each visit, Don't worry. Again, we all do it. Now, did you know that humans devote about 30 to 40 percent of all speech to talking about themselves. But online that number jumps to about 80 percent of social media posts. Why? Well, it's a much bigger subject, but it involves dopamine and oxytocin. Do some research on the psychology of social media. It's really, really shocking and kind of embarrassing, but it's worth it. The point is, we love ourselves online. We loved talking about ourselves and we also love to see who likes us. Did they really like my post? Do they comment on it? Did they share it? So step number 2 and engage with them, right? Have these real relationships. Thirdly, communicate within industry businesses and influencers. Don't be afraid to comment or email the other businesses that are like you give genuine feedback, ask real questions. Which leads to number three. Which leads number four, big January, right? Any real relationship will be genuine, it's lasting and costly. To some degree. Make the effort, and everybody will win. Fifthly, developed what I like to call a creeper sheet. Now, it's not necessarily the best of terms I get that. But it's not as bad as it sounds. It's something I do with team members and even family members to some degree. For example, as my wife talks about things that interest her, I write them down so that I don't forget which I will forget if I don't write them down because it may come in handy while shopping for her birthday, for instance. Now when it comes to influencers, be businesses or people, you should include a list of categories or topics they like. And would they be interested? Even things like when they post, when they re-post, retweet or like or, or which type of post do they themselves get the most re-post retweets and likes from this way, when something comes across your desk, you can quickly scan the top influencers that you think would be interested, then schedule it to be posted at the right time. Again, this is a genuine relationship. The purpose of the creeper sheath is not to be manipulative, but it is to add value to other people, specifically influencers. And then sixthly, keep a shortlist of influencers, right? You don't need a list of the top 100 influencers because in most instances there are simply not that many influencers in any given industry. Generally I suggest tend to 30 influencers at max. Remember, these are thought leaders with larger followings and consistent engagement. The point is that when you get to this last step of eventually sharing your content with specific influencers, they are more likely to share it with their larger audience. This is called amplification. Your small audience meets their large audience and it just grows. And then of course, eventually share your content. Remember, influencers have large followings. Enter feeling the daily pressure to share and post trendy, likable engaging content. Therefore, they are constantly looking for the latest information news, research topics to share that their audience will like. So help them out, right? That's the point of these genuine relationships. You were finding what they like. You're sharing it with them. You're attaching your profile to it naturally and it gets amplified. I've also found that really good influencers tend to write all over the place, social, their own blogs, websites, guest blogging, PR conferences, et cetera. Now if you position yourself in their mind as a subject matter, authority and a trusted friend or some sort of relationship there, then they are much more likely to share your content. And that can have a direct impact on your SEO. In fact, the SEO industry is a great example of this, right? The top influencers are not only friends and fellow conference speakers, but they are constantly sharing each other's content. It's somewhat of a flywheel. I share yours, you share mine, I scratch your back, you scratch mine. That's the point. You want to get into their group, into their community. You want to be seen as a fellow influencer, a fellow trusted advisor and authority. And so they start sharing your content. You start sharing their content. It works like that. And that is how you can have an impact on your SEO through social channels. Before we wrap up this section on SEO and social sharing, Here's one last question I would like to address before we move on. Our social shares the same as links? Well, in a word, no, there is no good reason for this question. Around 2011, 2012, we saw a huge increase in social sharing and its effects on search engine rankings, especially when it came to Google Plus and Google search results obviously. And although there is evidence from recent research that does show social sharing link tweets, likes, and pluses affecting rankings. I would say at this time, links are considered to be a far better, more desirable, and longer-lasting way to promote the popularity of your content than any other method including social. Now, I personally would love to see a shift towards search engines using social sharing. The potential power of social signals as a ranking factor is immense. Think of personalized search results based upon your circle of influence or friends, or even personalization based on your own social activity, right? Your likes, retweets or even visits to certain pages, businesses and people. However, we're not there yet. And chances are with how friendly this social giants are with this search engines that day may still be far away. So for now, social relationship building is for the purpose of developing trust and recognition in the marketplace among food influencers. In order to earn these authentic editorial, organic backlinks. 119. METRICS: In this lesson of the SEO session, let's take a quick look at metrics. Now, metrics aren't sexy, I get it, but they are important. Now in SEO, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEO is track data about rankings, referrals, links, and much, much more. By the way, most of the metrics that we highlight can be measured for free in Google Analytics. So no matter which tool you use, you should be able to track these metrics that we're going to go through. Now if you don't track any key metrics or a defined set of KPIs, key performance indicators. It's impossible to know what is and what isn't working. Because if you don't know how effective your SEO work is, you could add an spending time and money on work, such as an endless blog that has a poor return. In the end, this could cost you more than you're willing to pay. Now, this should be bringing up a lot of recollection from session 1 about the importance of measurement in order to identify which channels and which tactics which campaigns are working the best. Now in my experience, lack of metrics can cost many organizations far more than they would ever like to know simply because there are winging it, right. Thrown out marketing campaigns that are writing lots of blogs, that are paying freelancers, but they don't understand or they don't see the return on investment. Therefore, my strong suggestion to you at this stage is you can't leave SEO up to chance. Decide which metrics are the most relevant and important for your websites SEO. And then decide how and when you will track and report them. So as we go through these metrics, make sure as a leader, either in marketing or business, you follow a tracking schedule and take conscious action to improve each of the metrics over time. Remember, as a leader, this is on your shoulders, right? You should be able to understand, analyze, aggregate, and interpret this data. You need to speak logically, rationally and professionally to each one of the metrics that we're going to go through. All right, let's start with keyword rankings. 120. Metric: Keyword Rankings: Now unfortunately, when we talk about keyword rankings, this is one of those metrics where a paid service or third party tool not only comes in handy, but it is a must-have. Now the result that you see here is from Moss. Moss is my favorite keyword tracking tool due to all of the added extra features. However, there is something like a gazillion, different keyword tracking tools all the way from basic to super advanced. Advance in this case means expensive thing, bright edge, or a conductor. Now generally speaking, despite the tool you use, all you do is input your huge list of primary keywords that you worked on earlier and then track the results. Now there's, there's no perfect way to track your exact search engine authority as a whole, but some metrics are good estimates. Although we are moving away from keywords to semantics, there is still a load of benefits for using keyword rankings. For instance, not only do keyword rankings show how you are improving or not, right, week over week for specific keywords. But they can also help you determine if you're targeting appropriate keywords when trying to outrank your competition. However, there are some pretty big limitations as well. For example, as we saw earlier, 70% of searches are considered long tail searches. That is really complicated text. There's no real way for you to track all of these searches. So why do we track keywords in the first place? Well, even though traffic from keywords only represents about a third of your potential traffic. Measuring rankings for keywords with significant search volume, that's anything over a few 100 per month, tells us a few things. Number 1, whether you're targeting the right keywords. If money or blog posts rank for their target keywords, you need to target less competitive keywords, at least for now. Secondly, it lets you know whether you're growing over time, right? All keywords should slowly improve and rank as you gain backlinks and your site becomes more trusted. If not something is wrong with your SEO plan or the keywords that you're targeting. And thirdly, whether you're transferring link juice. Well, now link juice is just a way to describe the amount of weight or authority is passed from one web page to another. Now when you get a new link to a page to one of your pages, most of its power or authority or link juice goes to that page, right? You're, you're sharing and you're receiving. However, some also flow to other pages you link to as well. Now if most of your older pages Never improving their rankings, you can likely improve your internal linking. So for instance, page a is a new article you just wrote. You receive several links from some really important.edu or.gov websites. You're getting a lot of link juice flowing to page a. Well, if you wanted to improve the ranking of maybe your page B and C that you wrote last year or three years ago or whatever the case may be and it's not doing really well. Well, if they are related pages, then you can link from page a to page B and C and share some of that link juice. Now, the real value from this simplistic tracking comes from the low hanging fruit, right? Finding keyword that continually send visitors who convert to paying customers. And then increasing focus on rankings and on improving the landing pages that visitors reach. Now, while conversion rate tracking and optimization from keyword phrase referrals is certainly important. It's never the whole story. Dig deeper. And you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable debt data about how conversion starts and ends on your site. You're going to start to figure out, wow, these three URLs or this blog post or this article, they are driving the most conversions. And by the way, this is what people are searching for when they land on this page. Therefore, you're going to start to figure out the intent, the desire, the pain points, the wants, the needs of your target audience. At least those that are converting the highest. You'll also start to figure out what's working on your landing pages and what's not working. And so over time, hopefully you're learning from these rankings of the most effective pages that are converted. Converting at the highest rate, learn from it and apply it to the rest of your site. 121. Metric: Backlinks & Linking Root Domains: Another metric you should be tracking is the total number of backlinks and linking root domains. Now linking root domains just refers to the number of unique websites and URLs that will lead to your website. Now, as we have just seen, backlinks is still one of the primary ranking factors, if not the most important factor behind rankings right now. Now they will continue to play a major role into the future, so we cannot neglect them obviously. Now what that means is that a big part of any SEO plan should revolve around acquiring backlinks. If you're not getting any or many, then there's a problem that's going to hold back your growth and you can focus on it. Therefore, measure backlinks and linking root domains to see how you are progressing compared to your competitors. Again, you're going to need a third party tool like Moz as you see here, or Searchmetrics or SEM rush or all, or all the other tools out there which are fantastic at measuring these metrics against competitors, right? Because what you can do is you can say, well for this keyword, how am I ranking overall in the search engines? And then you can start comparing what the other pages that are maybe ranking higher or lower than you, how they're doing on key metrics, such as backlinks and linking root domains. You may find that you're sitting in position number 3 and position number 1 and 2 are your competitors. And then you might see that while they're linking root domains far outweighs the number that you have or their page authority or domain authority is much higher. You can start to whittle down based upon all of these numbers. As you aggregate them, you can start to figure out, well, I know what I need to work on. If the ranking higher, maybe it is because they have more domains linking to their pages. Now when it comes to links, you also have to be sure you are monitoring both the quantity and the quality of newly acquired links and then compare that to your competitors, right? Just because a competitor has 3000 linking root domains, it doesn't mean they're all high-quality. So it is possible to have more linking root domains and rank lower. Simply because the linking root domains are not that high of quality. But when you look at your competitors, you may find some great backlink opportunities and ideas. Just by seeing who links to your competitors. You may say, Hey, there's some really easy opportunities here. For instance, take a keyword that you're both competing on. Take a look at who is linking to your competitors. And there may be some easy opportunities for you to share your link on that side as well, contact the website owner. It may be a form of sorts or it may be a partnership site that you can get into a relationship with. The question is, why should you track backlinks? Well, tracking the overall growth of your Backlinks is important. But there are three other main reasons to check them regularly. Let's go through them quickly. Number 1, it's to assign a cost per link. Now, especially when it comes to partnerships, for example, if you acquire a few really high-quality links on partner sites, but it costs you a $1000 per link. It's probably not a profitable partnership, right? The point is, make sure you evaluate the cost of links from different link building strategies and tactics. Find what works best for your budget and for the return on investment. Secondly, why do you track backlinks? Wants to see the success of your tactics, right? Similarly to the cost per link, you can also monitor how many links you get from a single tactic. For example, you might see that you get seven links from 100 emails in an e-mail outreach campaign. That's a 7% link rate. And so you want to be measuring the effectiveness of different campaigns in different tactics. Thirdly, it's defined potential relationships, right? If someone links to you, they probably like your content. So you can send them a quick email to begin a relationship that can lead to more links or other opportunities down the road. Especially if they're an influencer that does a lot of guest blogging, you want them constantly quoting you or sharing your articles or your research. So those are the reasons we track backlinks. It is a powerful ranking signal. And so again, you want to see if you are improving or not in these metrics, as well as how you compare to your competitors. 122. Metric: Organic Traffic: Now another metric that you want to measure, and this should be an obvious one, but still important to remind you of is organic traffic. Now, this is quickly and easily pulled from Google Analytics, as you can see here. But let me ask you, why do you do SEO? Well, I'm going to guess that you do it to get organic or free search traffic, right? That's a good reason. Well, since that is why you do SEO, you should be tracking how much search engine traffic you get per month and make sure it's increasing. It's important to note that you should look at it over a period of at least a few months. Every now and then because of seasonality, seasonal changes can affect traffic, especially if you're looking over the holiday season and you're wondering, well, why is it so low? Is it because we're failing know it's because people just aren't searching for your business right now. They're on holiday in the tropics somewhere. Also, it's important to see where that organic traffic is going on your website, right? You'll be able to see if certain content pieces are successful or not. From an organic standpoint based on the organic traffic, it's a great way to confirm the validity of your SEO strategy. Now, if you have a lot of organic traffic landing on your homepage, well, that means your brand is popular, but maybe your content is not. Now, I'm a big fan of people going to the homepage. Obviously that's important. But I'm a much bigger fan of people going to content pages deeper in your site. Because what that means is you have identified successfully wants, needs and pain points of your users. And you have developed good enough content that ranks high enough to not only receive impressions, border organic, click through from your target audience. Now that's really important because that's really the goal of your SEO strategy. You want to widen the net that you are casting onto the organic channels. And so you don't want people just looking for your brand. You want to hit people throughout the entire funnel with all of their different questions that they have. And you want to anticipate these questions by providing the correct solutions. So keep a close eye, not just on organic traffic, but which pages they are landing on through organic channels onto your website. 123. Metric: Average Time-On-Page: Average time on page and this is another metric that I like to look at. But, but let me preface this metric by saying it can't be fully trusted. What happens if someone opens your page and then goes to lunch, right? This happens all the time, especially with an internal traffic. If you are not excluding your internal traffic, then this is going to be completely blown out of the water. Because chances are your sales or support is going to be consistently heavily using certain pages on your website as they talked to customers or prospects. So if you view average time on page stats per day, you will notice it fluctuates radically, right? As in the example here. Now the purpose of this measurement is just to find the average over time in comparison to other pages. Again, I wouldn't use the actual metric as gospel truth, but I would use it as kind of a baseline in comparison to other pages. Now, let me ask, what do you typically do when you land on a page are not interested in? You leap right? Conversely, if the page is extremely relevant and interesting, new, spend time on it. Now in real life, your page exists somewhere in-between the two extremes. Obviously your goal should be to satisfy your readers as much as possible so that your page ranks highly. Now although you can find out an overall average time on page metric for your site in the audience overview section of Google Analytics, that's not very useful, right? Instead, you need to be drilling down and look at how much time visitors are spending on each page. Longer dwell time. And chances are you have nailed user intent for now. So this, this is especially helpful if you're revamping a few choice pages on your website. Just take a look at over time, before and after your revamped. Is it more successful, our users spending more time. But keep this in mind. Just because users are spending more time on average, doesn't mean that it's necessarily successful. They could just be more confused, right? There are some key pages that you don't want people spending a lot of time on. Such as in maybe some landing pages or checkout pages, right? If you know, hey, this is just an intermediate page that users should be spending 20, thirty-seconds on, that they're spending upwards of 60 plus seconds, then chances are you've confused them. So the reason I point this out is you don't want necessarily a higher number here. But I point this out so that you look at the averages. And based upon the topic and the purpose of the page, and based upon what you're doing, whether you're revamping or changing or improving, you can start to measure and see, hey, is this improving or not? 124. Metric: Pages Per Session: Pages per session is another great statistic. But like average time on page 82 cannot be trusted that much, especially when it comes to an article heavy website, right? The reason for this is simple. If you have a ton of articles or blog posts, well, people land on your site just for that article and leave, right? They would much rather search Google than they would searching your site. Now, I had someone recently asked the reason why visitors don't continue on a site if they liked the blog? Well. And my experience, there are several reasons. First off, most website navigations are not that helpful. Especially visitors are searching for a specific topic. They would rather cast the net wide and look at a bunch of different sites rather than just your site. Secondly, Google offers a much better search as I just mentioned, then your site does. And so I too would rather use the Google Search feature rather than a websites search feature, which is probably just some sort of WordPress plugin. And thirdly, if I searched Google, I can get the best result from multiple sites, right? Not just one. And so as much as I loved specific news sites, I do prefer to get a well-rounded results set for my search, and therefore I go to the search engines natural. Nevertheless, if you are selling a small number of products or have a good brand website, you will want your visitors to continue to read other important pages on your site after they visit the initial landing page. This is often part of a user journey. For instance, if a visitor lands on your homepage, you may wish for them to view your product page, then pricing page, then request a demo or pretrial. Now, you may have built this journey because you have seen that most customers travel that same path and asked similar questions in that order. Now to test your user journey or internal linking practices, both in content and navigation, you should track pages per visitor, right? Just to see how you are doing. Conversely, if you're getting too many clicks, again, like average time on page, it may mean that your visitors are confused. Now just take that into consideration. I have seen this using Crazy Egg and Hot Jar. People will land on the pricing page. And yet the number one click in the main menu navigation is the pricing page. Even though they're already on it, right? It means they're confused, so we have to make things a little more clear. So again, a bigger number here, just like average time on page doesn't determine success. We'll look at this number as a whole to see, is this number going up way too much or is it too little, right? If you're getting one page per session, well, people might be bored with your website. But if you're getting 89 pages per session, well, chances are they may be confused. Again, it depends upon you and your market, your industry specifically. But nevertheless, a, another good metric to know and understand. 125. Metric: Returning Users: Now one of the key metrics of success that most businesses use our returning users, let, let me present you with an example. Take your neighborhood grocery store. They want repeat visitors. In fact, repeat visitors is a good sign because that it shows that consumers are happy or that other supermarkets are too far away. But either way, repeat visitors are good, right? It means they're satisfied with your service. They like your prices and they're going to keep coming back. Now, if you own a B2C store on line, repeat visitors are extremely important, especially in this age of lessening brand loyalty, right? In the B2B world, most of your marketing and sales cost comes from customer acquisition, not customer retention. Therefore, returning users is a great sign that you are doing something right and is often a measure of how engaging your content is. Now if you're just slapping together some mediocre content visitors are not going to return. That should be obvious. You won't be able to add them to your email list either, which is another way to get them to keep coming back. Now, no matter how you're monetizing the site, having visitors who don't come back is a bad thing. Returning visitors though already know who you are and they like you, which makes them more likely to buy from you. They are the most valuable traffic. You have. A couple of important side notes to this metric of returning users. These are the people you want to retarget with your advertising campaigns. We're going to look at this much more in session six. But this is a powerful audience, right? They already are familiar with your brand. I've already clicked on your site. So when you remark it to them, they're going to be familiar with your brand, your logo, your messaging, your color scheme, whatever it may be. Another side note though, is just make sure that you are excluding current customers, especially if you have a login button on your homepage and a lot of people go to organic search typing your brand name in order to log in, right? Because this is just going to ruin all of this metric. It's not going to be meaningful. So when you have custom segments in Google Analytics, just make sure you are excluding anyone who goes to the login page or a customer dashboard or however you do it for your site. 126. Metric: Bounce Rate: Another important SEO metric that we have looked at throughout this course and have even defined a couple times is balanced rate. Now just as another reminder from earlier sessions, a bounces when a user lands on your page but doesn't interact with your website, that is, they don't click anywhere else. They either close the page or they enter in a different URL that I click the back button, whatever it may be. Now closing the paint might not be a bad thing. But clicking back is, since we can't measure this specific action, that is the closing the page, we look at the closest thing and that is bounce rate. Now, It's debatable whether or not bounce rate is a direct factor in search rankings. After all, for some pages, a high bounce rate can be good, right? It can mean that a user came to your page, found what they wanted and then left. For instance, blogs tend to have a very high bounce rate. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So if you have 80 plus percent bounce rate on your blog pages, don't think I've got to get that down to 20 percent or less. Now your homepage should be much, much less than your blog pages. And so you just have to understand the intent and the purpose of each page before you really paint a wide swath across success and failure with the bounce rate metric. However, having said that bounce rate is still our best indication of pogo sticking as we've talked about before. And as you can see here, remember pogo stick and refers to users behavior of continually hopping back and forth between search results on a search engine. Because they can't find what they're looking for. They'll hit result number two. They'll bounce back to the search engine though, hit result number 3. They'll balanced back to the search engine, right? We, we've probably all done this until we land on a result that satisfies our need. Now as we have looked at search engines, obviously want to satisfy users, which is why they don't want searchers getting frustrated by not being able to find an answer or solution. So if too many visitors to your page, click the Back button and then choose another result, your RNC potentially will get worse because you are not satisfying the user's query. Now since the bounce rate is important on a page by page basis, That's how you need to look at it page by page basis rather than just across the entire website. Keep in mind that unless you have a few 100 visits to a page, the bounce rate isn't all that accurate. So be sure you have a big enough sample size before drawing any hard conclusions. 127. Metric: Page Speed: Another important SEO metric that I look at all the time is page load speed. Your bounce rate is we just looked at, mainly depends on two things, good content and its accessibility. Now I know I'm way oversimplifying, but, but let me make this point. If your page takes too long to load, visitors will leave even before they have a chance to read it. Now, I don't know about you, but I do this all the time, right? If I'm clicking through search results on a search engine and one result takes 5, 10, 15 seconds to load. Well, i'm I'm clicking back and I'm going to the next one. Because clearly that one is loaded down with the ads are spam or stock photography or whatever it is. But it's not fast enough for my anxious needs, right? Maybe I need to grow on patients a little bit. But either way, that's human behavior. A slow loading webpage is one of the leading causes of a high bounce rate, which in turn will result in lower Google rankings. In fact, PageSpeed is so important to Google that they created Google PageSpeed Insights. Google it, look it up, entering your URL and you can see what areas you need to improve. Now, as you can see on your screen, google points out what is wrong and how to fix it. This is an actual result for Apple. Now, if you're Apple, no biggie, you have good brand awareness already. So be it. However, if you're a small fish in a big pond, then you need every competitive advantage that you can get. Ideally, you'll want your web pages to load under two seconds. But obviously if that's not possible, then the lower time per page load, the better. Try to always and I mean, always keep it under six seconds. Now to test the actual load speed of a page, you can use any number of tools online. If you don't want to use Google PageSpeed Insights, there's a bunch of alternatives such as GT metrics, Quick Sprout, Pingdom. There's a bunch of free and paid tools. Now keep this in mind. Optimizing a page's load speed is not easy if you've never done it before. There's a lot of technical terminology involved and work on the backend that will take a significant amount of time to understand and implement. So this is one of those opportunities. Either you work through the suggestions, such as what you see you're on Google PageSpeed Insights. You worked through them one at a time, reading through all the tutorials, or you hire a developer or you're hopefully your current developer, to go through a one of these tools as well and make sure that page speed score just increases. So again, just don't lose sight of how important of a metric that this can be. If you have a slow page, people are going to balance. They're gonna go to the next result on the search engine, which chances are it's your competitor. So don't give your competitors any advantage over you. This is one of those key SEO ranking metrics that you can't get wrong anymore. It's just too late in the game of the Internet to have a slow website or slow page. 128. Metric: Traffic By Device: Another key SEO metric is traffic by device. Now traffic by device was unheard of when I started developing sites in the mid 90s. But nowadays, understanding this metric is not only popular, but it's necessary. Why? Well, as you know, mobile traffic makes up a significant portion of most internet audiences. As of 2015, it now makes up over 50 percent of online retail traffic. And now years later and makes up over 50 percent of traffic across most industries. Now as a quick side note, you have to obviously know your own audience, right? I worked with an organization that targets and government agencies. And over 80% of their traffic comes from desktop computers using Internet Explorer nine or 10. Yes, you can imagine that is a lot of fun. So the point is, know your own audience. Nevertheless, that is not the case for most organizations. Why Google recognizes the importance of mobile optimization, right? If your site isn't responsive or optimized for mobile, then it's going to be obviously difficult for your readers to easily read your content, which leaves them less satisfied, which will ultimately affect your ranking. And no doubt you've come across sites like this, right? You open up a site and the text is really small or the images are running off the screen or the menu doesn't work or things overlap. It's a poor experience. And if you're like me, you bounce, right? And there goes your rankings. You may remember April 21st, 2015, that's when Google's Mobile get an update was released. Now, it wasn't quite as big as anticipated, but nevertheless, size that were clearly mobile unfriendly did take a bit of a hit. Now, this ranking algorithm that you continue to hear about is only getting more sophisticated with time. Think of this as a warning shot, right? Google will likely continue to place more and more emphasis on having mobile friendly content, which means that the consequences will only become more severe if your site's not mobile friendly. Now to check if your pages are mobile-friendly. Search for Google mobile-friendly test and enter your URL. If you fail, think good news. You potentially found some quick or maybe not so quick, wins other way and turn your URL just to do kind of a high level. It's not a perfect test. But from Google's standpoint, it will give you a ranking on whether you pass or not, concerning mobile-friendly. Now again, the reason this is so important is that people are using mobile. As you can see from this chart on your screen, 65 percent of people searching for information started on a smartphone. Bullet, they continued on a PC, some continued onto a tablet. The reality is across all of these industries, smart phones are becoming that much more important. Think about you're at home, you're in a restaurant, you're at the mall, you're walking in a park. You're not going to whip out your laptop and try to find Wi-Fi, right? You're going to do some precursory work on your mobile phone. You're going to start browsing the Internet or shopping online, are planning a trip. That's why we have all of these apps. So we're going to be looking online initially, including browsing the web. And if websites simply are not mobile friendly, then we'll bounce. And that will hurt your SEO ranking. 129. Metric: Conversions: Having done SEO for decades now, well, over 20 years now, the metric that has become the most important for me are conversions. All right, As I mentioned earlier, keyword rankings are great. But keyword rankings Don't put food on your table. So to search traffic is great, but what you're really after is traffic that converts because conversions mean dollars. Now once you understand how well your search traffic converts, you can figure out how much you can afford to invest in content and link building. You may recall from session 1, this is why it's so important to track dollars earned back to the appropriate channel and content piece. Otherwise, you'll find blind in your marketing efforts. For instance, let's say you have content a versus content B will contact a may have two or three times the amount of traffic. But if you're not looking at conversions, you don't know which one's more successful, right? Traffic is great, but it could be all the wrong type of traffic. You have to measure it all the way through to conversions in order to see if it's a successful conversion, a successful piece of content. Now this is often much easier to do with a B2C website and Google Analytics. But nevertheless, this is your goal. This is the purpose of this marketing course because this is one of your most important metrics and this is what we are after. Again, go back to Session 1 to review how to measure conversions accurately as part of your funnel. Because for SEO traffic, SEO metrics, this remains for me, the most important metric today. 130. End of Session #4: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass. 131. Session 5: Welcome to session five, where we will look at building out your own content engagement strategy. Now as you know, technology has made content creation and marketing and general far more complex. Plus the added emphasis on data-driven approaches has forced all of us to rethink the communications industry, right? The keys to breaking through the immense marketing clutter today are quality content, compelling experiences, and their effective distribution. As such, every piece of content should have a defined purpose that traces back to the belief framework that you built out in session two. In today's modern marketing world, this is a table stakes requirement that you cannot afford to get wrong. Therefore, in this session we will focus on helping you develop evergreen content that will shape, nurture, and grow the beliefs of your target market based on the personas that you have developed earlier. I look forward to walking through this all important topic with you. 132. Introduction to Content Engagement Plan: Welcome to session number five, developing your content strategy, otherwise known as developing your content engagement plan or whatever other term you want to use for it. Here we're going to call it content strategy because we referring to the strategy of developing appropriate content. Now as we begin this session, I want to underscore the necessity of this topic. First off, we're not going to give a lecture on how to create great content, right? There are too many good articles and books about such topics that you can easily find online. Rather, we're going to focus on the strategy of developing the right content, which by the way is more needed than ever. For instance, if you saw high school sports team that was seriously awful, you would say, they need a coach more than ever. Now in my world or in our world, as I look at the sheer volume of content being produced every year, experts are saying we need content strategy more than ever. To underscore this point, take a look at a few stats on this image. Now this is a great infographic from Domo. And as you look at this, I'm just gonna give you a few seconds to process this sheer amount of data that is being produced every single minute of the day. Now as you're looking through this, hopefully your mind is a little blown, right? Keep in mind, this is not how much data is generated every day. This is every 60 seconds. This is a staggering amount of information, not just information that is produced, but information that is consumed, like YouTube, over 4 million videos are watched every 60 seconds. What are people doing with their time? How are we supposed to compete in this massive ocean of content, right? But this should underscore a very important point for you. Old school foreign marketing just cannot work for you, your brand, your company anymore. Buyers like me and probably you as well, haven't become overwhelmed by the barrage of content aimed at us via websites and emails, blogs, social channels, display ads, whatever it may be. Speaking of old school, here are a few other old school strategies and miss that I hope during this session, we can finally laid to rest. First off is the spray and pray methodology. And as a side note, this is by far the most common content strategy. This is the strategy of almost every junior marketer I have ever met. And tragically, quite a few CMOs as well. All you have to do is write more content, right? We need a daily blog on anything. Let's post to social five tons of a day and on and on. Let me ask, how do you know it's the right content? And how are you measuring success, Right? The spray and pray methodologies simply says, we are going to produce as much content as possible and just hope that it works. Oh, by the way, we'll run metrics once a month for our team, pow-wow. And we'll applaud when one piece of content outperforms another. Worse yet is the old timer who comes in and says, content marketing is number two, just blogging. Now, this may have held a lot of weight in 1999, but we are no longer using dial-up to connect a static pages built in HTML. Can we not agree on that? We actually use today are to develop engaging content that meets real needs. Thirdly, you can always tell old-school content marketing by the fact it's not weighed down by analytics. Now I say that tongue in cheek, of course, the common methodology here is to post content and to move on to the next content without analyzing if anything worked or resonated with the audience. Now this goes hand-in-hand with that spray and pray methodology that simply says, hey, let's produce a bunch of content. But here, let's not even analyze it. Let's not even build out a funnel or a buyer's journey to see if anything worked or if our customers even liked it. Now fourthly, you can also tell if you're confronted with old school tactics, if you hear one of many questions, these questions can appear in your own mind or by someone else. Questions such as how many blog posts that I write as if there's a magic number, right? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Like, Ooh, I've got a team of people. How many blogs should I produce every week? That's kinda old school marketing again. Or along those same lines. How about this question? Do I really need to write in depth quality content like e-books or white papers or can get away with just kinda lighthearted thin content. Now, what you have to, here, there is the lack of desire to even invest. Helpful content, right? That's a company for its, that's brand centered marketing versus consumer centric. Or, or how about this question? How often should I be tweeting every day? Again, can I ask, are not markets, industries, and organizations unique? There shouldn't be a magic number right? Now we can learn from each other, but we have to understand our audience. Or I actually got this one recently. Is there a specific percentage of my budget that I should be spending on video? Yes. The answer is the right amount, right? There's no magic formula here. Content marketing question should always be centered on the user or founded in data. Otherwise, you're guessing. And we know that in a guessing game, hippo, highest paid person's opinion always wins. What many organizations fail to understand is that content creation, when done correctly, isn't about quantity or even a race against the competition. Rather, in a modern framework, every piece of content you create is an opportunity to satisfy leads and eventually bring a new lead closer to a sale or to inspire an existing customer to take action. Well as content Volume important, absolutely. But content synergy is far more important. In other words, there's no point in creating a 100 blog posts if that's just your end game. Or there's no point in developing those great paid ads. If you're just going to send all your readers to your homepage, right? You have to have a game plan, you have to have a content strategy. Thankfully, a shift has occurred in the marketing world because buyers and getting smarter and they have access to nearly limitless information and they're actively researching their own solutions. And that means a couple things. Number one, we have to face the fact that the buyer is in control of their own journey. The central statistic highlighting the shift is serious decisions, finding that over two-thirds of the buying process occurs before sales is even contacted. The buyer is in control of their own journey. Another step that underscores as truth is that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before purchasing. In other words, buyers are becoming much more savvy and far less dependent upon sales and organizations, right? That should both scare and excite marketers. But secondly, marketers own the tofu that is the top of the funnel. Marketers are no longer the sales support organization, but rather marketers are responsible for understanding the target audience and implementing the most effective strategies for reaching them. What this means is not a barrage of product messaging, but rather an elaborate digital funnel based upon persona beliefs that managed the buyer controlled purchase process, right? Does any of this sound familiar from session 1, the model and session to the belief framework, right? That's the heart of strategy. Rather than just going through motions. Content strategy as part of the belief framework and as part of the model, seeks to develop the right content for the right persona based upon identified beliefs at different stages of the funnel. In other words, today's market or seeks to research, understand, and develop helpful, tailored and necessary content based on anticipated customers questions, wants, needs, and pain points. Which makes this research that you see on your screen that much more sad, right? Only 38 percent of B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. Everyone else either doesn't have a strategy or the so-called do have a strategy, but it's not documented. Now, what I'm sharing with you is not something that most of you haven't heard or agree with. I believe we all can stand in agreement that having a document and content strategy is important because we don't want to be throwing away dollars writing that, we agree on that. But what's worse than that? This is something that most of us would agree with, but either don't know how to start or don't care to start. So my goal during this session is to rectify both of those challenges. That is not knowing how to build a content strategy or simply not carrying enough to change the way things are currently done and your organization. So to start this discussion in the next lesson, we will take a look again at the sales and marketing funnel. 133. Modern Marketing Funnel: Let's start this discussion with the sales and marketing funnel again. Now, this is a great example from Kano creative. I want to introduce other funnel images so you know that it's just not me who's telling you this. As you may remember from earlier sessions and most purchasing experiences, a product does not purchase upon scene up for the first time, right? In fact, according to the step from serious decisions, I just share with you, two thirds of the buying process occurs before sales is even contacted. That generally speaking, is the bottom third of the funnel, otherwise known as the Bo Fu, or bottom of the funnel or decision stage. Now if you employ a model like this, then you will realize that marketing is responsible for most of this buyer's journey, most of this process. Today's marketers are technologists that embrace marketing automation systems in order to nurture their leads through digital channels, right? It's a marketer's job to give them the fuel to move them along the funnel toward a purchase. Because according to HubSpot, 96% of website visitors aren't ready to buy. They're too far up the funnel there in the awareness or interest or consideration stage. They're not down at the evaluation and purchase stage. Now some have labeled the top part of the funnel as the content marketing funnel. The idea is the same, right? A content marketing funnel is a system that takes as many leads as possible, three step-by-step content flow, and then converts them into actual customers who pay for your products or services. It's common sense, right? Well, all of this need for context centered content may already be well-known in, in marketing circles and you may be familiar with it. Recent research still shows that 65% of professional markers do not understand what types of content are effective at each stage. That's why we have a dedicated this entire session in our course to content strategy. If you're just creating content to fill a void in your marketing strategy because it's what every marketer should do. Well, you're wasting your time, right? Quality content seeks to satisfy a specific and identified consumer belief need. Otherwise, Can I ask why create content in the first place? If you say it's terrain, well, then you need the session more than ever. The point being is this. And today's age of digital transformation, marketing plays a much larger role in the buyer's journey. And it's the smart marketer that will win this game. 134. Why Content Fails: Before we delve into the content engagement plan too far, I believe it's important to pause quickly and do a real quick reality check concerning your current content. As I mentioned earlier, we will not dive into how to create great content in this session because we're focused on the strategy of content from a leadership perspective. However, every great leader has to do a sanity check on their current content in order to see if it passes some basic tests, right? So what we're gonna do is we will do the same thing from a positive and negative perspective. First off, the negative, I wanted to take a look at why some content fails. So we can just avoid these topics and ideas altogether when creating content. Now, this is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means, but I do find that some of these topics come up regularly and therefore should be addressed. For instance, have you ever heard this? The foundation of great content marketing and SEO is good, unique content. What does that even mean? Right? It's just kind of a vague term that sounds really intellectual, but it's completely full of air. I love a UX or said about this topic, creating unique content isn't enough. Your brand has to create purposeful content and be intentional about reaching your customers in the communities that they're already a part of. That doesn't sound like good unique content, does it? Now at this point, every lazy marketer should cringe at words like purposeful and intentional, right? Because these type of words go well beyond good, unique content. Anyone can create unique content, right? Just make something up. But is it purposeful? And how do you identify that purpose by attaching it to a defined user belief or something else that we have already mentioned and that is content fatigue. Now as you're vetting content ideas during this session, please pause and remember that the Internet is increasingly flooded with generic content. According to World all matters. More than 2.5 million blog posts are published every day. Now this shouldn't be surprising since according to CMI, 93 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing. E marketer published another similar stat that said 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. That's a staggering amount of content right? Now here, Here's why I mentioned this again. Your purposeful content idea is up against some pretty serious competition to get noticed. Because there's millions of posts every day. So don't let the possibility of content fatigue discouraged you, but do let it push you to create even better content because you have to stand out in the midst of all this noise. Because another reality that you have to remember is that online users don't read, right? They skim, deja, and marketing has put together some research on the reasons why read or skim your content instead of reading every word. Some of these, like impatience as you see on your screen, are obviously harder to fight than others. However, other reasons are a part of much of the content I find online and shameful he had been a part of my content that I generated in the past. Things like text is too long to bother. And yet I continue to hear that the best content is about 2000 words long. And then I find myself imitating this because 2000 words is the magic number. Evidently 2000 words is better for a blog post and having a good blog post. Or how about losing interest? But, but I'm hitting all the right keywords you may say exactly, you're writing for search engines, not humans, so they lose interests. Or how about this one? 38 percent say poor layout. Content is anything consumable, you have to remember that text, imagery, videos, layout, make it beautiful for the user. Otherwise, a poor layout with just stuff thrown on there and some sort of haphazard way is going to lose their interests. The point should be simple, right? If you're a content creation is becoming formulaic and chances are it's going to fail. Each content has to be dealt with individually, treating carefully, researched, thoroughly, developed, purposely, and so on, right? But if you're content creation can be likened to an industrial process, then I would take a hard look at why you are creating continent the first place and if your content hasn't been that successful. So here's the question. What makes great content? Well, content marketing, according to Lee Auden, isn't just about adding more content. It's about creating information for a target audience that has a particular purpose and intended outcome. Content drives awareness, but also social interaction, customer engagement and sales. Are you catching these words? Right? Particular purpose, intended, outcome? This is heavy, right? This adds a lot of way to our job of creating content. Meaning more isn't better. Better is better. So in this next lesson, that's exactly what we're going to start to take a look at. 135. What Makes Content Valuable?: In the last lesson, we took a look at some examples of why content fails. Well, in this lesson, I want to take a look at what makes content valuable. And I want to start with this checklist here. Now when I say checklists, I'm not attempting to industrialize the content creation process. Rather, this is more like a safety checklist just to make sure I'm developing valuable content that has a particular purpose and intended outcome. Now, first off, I know I am just dogged the word unique, but I put it on this list for another reason and another meaning. The word unique here refers to not copying someone else's work, right? The reason I put this course together is because I haven't found it any in-depth marketing course for leaders, period. Hence, I wanted to develop this course. It's unique in the sense of I can't find it anywhere else. Now when you are writing a content piece for a specific keyword, phrase or topic, don't find the top ranking organic result and duplicate it in your own words, write if you were in college, that would be plagiarism. Search engines two are becoming too smart for copycat and an original work, which is why I've placed uniquely valuable. Next, if you were copying someone else's work, then you are not providing unique value because that content in some form or another already exists. Uniquely valuable. According to ran Fishkin from AWS calls this Tenex content. That is content that is ten times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword, phrase or topic. By the way, Tenex content is really hard to do, right? Not only is there a lot of really great content out there already, but Tenex content means you have painstakingly researched unmet consumer needs. And you're convinced that you have the ability and resources to uniquely satisfy that defined need. Which is why it has to be both relevant and helpful as you see here on this checklist. Relevant in the sense of, are you answering an actual question, concern, or need help by your target market? And helpful. Are you helping your target market? Are you just trying to send them a barrage of product-centric messaging because your VP of sales is directing marketing campaigns. Now remember, consumer centricity doesn't mean that consumer is everything, but it does mean that a happy, fulfilled consumer is more likely to trust you and purchase your product, which is why your content must offer number 5, great user experience. Ux designers like to remind us, you, good UX builds trust. Don't just think words on a screen is good UX, right? The modern consumers far more picky and savvy than that. Are you using the right font size, nonstop photos, engaging layout, header tags, bullet points, etc. It's all of it together. Everything on a website page, lens to user experience. Now you can do a final check if your content is really pleasing to consumer by asking this question, is it likely to spread or is it shareable? If someone read your content? Will they get bragging points, bragging rights for sharing the content with their friends or coworkers. I like what Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, says about this motivation of mediocrity. Those who build them perpetuate mediocrity are motivated more by the fear of being left behind. And in reality you can, you can tack on to that quote, that they are motivated more by the fear of being left behind, then the resolute and insatiable desire of being great, right? There's no real desire of being a great brand or a great company, right? Any real investment is going to be risky. You may put your neck on the line by spending extra time and resources. But people and content are not remembered for their mediocrity, but their brilliance, their investment, their creativity and their disruption in the market. Now in the next lesson, we will take a look at the last two points of the checklist that underscores this point of being resolute and having an insatiable desire of being great. And that is content that is interactive. Number 1 and personal number two. 136. Interactive Content: Now in the last lesson, we took a look at a checklist of what makes content valuable. Now we didn't go over the last two items on the checklist because I wanted to devote an entire video to each one of those elements. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at interactive content, a topic by the way, that he's becoming much more valuable and important today, at least in my experience, right, because people love to engage with content. Now this can be anywhere, for instance, an interactive display in an airport, to an interactive map of a city, to an interactive store listing in a mall, right? People just love to engage. Really what I mean, engage, I mean play with content. And this is especially true on line. If you ever do Scroll Tracking using a tool like Crazy Egg or Hot Jar, you will find time. And again, at least in my experience, that a good piece of interactive content will stop the user every time. Can I just, can I just say this respectively? Most users are like little children when it comes to interactive content. Take a world map and watch what happens right? In my studies, people will stop at hover over country after country, state after state, just to see the little info box pop up, then of course they have to click the little box to see what happens, right? It's just like little children playing with toys. Well, let what happened? If you have implemented something like this, then you've entertained your users. Clearly, you could have placed all the countries in the world in a long bulleted lists, which by the way, should still be available for accessibility reasons. But with an interactive element, you went beyond just informing the user. You delighted the user. Now, this is a simple example, but hopefully you're getting the point. The days of just reading content online. Well, they never really happened. As I mentioned earlier, Jacob Nielsen pointed out that users don't read. They scan, and even then they don't scan very well. The point is this, when creating content, ask yourself if there's a way for users to interact with your content. Now I'm not necessarily talking about creating a game, but what about polls and surveys that rewards the users with statistics for interacting? Or what about a personality demographic tests so they can see how they compare to other users. I found this particularly useful because no one wants to be left behind, right. We love to compare ourselves with everyone else. Even a slideshow or slider or carousel. We'll add a classy touch of animation to your page that the user can control. Again, I am amazed at how we are like hamsters on a wheel when it comes to such things, we can't help ourselves right on we go clicking back and forth just to show, I guess that we're in control or something like that. Either way people just stop and they play with these little interactions. And of course, there's, there's many more examples that you can see here. Assessments, which again, can I say, these are stunning in their effectiveness. Most people in Oregon want to know how they assess compared to others. Calculators, knowledge test questions, interactive video. And again, you can use a program like Wistia for this. Galleries, contests, sweepstakes, brackets, interactive white papers, interactive infographics. The list goes on and on. Again. This has to be up to you based upon your market and industry. But the goal is the same. Try to be creative without being ridiculous. Because people love interactive content. And as the Internet continues to grow and maturity and as user and consumer expectations grow as well, you cannot simply serve up static boring content anymore. People want to swipe, they want to scroll, they want to click, they want to hover. They want pop-ups, they want, they want all this fun stuff where they can interact and engage with your content. 137. Personalize Content: As we looked at a couple lessons ago, we went through a quick checklist of what makes content valuable. Now we didn't go through the entire checklist because I wanted to reserve a couple lessons for two of the points. In particular, in the last lesson, we went over the importance of interactive content. In this lesson, I want to go over the aspect of making it personal, right? Because as we've gone over many times in this course, the number one challenge in marketing or with content or interactive content, whatever it may be, is creating the right content for the right people at the right time. And because content is always getting better and really every element of continents getting better, it is more important than ever to question what is the right content. And this brings us to that second element that I just mentioned. And that is make it personal because it is the right content for the right person or persona that you developed earlier. Now as a quick side note, I did not say personalization. This idea of personalization opens up a vast technical discussion on how to personalize content for your users based upon a myriad of data points. Now if you are interested in this discussion, I have no doubt you'll find plenty of books and articles ready to educate you. And software that people are willing to sell you that takes care of personalization. Rather here I want to focus on making your content personal. That is consumer centric rather than just product-centric. Now, as we have already seen, content is what ranks. Content is what people consume. Texts as content, images, video and media as content even designed can be content. Without content, we have nothing, right? We've, we've gone over this many times. But if content is king, then context is queen. That is, when making content valuable, we must understand the context of how and when and why this content is being consumed. And one of the primary elements of context is the necessity of understanding our audience. If we want to win this content game, then we must understand our audience better than anyone else. Because it is only then that we will have an idea of what type of content they specifically are looking for. Because when we don't have a complete understanding of our audience, then a disconnect is created between our business and our potential customers. Think of a marriage. How good is a marriage going to be when either or both spouse doesn't invest in learning the other person, It's a disaster, right? Worse yet, it's completely selfish. And that is what happens often in content marketing. Understanding your audience is an investment. It takes time and can be costly. And if we refuse to make this investment, it usually underscores that we are selfish with our time and frankly lazy. We must heed this warning. If content marketers are putting out content that your readers don't really relate with, then it holds no value, and hence, you by association hold no value. So as is the case in all marketing disciplines, it's important to understand your audience. Understand things like how they think. That is, what is their motivation, what are their passions, what are their pursuits, right? We talked about this in session two when we develop personas, or how about the answers that they seek? Write these hopefully should have been written down during the new framework session. If not, please take some time right now and start to brainstorm answers that they are actively and presently searching for. If you don't know, then ask them or as sales and support, they may know as well what their pain points. What keeps your customers up at night? What what could be frustrating or what are their concerns? What are their doubt? Your goal here in developing content is to make their life easier by answering their questions and solving their pain points. Fourthly, is the path. That is the path they tend to take the final solution. What is their unique buying process? Again, we went over this in session 2 when we develop personas. Now, knowing this not only helps you speak their language in a meaningful way, which is really important, but from that research, you can begin crafting a documented content strategy that maps your content to the various stages of the buyer's journey. You should obviously remember this from when we were building out persona's, that Azure point, this information together and answering these questions. We need to consider audience intent as part of your process because it's not enough to know that your audience is interested in a topic. You have to understand what they want from information about that topic. Are they researching? Are they shopping or they reselling? Because only then can you make your content marketing truly conversion worthy. Now some of the most successful campaigns in history, or when businesses knew exactly how to relate to their audience. Take for instance, Nike's find your greatness campaign. Now you may remember this from the London 2012 Olympics, but when those Olympics began, Nike launch this clever campaign encouraging everyone, no matter who they were, age, size, demographic, and it doesn't matter encouraging everyone to excel as athletes regardless of their ability. Now what Nike understood about their target audience is that it's not just the championship athlete or a record breaker that strives to push their own limits, right? A large portion of Nike's target audience, our everyday athletes, otherwise known as weekend warriors. Now this campaign set out to encourage them to achieve their own defining moment of greatness. You may not win the Olympics, but hey, that's fine. You have your own limits that you can push, you have your own greatness that you can achieve. Now the reason this campaign work is quite fascinating. While the message did have mass appeal, this campaign was developed with data-driven persona's in mind. Nike understood innately the motivations of their target consumers and appeal to those emotions. While at the same time challenging common perceptions of the brand. In this case, that it's not just for professional athletes. And it was a brilliant consumer centric campaign based on data that as you can imagine, ended up doing really well. Let's conclude this section on creating personal content with a quote from Jim stumbled, a brilliant marketing mind. What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today's consumer. A mindset shift from telling and selling to building relationships. Note that word, relationship, it's becoming personal. They're not just a marketing ID in some sort of nurturing software, right? That's not the, that's not our target audience anymore. We have to know them. We have to steady them as real human beings because that is the cornerstone of effective content marketing today. 138. Full-Funnel Content Plan: We now come to the strategic part of building out a content engagement plan. Now at a generic high-level, an ice cold prospect will generally travel through three stages before they become a customer. Again, I'm oversimplifying this just for discussion sake. Now to satisfy or nurture that customer through this multi-stage buying journey, you will need a full funnel content plan or content that satisfies at each stage of their personal journey. Now as we have already looked at, let me ask our daily blog posts and only daily blog posts and good content strategy. Well, for nearly every one of you, the answer should be no, right? But it's creating top of funnel content like on a blog, important, we'll absolutely right, 70% of consumers learn about accompany through their blog rather than adds. 60 percent of consumers, according to i media connection, feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from an inner form of a blog. Now tofu content or this top of the funnel content like a blog, can be still a very effective part of a content strategy. But the operative word here is part of a content strategy. Because failing to build a full funnel content plan will leave many of your target consumers wanting more and your marketing results obviously less than stellar. This is why when we talk about content strategy, we want to be ascension of focused. Now, even though a funnel technically points down, for now, think of a buyer's journey is moving onward and upward to greener pastures. If we fail to provide an ascension path for every piece of content we create, that's not just bad marketing, it's a bad user experience, right? We've already taken a look at this in detail. Smart content marketers anticipate the next logical intent or step of their users, and remove as much friction as possible to create a clear path to conversion, which brings us back to the belief framework that you saw in Session 2. And hopefully you remember this chart, but more specifically the four columns under each persona. And hopefully each one of these four columns is mostly filled out. Well, let's walk through these quickly again just to refresh your memory. The idea here is that every persona has important needs related to your product that needs to be fulfilled at each stage of the buyer's journey, your goal, right, if you remember, is to identify and articulate those needs and this belief. Secondly, you start to draw a line from there needs to specific solutions that your product is able to solve. At this point, you can start to come up with specific content titles and topics that will potentially satisfied the defined need of the persona. You're making it personal for your product and your brand. An example would be if persona one doesn't think they have a need for your product or it hasn't been defined for them yet. Therefore, your solution should underscore the ramifications of not using a product like yours. Like what are the downsides, the risk, the dangerous, or what are the upsides, right? I mean, this is, this falls underneath that values-based versus fear-based marketing successes and failures, risks and rewards that we talked about during the belief framework. For instance, a fear-based, you could say, are you ready for an audit? Or five ways to avoid losing your business? For the values-based or the upside or the rewards, you can say things like ten unknown benefits for using product XYZ. Or it's a great time to use other companies to talk about the personal benefits that they have personally found, right? You can use case studies here, social proof, customer testimonials, what have you. Now obviously, these are cheesy examples that I just gave you. But you get the purpose of the exercise. Start filling in the blanks for content that will help solve these defined needs. Thirdly, you'll want to identify the content type. Now again, this is preliminary work, but you're starting to create a structure for your content strategy. Now Content-Type is what we'll be discussing at length in this session. I'll also provide you with loads of examples to get your creative juices flowing. And fourthly, as we just talked about, is the CTA or the call to action. Now, I cannot understate the importance of the CTA. The point of the CTA is for you to clarify for the visitor, your visitor that you know that based on the persona, the next logical step in the buying process. This is basically the ascension path that you clarify, measure, and optimize over time. Now chances are pretty good that you are not going to nail it perfectly the first time, right? No. Because you're you're kind of guessing at this point based upon your experience or the limited data that you have. So make sure you are iterating on this process optimizing over time. Now, as we have seen earlier in this course, this ascension path outlines the steps a consumer will take from the beginning to the end of their journey. Another disclaimer here, there's no clean journey for any specific persona, right? But we have to start becoming a little formulaic in our strategy and our content plan. So the reason we do this is for the benefit of our organization so that we can be sure that we have covered all of our bases to the best of our ability concerning the defined needs. Meaning we don't want to leave any need of the consumer an unsolved, alright, we don't, we want to make sure that we address every need, that we hear, every problem, every pain point, Every want should be addressed successfully. And using a spreadsheet like this example in your homework, you can start seeing where the vacancies are and what you should prioritize based upon the needs of different personas. Now let me illustrate why this is useful. I personally, in the middle of purchasing a car, it is a messy or deal and there is no easily defined path. And a number of you probably agree. However, as I personally go through the stages of this tumultuous buyer's journey. And I know I'm be dramatic, but it is a dramatic journey. I am looking for resources that will help me at each stage of the buying process. For instance, at the beginning, I was looking for the list of top cars in my price range, or at least in the style I like. These are very high level content pieces that I came across, right? And may not even be super accurate. But it gets me thinking about certain problems and solutions. Now some resources are very unhelpful and I can guarantee you they will not receive my business. I go to their website on my phone or on the desktop and and information and images are all jumbled. It's really difficult to navigate. Sorry. They've lost my trust. Now, whether it's a bad design of the website or they over-promise on content and then don't deliver whatever it is. I'm super disappointed in some content or whatever they've delivered. However, I have come across other resources that have really surprised or informed. Therefore, in my mind, these brands are now more trustworthy because they've understood my pain points. They've understood where I'm at in the journey. They have actually delivered on the promise of giving me really helpful, insightful, and timely solutions to my questions. So two for you, write your goal in your market and industry is to provide the right information for each target consumer at the different stages of the buying process. Unfortunately, research shows a shocking 68% of B2B organizations haven't even defined the stages in their marketing funnels. Now without defining these basic stages in your funnel, there's no way you can effectively nurture or even satisfied leads because there is little to no concerted effort to satisfy different problems with different solutions or to even move customers to the purchase stage. And the end result is that every consumer gets essentially the same content, which is you can imagine is not helpful at all. Now the common reason that far too many organizations give for simply creating this generic content is because, well, it's what they should do as a business, right? All good businesses create content. All good marketers or content mills and so too, we should do the same thing. However, since each person reacts differently in each stage of the funnel, content should be created for a personal funnel with a specific design and purpose in mind. Now, as we have seen before, the benefit of this conversation about a belief framework is that the content in a belief framework is typically evergreen. And that means two things. First off, the content is almost always relevant or not David content. Secondly, it is never finished or complete, which is probably why it is relevant. That is, you can always improve upon it, updated and more research, whatever it is. The point being, it is always evolving and growing over time. That is, for persona one, there may be one to three top of the funnel content pieces that address specific beliefs such as pain points, market problems, challenges, struggles, whatever it may be right, that this specific persona has. Also, when you take this scientific approach, you are able to analyze the online behavior of visitors. So you can identify which content was consumed at each stage of the sales funnel. And if the CTA that call to action effectively lead prospects from one stage to the other, right? And at the same time you can see what's not working. You'll see a low engagement on certain pieces of content or a low click-through rate on the CTAs. And you'll realize, wow, this isn't resonating. So you can switch it out for other pieces of content until you have an optimized funnel. Now if you have not filled out the belief framework, then you will need to do so before you can move on to the next stage of the content engagement plan. And that is starting to build out that content. Now, one of the reasons I love this model is that once all of the tofu, mofo and Bo Fu, that is top, middle and bottom funnel content is created, identified, segmented based on persona and belief. Then you can deploy a true multi-channel lead nurture and campaign where you're delivering the right content to the right person on the right channel at the right time. And the best part is you don't always have to create new content, right? If you see a low conversion rate on any piece of content or CTA, then you have the opportunity to test new content against your current baseline. But what you have is now a framework that you can measure and analyze and optimize. 139. Defining Content Type: As we just saw in the last lesson, there are several major elements of the belief framework. There's persona, there's the funnel stage. There's needs and beliefs, there's content and content type and CTA. But remember, the belief framework is the foundation of your content engagement plan. So once you have defined the persona's beliefs at each stage of the buying process and their needs, at least to the best of your ability. And a potential title for content that could help support that belief. Then as we just saw, you need to move on to the next stage of building your content engagement plan. And that's defining the content type. If you've ever sat down with any content strategists or marketing guru, then you will immediately recognize that there are a ton of different directions you can go at this stage. I love this image from Robin, good because it underscores this vast array of content types and categories that exist. Meaning, when you create content, do you ask a question like, is the content I create going to be informational, educational, illustrative, entertaining data analysis? Or do you have your blogs and webpages? And those are the only two pieces of content you create, right? If it's not a web page, well, it's going to be a blog. So again, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what type of content type should I create? Because different types of content fulfill different purposes. Well, to help you start this process, let's take a look at some information we briefly looked at in Session 2. And that is the different content types for each stage of the buyer's journey. Now we want to be very clear that this is just a guide for content types. There's no real scientific consensus on what types of content work best in each stage, because it does depend a lot on your sales cycle, your industry, and your audience. Also, there's a lot of overlap between content types and stages. However, that being said, this is the best we've figured out for now. And according to the research we seen and our own personal experience, it seems to hold true for the vast majority of companies we've worked with. For instance, when you're in the awareness stage, you're obviously not looking for trials and demos, right? Rather, you are learning about your wants and needs and pain points. This type of information is much more consumable and ungated content like a blog, social post, or tip sheet that is free and it requires almost no investment or risk on your part. This is why Forbes has become increasingly irritating. That is forbes.com. They're hiding their awareness stage content behind second ad. Now, no doubt you've, you've probably seen this stuff before. Now, I actually hit an entrepreneur.com blog post today that was hidden behind a 15 second ad. Her, You kidding. Just say, you know, I did not wait for the ad to complete before I bounced back. Why? Because I was looking for awareness stage content, top of the funnel. I wasn't looking for in-depth, detailed research. And I can guarantee you every time I go to the Forbes.com blog posts or articles, it's not super in depth. These are, this is just more like a content mother. They're sharing some, some nice high-level research, but it's nothing super a deep or research. So why do I have to commit to so much in order to read it? Now all of this content I'm talking about at Forbes.com and entrepreneur.com isn't really considered ungated content, right? I didn't actually have to enter in any of my information. E-mail, phone, what have you. This kind of content that requires more commitment or investment though, it's just much better further down the funnel, when you have already built rapport with your consumers. And your consumers are more dedicated in their search to the point that they are willing to give up their private information or valuable time in exchange for a demo or a trial or an e-book, or at least some valuable research. Now, I suppose I should have waited the full 15 seconds on entrepreneur.com so I can share with you what it was they considered that kind of time investment, but like most humans, I'm impatient, right? And they don't have any rapport with me so far because I know what I would have found would have been lighthearted at best. Well, let's take a quick look at the terms that work best for each stage of the funnel. Again, as you're looking at this list, there's, this isn't rocket science. But it still is important because as you're building out the belief framework in your content engagement plan, you'll want to take these terms into consideration. For instance, During the awareness stage, consumers will often, not always, but often use terms like issue or risks or improve. Now as you can see, these are vague questioning terms, right? Consumers don't have an idea of a solution yet. They're addressing pain points. And you would probably want to avoid words like comparison, where you're comparing brands or solution categories because that is simply not where the consumers yet in their buying process. However, during the consideration stage, now this search begins to narrow from a general solution to a more specific problem or maybe a provider or a service that can help. And finally, the decision stage on the right. Consumers are actively comparing and looking for social feedback and reviews. Why? Because they know they have identified their pain point. They think they have a general solution and now they're comparing specific brands and options and solutions. Now, these terms should be helpful in starting the discussion of not just what type of content could be created each stage of the buying process, but also content titles, right? Use something similar to this, or at least uses to get the creative juices flowing concerning the type of content and content titles for each stage of the buying process. Now also, what I want you to notice about this is how this information can be valuable to you when filling out the CTA column in the belief framework. For instance, when you create an awareness piece of content, do you know the next question, the next concern or answer that your prospect is seeking, right? This should be included in your CTA. If they have consumed an awareness piece of content, then be thinking in the back of your brain, what is the consideration piece of content going to be? And where can I lead them to next? 140. Consumer-Centric Content: Now I wanna take a few minutes out and underscore a really important point when creating content. And that is, when you create a piece of content, be like Walt Disney. Walt Disney is considered by many the first user experience designer because for him, it is always been about the experience. As such, he's had the guiding principle of attention to detail, focus on immersion, and the desire to constantly improve his product. So two, when we come to the belief framework, you should have the same view in mind. Have you, have you ever been to a Disney theme park? If you have, then you know, Disney's relentless pursuit of immersion. Immersion is the idea that everything is designed down to the exact detail and I mean everything, right, how cast members are to waive the fact that they are called cast members. Each plant display food items, signage, everything is exact. And you should take the same mindset when it comes to your content, right? You shouldn't just produce flipping content and expect users to figure it out and just buy your product. Note, everything should be detailed. Everything should be dialed in down to every last element. What is the content, the content type, this CTA, what needs you are addressing the beliefs that you are creating. Everything should have a purpose, which leads us to Mickey's Ten Commandments. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen these or not, but this is an amazing list of Walt Disney's wisdom concerning his attention to detail and is relentless pursuit to understand his visitors and their behavior. Now, there's a lot that each of us can learn from Disney's wisdom hearing and Mickey's Ten Commandments. Things like know your audience. Sound familiar, right? Disney, Disney's quoted for saying, Don't bore people or talk down to them, lose them by assuming that they know what you know. This is brilliant, right? We are product owners, their product consumers who are not necessarily familiar with our brand or product or mission statement or so on. So we have to not speak to them like they know what we know. We have to know our audience and what they know. Or how about this one? Organize the flow of people and ideas. Now that's what we're doing here with the belief framework and content engagement plan. In fact, that's the foundation of strategy, right? Being organized. Here's the one I wanted to point out most. Create a weaning or a visual magnet. Walt Disney said, You leave visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey. Now, Disney's design team called these visual magnets, weenies, as in a hot dog that you may remember from Disney's early cartoons. Basically, these are objects that are large enough to see from a distance and interesting enough to draw a visitor's attention. Now, you can imagine right off why this is very good advice. And when designing a stepped process like a content engagement plan, providing a visual magnet or a clue to follow will result in lower abandoned rates and increased customer satisfaction, right? People need to be told what to do on your websites, especially after they've consumed a piece of content. The point is, make it easy and satisfying for your visitors. Because even if an organization develops an amazing content piece, very often too little attention is still spent on the what's next question. The point of the call to action column, the CTA calm in the belief framework is to identify exactly what you think the persona we'll want to do next. And you do so by creating a CTA that the large, it's visible and easy to read. And like Disney said, it rewards visitors for making the journey or in case the commitment for clicking, right? This is that visual magnet that we need that says, Hey, this is what you are to do next. You don't have to guess. You don't have to choose your own journey. We will let you know what we think is going to be the next most beneficial step on your journey. Why? Because we know you. We've invested in learning about you and we want the best for you. That's why I love what Russ Henan buried. He said concerning this topic, Smart content marketers anticipate the next logical intent and remove as much friction as possible to create a clear path to conversion. Now the reason we went through the CROs session before this one, so that you can be data-driven about where the friction exists. Remember, your goal is to hold your visitors hands during this entire process so they don't have to guess where to go next. They want to be able to trust you as you are helping them and as they start to see and understand that you want the best for them, then they can trust you with their with their business and with our dollars. If they have to guess though, then chances are they will hit the Back button and find one of your competitors that will be helpful. 141. STAGE 1: TOFU CONTENT: The first stage of content that marketers often identifies called the tofu, or top of the funnel stage content. Now as a side note, there is a another stage before this one that targets anonymous visitors. That's because website visitors aren't officially at the tofu stage until they opt in to consume content. Otherwise, the visitor is just an IP address and not an actual person. So tofu could be someone subscribing to your blog, a lead in your lead list, a visitor filling out a form to establish a free membership for a content access to watch a short video or to download a guide, white paper, chichi, whatever. Now, this type of content can be characterized by having a low barrier to consumption and is generally fairly quick and easy to consume with almost no risk for the user, if any, risk at all. Again, think of blog posts for instance. However, for the sake of this discussion on content, I'm going to categorize tofu content as having low to 0 barrier to consumption. Even though as we just went through the definition, the accurate definition may be slightly different. Meaning anonymous, suspicious, and legitimate tofu traffic will be addressed in this section on tofu content. So let's take a look at the type of content that would be meaningful and satisfying at this stage for these visitors. The top of the funnel, as you know by now, is also known as the awareness or attract stage in the buying process. Now at this point, a buyer is generally trying to solve problems and get an answer or meet a need, right? What tends to work well, here is top-level educational content that helps direct them to a solution like blog posts or website content or articles or social posts. So think of content that focuses on answers or maybe a list of resources or educational that is easy to consume but teaches a valuable lesson or addresses a real problem. Or you can also include in here research data. This is good because it's light and it's repeatable such as 85 percent of all consumers do this. Fill in the blank, right? Anything that's easy to consume, an easy to repeat as great research data at this stage. Also opinions and insights, especially from respectable resources, can be very helpful here. Now the top of the funnel stage is often where we see inbound marketing at its finest. Our goals might include nudging a few potential customers torque conversion. But the way we go about that is rarely by talking about ourselves, right? Instead, it's about figuring out what the audience wants and needs to learn about, and then teaching them those things. If you're doing that well, you're associated then with feelings of gratitude and respect with your brand. You write your brand awareness only gains rapport, not to mention authority. Now all the while you're raising the competence of your readers to a point where hopefully the products or services you have to offer start to become more useful to them, right? You're going for that double win. So as you begin to think of developing content for the TOEFL stage, here are the top three goals you should have in mind. Number one, indirect customer acquisition. Again, as we just talked about your non-specifically trying to get a new customer with this one piece of content. Otherwise, you're trying to answer to many questions and provide too many solutions. This is top of the funnel content. Otherwise is the analogy I've used several times is it's like proposing to a perfect stranger on public transportation. You got to develop a relationship. In fact, you just have to talk to them first. That's what this stage is for. Rather, in this first phase of content marketing, you're trying to generate awareness of an interest in your brand among potential customers and even the market at large. Because it's not enough for people to just be aware of your brand name. They also need to be curious and interested in enough about your brand to remember your name and start integrating it into their list of trusted brands, even if they only trust your content at this stage, again, That's the purpose. The overwhelming topic of your content must be to make potential customers problem and solution aware. Any prospect must first become aware that there is a problem or a need. Remember the belief framework. And then, and only then you or your organization have a solution for it. Addressing problems may be the first time of potential customer discovers your brand. And again, that's one of the great purposes of this content. Remember, in many cases when the use case for your product isn't immediately obvious, you have the added benefit of trying to educate the market that there's even a problem or a need to be solved in the first place. Social media is a great way to make people aware of problems that they didn't even know existed. Remember the example of the heated steering wheel that I shared with you several sessions ago. Now, I personally didn't know I had this problem until I heard about heated steering wheels. Now, every time I hop in my car when it's freezing outside, I think about how I need a heated steering wheel. I did or this brand didn't create that need for me. They simply exposed and need. I became aware of a problem that I wasn't aware of before. Now, ridiculous analogy, I know, but you get the same idea. That's the purpose of the content at this stage sometimes make people, your prospects problem aware before making them constantly solution where, remember, at this stage, a visitor's value as Aleve is low, right? Because there's no guarantee that they're going to buy from you or even a product in your product category. But those who find your content helpful and interesting may journey on to the middle of a funnel if they find your content trustworthy and helpful, and they are gently guided onto more helpful content. Nevertheless, the biggest goal at the top of the funnel to make a prospect problem aware and solution aware. Now, you may have seen or heard all of the research that underscores the value of tofu top of the funnel content. For instance, according to Adweek, I read recently, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase, right? The operative word is research. They're not looking online for a demo or Free Trial button research. It's how humans in every industry operate today. Think about if you're going to buy a new software or a new pair of running shoes, or a new car, whatever it may be. Do you just go out and buy it? No, you research and we all research it. And what we come across is a lot of top of the funnel content first in our buyers journey. Now one of the most powerful ways to capture tofu attention is to optimize high-value written content, like blog posts, guides, checklists, white papers and reports with original research. Don't feel limited to written content though, right? Amazing. Top of the funnel content can also include videos, social media content, courses and certifications, and other forms of educational or even interactive content. Now, do you need all of these types of content at the top of the funnel? Know that this is quite a lot of work, right? Most businesses will post content to a blog and to a social media channel or two, and that's about it. However, once you've mastered these two types of content, your website, your blog, or social media, whatever it may be. Then you'll want to strategically add more top of funnel content to the mix, like maybe some guides or checklists or white papers or maybe even a video. Remember, the biggest goal at the top of the funnel is to make prospects problem aware and solution aware. So it could be through the use of ads. Maybe landing pages are videos, infographics, handy checklists. Just don't lose sight of the purpose of this content during your ideation sessions, I've seen organizations get crazy loss down rabbit trails during this stage. So repeat to yourself, problem aware, solution aware. You're trying to expose them to problems or needs that they have based upon your research. And then get them ready for a solution. 142. TOFU Spotlight: Social Media: Now in the last lesson, I mentioned social media as an opportunity for tofu content. So I want to take a quick minute or two to underscore that this is a very viable channel for tofu content. In recent research, 92% of marketers stated that a social media strategy was vital for their business because it creates a sense of community engagement. The key here though, is you have to foster community engagement. Now what you see on your screen are some stats from YouTube, which I find very interesting. Notice there is a huge difference between those who post to social and those who engage on social. Meaning. Having a social channel doesn't mean you are social. You have to be engaged, fostering strong ties, as it says here, with fans in your community in order to be social and reap the benefits of social. How? Well, by creating regularly updated content channels on the social platforms where your target audience regularly hangs out. You provide your prospects with easy access to your advice, right? You also give them a chance to see what other prospects and customers are saying. A prospect will also be able to instantly scan through dozens of engaging pigs, announcements, satisfied customer comments, whatever it may be, but it's all surrounding your brand, which is obviously great for you and your brand. But they'll also be able to respond to comments, right? Think of it as a relationship. How do you foster strong ties with anybody? Well, by being there, being gauged, communicating, and being responsive. And social media allows for this to happen. Today. Social media is the quickest, shortest way of getting prospects and customers to engage and eventually become brand evangelists. Aqua self-concept and he said build it and they will come. Works in the movies. Social media is a build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay. Now in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some great examples of tofu content on different channels. Just to give you a better idea of what is working today. 143. TOFU Content Examples: Now as we discussed the different stages of the buyer's journey and relevant content associated with that stage. I find it is helpful to look at examples of companies that are doing this well. So let's take a look at a few organizations and brands that are doing tofu content. Well. Now a great example of this is Farmers Insurance. They launched what they called their 15 seconds of smart campaign. You may remember this. Basically it's short 15-second videos educating their audiences on insurance opportunities. Now if you've had the pleasure of seeing these videos, they were educational while obviously also being entertaining. Maybe they were ripping off a little bit of Geico's. Well, that kinda did the same thing. Now, this is just a great example of snackable bits of tofu content that are delightful. They're shareable, and their educational and informational all at once. Now, while not demanding information or action from the consumer, they are building brand awareness and report in the minds of their target audience. The result is simply greater brand awareness along with a healthy dose of respect and trust for this brand. Here's another good example where a grand, in this case, mind-body, created an inspirational blog. What I want you to note is that mind-body is a software company providing cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry. Well, since their target audience includes those who offer wellness services, their blog ingeniously targets and speaks to their target audience. But note this, it's not about their software right there, talking about what matters to their target audience without loading down their content with brand and product messaging about all our Cloud-based business management or software, whatever it may be. The result is at their target market gains, trust and respect for this brand. Because they have shown that they are not only knowledgeable about their products and services, that they actually care about the topics and the needs and the pain points of their target audience in a personal, intimate, and authentic way, right? It's a powerful case of community relationship-building. One of my favorite examples of speaking the target markets language is Wistia. Wistia is a video hosting platform like Vimeo and YouTube. With the addition of loads of video analytics, right? It's a super valuable tool that I've used personally extensively in the past. Now think about this as it consumer hoping to get into video production, you may have an obvious need or problem. That is, you like many may realize you aren't that good at shooting or editing video. Or really any of the important factors that go into good video, including audio, lighting, software editing, and all the other topics that go into shooting actual good video. So like a normal human nowadays, you begin your search, your research online, and you begin to come across these helpful instructional videos from Wistia. Now, I encourage you to watch some of them there. They're both educational and entertaining. Some are quite funny, but they're also very informational. And as a result, Wistia has become one of the foremost respected leaders online when it comes to quick educational tutorials on everything concerning the topic of video. Now, this is what I want you to catch Wistia, rather than just talking about hosting or analytics, which are their primary products, they could have gone way down some rabbit trails about their features and their speeds and some really cool tech numbers. What they chose to do is position themselves as the authoritative, trustworthy experts concerning video recording and editing. Therefore, when their target market wonders, which platform is should I host my high-quality videos on? Who do you think is the trusted brand that comes to mind, right? This is what we've been talking about. People go there to learn about video production, aware of their need, where their problem, and at the same time discover a brand that host the videos that consumers hoping to publish aware of their solution. Remember, tofu stage, your goal is to make your target market both problem aware and solution aware. Wistia has absolutely nailed it. Another industry that has done a great job with this, or the upscale supermarket. So this is, this is almost a no-brainer. Maybe you've seen many examples of this. That is, you as a upscale supermarket, would want more people to buy more products in your store. So what do you do? You give them examples of how they can use your products, thus enticing them to purchase more. Now in this simple example, notice how Whole Foods, using their whole story blog, raises awareness for sea scallops. And a sea scallops offer while providing valuable content like recipes and cooking instructions. Now keep this in mind. This can go for most products that you wear out over time. If you sell car tires, then give examples of where people can go on long journeys and trips. Why? Because as they do, they'll wear out their tires than they need more. But you're not hurting them with that advice, right? You're helping them, you're giving them really good opportunities for them to engage in nature or see different sites or be a family or whatever the case may be. While at the same time, you are giving them an opportunity to wear out their tires and come back and purchase from you. That's what, that's what supermarkets are doing. Just talking about how they got the biggest sea scallops or see scalps tastes better than the other competitors. Know there's simply giving you opportunities in the store. You've probably seen a little recipe cards of how you can use the products all around you to make these yummy meals. Now if you've ever had to create a meal before, you realize that sometimes there are many ingredients. And so you have to naturally go to the store. So you may already have sea sculpts in your freezer at home. While you might not have a lot of the seasonings or some of the side dishes, right? This is, this is just brilliant TOEFL marketing. You're building trust and rapport and expertise in the mines of the consumer, right? You're making them problem aware, but you're also giving them real solutions, practical solutions that they can use and that are helpful to them personally. Just make sure when you're creating tofu content that you don't lose sight of the school. Some organizations are fantastic at the hard call to actions, making their prospects solution aware. But they forgot to introduce problem awareness at the same time. And without problem or need awareness, what can happen often is that your product or your service just seems unnecessary, right? It seems like an extra expense or an extra frill. So you have to make sure that you make them problem aware then solution aware. Now, in the next lesson we will take a look at how Mo Fu content will go beyond just making your visitors aware of problems and solutions, to actually evaluating the various solution categories that exist. 144. STAGE 2: MOFU CONTENT: Now we come to the topic of Mo Fu or middle of the funnel content. As you may remember, tofu stage was the awareness stage during the buyers journey. Now, during the Mahfouz stage of the middle of the funnel stage, we now move into the evaluation or consideration stage. Now as a quick reminder, there are not clean cut stages for buyers, right? I think we can all agree on this. But this model helps organizations tailor their content creation based on a different set of user requirements. In fact, this stage is often viewed as the most complicated funnel stage because of the broad diversity of interested leads who haven't been fully qualified yet. Nevertheless, if a visitor moves from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, it means you have captured their attention. Blogs, for instance, are a great way to attract attention to your website and brand. But they often lack personal engagement. That is, it requires very little of any commitment or risk from the visitor at all. Now, once you have impressed and engaged visitor, now is the opportunity for you to begin to talk about solution categories. This is also the time that your brand can start making a more central appearance in your marketing material. Remember though, that they may not yet trust you. So don't put on your sales hat yet. In fact, research that I shared before from Google and CEB in their digital evolution of B2B marketing research report, showed that people get up to 60 percent of the way through a buying process before they're ready to talk to anyone about making a purchase. Therefore, at this stage, you don't want to make the hard sell of a demo or trial or contacts sales. Rather, this is the time when you want to supply them with content that helps them evaluate you and your products as a potential solution. So as you think about content creation during this stage, just remember some basic characteristics of your audience. At this 0.1 off. You have to understand that you've already captured their attention. Therefore, you can make the most of it, right? They've committed to pursuing a solution. So this is your opportunity to expand on your content and wow them at least a bit with your knowledge and expertise and helpfulness. Remember, you are not at the selling stage yet, so use that to your advantage. For instance, if you were a car salesmen, how helpful would you be if you knew you are paid whether or not you actually sold the car. That's the idea here. At this point, you're just trying to be helpful. Share your knowledge and your expertise. You're not trying to sell them yet. You're not trying to get their dollars. And so they need to know that they need to see you as being helpful. Secondly, your visitors also know that they have a problem. Now hopefully it is you that is made them aware of their problem and need, but also a potential solution, but also uses to your advantage, right, as you go through the belief framework, this is an opportunity for you to anticipate the primary problems, articulate those problems and needs clearly, and then create content addressing the problem from a solution perspective. Now as an example, let's say you have written a book. Now hopefully you already understand the primary pain points and needs that your book will solve or does solve, right? That's why you hopefully wrote a book in the first place. Well, your marketing materials should address those very wants, needs, and pain points from a solution perspective. Rather than focusing on how great you are, you'll be focusing on the wants and needs and pain points of the user by providing a clearly spelled out solutions for each identified need. Thirdly, users and prospects at this point are conducting heavy research into discovering the best solution and whether or not your product or services a good fit for them. Now generally, at this point of the buyer's journey, the visitor is committed to finding a solution. Therefore, they are usually willing to input their private information. Think of email, phone, address, whatever it is. In your instance, they're willing to input their private information into online forums in order to receive valuable research. So two things you should know at this stage. Don't be afraid number 1, to gate this valuable information that chances are costs you both time and resources to create, right? You can actually put this information behind a form. And secondly, make sure you impress them, right? Nothing is worse than giving my information over to have an underwhelming experience, either have to wait five to ten minutes to receive an e-mail with the content I wanted in the first place or the content just isn't that great? It's either too thin, too wordy, too salesy, not well design, whatever it is, you get the point, right? This is your opportunity to impress them and wow them. If they're going to be putting in their information, make sure it is a good experience, right? Because you're building brand rapport and awareness. Well, number 4, remember at this point that the visitor is taking no action to solve the actual problem. Although they may be considered a lead at this point because they are filling out forms. They are not at the point where they are requesting demos or trials or sending you their credit card information. So just like any good relationship, you will need to nurture it by showing you are the most helpful, the most courteous and knowledgeable expert in the industry. Now, for smaller purchases, this can take a short amount of time. The research and investment that gets put into a purchase is much shorter. Phrase smaller purchase. Then for a larger purchase which can take weeks if not months. So think of this stage as a point of extended engagement where you're nurturing a lead, you're building a relationship and establishing trust between the audience and your brand. 145. MOFU Goals and Tactics: Now before we take a look at some Mo Fu content examples, I want to take some time and go over the goals and tactics of middle of the funnel content. Again, it's important to note that this content usually doesn't focus directly on what you're selling. It uses though what you're selling as a means to some other end. Whether that NB, higher search engine rankings, relationship building or problem-solving. Now the reason I want to spend some time on this section is because this evaluation stage, the middle of the funnel content, is arguably the most critical point in the buyer's journey because this is where prospective customers start eliminating solutions that simply aren't a good fit for them. Now, while the top of the funnel is designed to educate a prospect, this is the stage where you want to show why your solutions in particular are the best fit. Now as a quick word of wisdom, you also want to help people determine if they're not a good fit. Which will be very important later for healthy customer retention. Because if you convince customers to buy who aren't a good fit for your business in the long run, you can be shooting yourself in the foot in the form of high churn rate later on or bad reviews. So at this point, generally speaking, one of the first things a prospect will want to know while deciding that a product or service might be useful as whether they can trust the brand behind it. Now the best way to build that trust is by establishing domain expertise as a helpful thought leader. And helpful leaders usually offer free advice. That is why the primary goal during the middle of the funnel stage is direct customer acquisition. Your goal here is to convince him that no-one can be trusted as much as you and that they would be foolish to go anywhere else. Therefore, since people in the middle of the funnel are likely to be looking to you for content, showing that you're the experts in your industry. You'll want to produce content in effective content types that underscore this point, right? It's difficult to build a tremendous amount of trust if you only offer blog posts. Because that's generally tofu content has generally light reading. It's generally not going to show how much you know as an expert in your industry. So during the middle of the funnel stage, your content should continue to educate like a blog post, but also start the process of positioning your company as the solution to the leads, problems, needs, and challenges. Things like advanced e-books are a great form of continent stage. But so too are webinar's case studies, white papers, quizzes, and videos. They'll also do wonders with beginning to build your credibility. Remember your goal is nurturing, engagement and relationship development. That shows you are the experts in your industry without forcing them yet to make a decision for your product over others. So at this point, you'll want to make sure you have clear FAQs page on your website to answer the most relevant and common questions they're likely to have before committing to your product or service. Again, the purpose of this stage is to wow them. To really show your expertise, not just in the content that you have, but in the way you present your content. So make sure you take a hard look at the content you're creating. The goal of your content and the tactics. That is, how are you presenting it? Is it going to be interactive content? Does it show that you know what you're talking about? Are the people going to be happy that they actually gave you their private information in order to download this quality content. 146. MOFU Content Examples: Now just like we did with the tofu content, I want to take a look at some Mo Fu content examples. But before we do, let's answer a quick question again. Is middle of the funnel content really that necessary? Well, let's have the numbers speak for themselves. Recent research shows that companies with refined middle of the funnel engagement and lead management strategy CA, four to ten times higher response rate compared to a generic email blast and outreach that's from HubSpot. Now, there's a good reason for this. Middle of the funnel is usually the easiest group to target. Think about. During the tofu stage, there is often a lot of work for very little return. As you are making your target audience aware of problems and solutions and even your brand. Well, at the bottom of the funnel, consumers are often fairly convinced which solution, or at least solution category is best for them. That leaves the middle of the funnel. The middle of the funnel is prime grounded, convinced, active researchers that your solutions are logically and emotionally the best fit. But secondly, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20 percent lift in sales opportunities. That's not something good marketers take lightly, right? 20% is a huge number. Now the reason is that you have already done a lot of the sales work by answering questions, building trust, and providing some clear solutions. So let's take a look at a few examples of organizations that have done Mo Fu content really well. First off is Zendesk. Zendesk is a great example of an organization that puts out a wealth of in-depth educational content like this gated e-book, for example, on how to build and manage a virtual team. Now, this piece of content targets people who manage remote teams, and it goes a step further than just a typical top of the funnel blog posts. By diving much deeper into the subject, meaning. They reward you for reading or filling out the form for this gated piece of content. Now middle of the funnel content like this, helps point their audience to a specific solution. Addressing identified common pain point while simultaneously building a relationship between business and consumer. Can you see why someone who is actively looking for a solution to their problem could potentially be very impressed by Zendesk. Think about it. At Zendesk, knows this problem and solution so intimately and expertly, then chances are there software provides the same level of expertise and solutions that you see here in this research. In other words, they have presented themselves as a trustworthy brand. Here's another example of Mo Fu content, but this is a little more technical. This is MailChimp product guide. Now, I understand that this is super detailed, but remember, product guides like this that outline the aspects involved in a specific solution can demonstrate further benefits and features. Helping buyers understand what to expect should they purchase your product. In other words, if someone is really considering your solution, well, a well-timed to guide may provide the detail they need to make a decision. That is to be confident in making that decision. These guides provided by Mailchimp are displayed in a very appealing way. So all the points and instructions are mentioned very clearly. The point being is this. If you are looking for a service like male chimps, you're able to find a solution to your problem quite quickly, even if you don't have a specific problem as yet. This article, this page, this section of their site shows the detail and effort Mailchimp puts forth to providing the easy to understand solutions. Now obviously this is ungraded, but it does show and it does reinforce. Mailchimp has their dogs all lined up in a row. These guys are technological experts. They've got how twos and they've got instructional manuals and guides on nearly every topic that is important to me. And if they're willing to invest that much into this amount of detailed content, well then I can trust that for software is going to match that detail as well. Here's another incredible example from HubSpot. This is their customer testimonials page. Now, as you can see, there are a ton of case studies listed here that you can filter through by a number of categories. The point is this, you can find someone or several someones who was just like you and you can see what they have to say or at least the benefits that they have experienced by using HubSpot. Mo Fu content is designed to provide prospects. With the information that will put your company and its products ahead of all others being considered. And case studies are a great way to acknowledge the prospects, specific pain points and the consequences of those pain points while presenting your organization's products as a practical way to address them. Alright, Case Studies affords you this opportunity because once you have a real life examples of how you improved a customer's situation, made their life better, such as reduced their overhead or improve their productivity or eliminated their bottlenecks, etc. And these are meaningful the prospects because they showcase what you did for someone just like them. In fact, as a side note, if you want to do some comparisons, but don't want to look to critical or harsh. That is, you want to compare your product to a competitors, will let a user do it for you. For instance, a user may be willing to share why they chose you over a competitor. Well, consolidate this testimony of theirs into a clean case study and then entitle it. You can say something like your product versus the competitors. Products such as QuickBooks versus Excel, right? That's, that's a huge search term on the Internet. Or why QuickBooks isn't better than Excel. You get the idea. You want to offer evidence of your product superiority using side-by-side comparisons, study results, customer case studies, demonstrations, customer testimonials, whatever it is. But you want your customers to speak for you. Write it if you're saying your product is better than competitors, well, that it's not really that trustworthy, right? It's not that meaningful. But if you allow your customers to show why your product is better than customers by using numbers or research or percent growth or whatever it is. While that speaks volumes, right? That's what you can sell internally. And that's honestly why I'm sold on many software products. I see people just like me who uses certain product and they're convinced it's a better solution than maybe their competitors. The point being is this, HubSpot has absolutely nailed this mofo content. Remember, mofo content should not be too salesy, right? You will lose credibility because you don't appear to be helpful. Rather you appear to be just trying to make a buck. A prospect should be encouraged to reach his her home, her own conclusion, based upon what you've presented. And that's what HubSpot does here. And that's why webinars can be so helpful. Marketo, a leading marketing automation platform. They have a wealth knowledge about latest research and best practices all the while positioning themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Now thought leaders are almost always more trustworthy because if they are a thought leader than they must have implemented their knowledge and research into their product right? Now on top of that, Marketo host these live webinars that include interactive commentary, user submitted questions, and episodes that often feature expert contributors. Now, this interactive content targets those already tuned into the brand who are likely looking for a solution to their marketing automation needs. What Marketo has done, along with many other great organizations is demonstrate their healthfulness and expertise. Without strings. As such, a prospect is going to be far more comfortable with and serious about their brand. So no matter what type of Mo Fu content or content type you create. Before we close this section, I just want to reiterate one main point. Make your UX content shareable, right? Make it something that people want to pass along and allow them to be able to pass it. All right, ensure that those you target will share your content with others. The decision pool, by keeping them all in mind as you're creating content. Above all else, make sure all of your mofo content leaves the prospect with a strong sense of your expertise and attitude. Be confident, but not arrogant, helpful, but not timid and eager, but not pushy, right? Because there are still a few more steps that must take place before they commit to making a purchase. For one. You have to convince them that bind from you is the smart thing to do. This usually means providing more qualifying that information to call many fears that they may have. But this information can't just be an infographic. All right, these, these prospects aren't leaves anymore and they're going to start scrutinizing everything a little more closely. In other words, now's the time to offer a long form in-depth content like white papers, e-books, and even informative webinars. But as you do so, make sure again that it's sharable that they can share it with their coworkers or their boss or their social networks. Because you want this investment that you've made into Mo Fu content to be viewed not just by one person, but by everyone that person knows or people within their organization. So make it in such a way that people can't help but sharing it. Because at this point what you are doing is setting them up to make a decision. But not yet making a decision. But they're getting there, they're getting ready to make a decision. And so that's what we're going to take a look at in our next lesson. 147. STAGE 3: BOFU CONTENT: So at this point, you've hopefully attracted a healthy collection of leads with your tofu content and continue to engage and warm them up with your most UGC content. Well now what? Well, incomes and Bo Fu stage, which is obviously the most critical stage messenger and going for the sale at this point, right? Bottom of the funnel stages, also known as the decision or purchase stage. The bottom of the funnel is where someone is making the actual purchase decision. So remember at this point, they're ready to buy, but that still doesn't guarantee that they're going to buy from you. As I mentioned earlier, I'm in the buying a car stage of my life again. And frankly, I really disliked buying a car for a number of reasons. I know number 1, they are expensive and I know there are hungry wolves, aka salesmen who simply want to written me off, not all of them, but that's just at least my mindset. So although I am ready to purchase a car, I have identified that as the make and model and year I want. I still have to weigh where am I going to purchase it from based on who I think will hurt me less, which dealership is going to rip me off the least amount. It's sad. I know, but it underscores an important point during this funnel stage. The last choice the lead has to make is where do they get the solution they're seeking and who's going to provide it. Now this is especially important in the current industry where I can purchase the exact same expensive car from multiple dealers all within my near vicinity. So in most cases, leads at the bottom of your funnel just need that final nudge and that compelling call to action or reason to get them to make a purchase decision from you. That is the right offer and content at this stage can have a dramatic impact on lifting your conversions. If you're in the B2C realm, you can leverage a discount or promo code to use during the checkout process in order to establish maybe some urgency around making the purchase. If you're in the car industry, attractive lease and warranty options may be the deciding factor of one dealership over the other. So as you think about content creation during this stage, remember some basic characteristics of your audience at this point. Remember this, again, this is not an exhaustive list, but it should help direct your creative juices. First off, the purchase decision or closed stages where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to be a customer. That is, what are the hurdles? What are the hidden costs? What are the contracts like? How long does it take to onboard, right? This is where freemium or free trials are so powerful because you can immediately show the customer hopefully how quick and easy it is to get started using your product. And then to become a customer, all they need to do is add a credit card. There's a bunch of organizations and softwares that I use that do exactly this. And in the process, I can quickly see, oh wow, it took only three minutes or five minutes to get on board. Or the software really isn't that difficult to use. But secondly, sometimes they need that final nudge and that compelling called the action to get them to make a purchase decision. This is the point in the marketing funnel that you can be bold and direct and you should be bold and direct. If you remember the belief Framework session, tell them exactly what you want them to do and make a promise, right? Such as requested demo, purchased product, Start free 14 day trial, subscribe, whatever your primary goal may be. Make sure that there is a promised attached to the call to action and then obviously deliver on that promise. Think more like a salesperson at this point of the game. Be very direct, very specific on what's going to happen if they fill out the form or click the button, whatever it may be. Thirdly, at this point, a prospect will be gathering the last bit of information they need before purchasing. Now some may be looking for that final assurance or statistic that confirms to them that they are making the right decision. For instance, if you're familiar with the adoption life cycle, then for innovators or early adopters and maybe messaging like be the first or lead the crowd or the latest technology or whatever it is, right? You want to speak to their desire to be the most innovative or trendsetters. However, if your audience falls into the late majority and laggards, well that makes sure you underscore this safety and security and popularity of your product. Something like join 1500 organizations just like you, or we have a 98% customer retention rate, right? You're, you're speaking their language. Now this is a great time to use an online survey. Question your visitors in the stage about what they're looking for. You may find some trends here. But the point is, no matter who you were speaking to, you wanna make sure you're speaking their language that resonates with them, that makes them say, Yep, this is the product, this is service, this is the brand I want to be associated with because they get it. They understand me. Fourthly. And lastly, a cold prospect cannot evaluate your solution until they are first aware of the problem and your solution. And conversion, is that impossible until the prospect first evaluated the possible courses of action. So be crystal clear with your prospects, what you have to offer, and exactly what they can expect to receive, right? This is, again, coming back to the belief framework. This is that values-based and fear-based marketing. What is their life going to look like? How are you going to make their life better if they use your product? What exact need are you solving? Are you providing a solution for it? But also you can throw on some of that fear-based marketing and saying, Well, this is what your life will be like if you don't go with our product. Again, clarity and simplicity at this stage is paramount. 148. BOFU Goals and Tactics: So before we take a look at some Bo Fu content examples, I want to go through some goals and tactics of bottom of the funnel content. Remember, your primary goal at this stage is not just customers, but happy and satisfied customers who will become loyal promoters. So make sure you delight your customers. All right, We live in a day and age where reviews are social, their immediate, and they're powerful. So despite how you try to convince your target market, otherwise, if you fail to deliver on your promises that you make during this stage, people will know about it because people talk. For instance, recent research from search engine watch it points out 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business. So it's your job to delight your customers so that those reviews are any your favor. 31 percent of customers are likely to spend more on a business with excellent reviews. And the last that I want to share with you, 72% of customers will take action only after reading a positive review. Now, this is obviously more towards like a B to C retail store, but at the same time, we know that humans are humans. People loved to hear what other people have to say, which is why we go through the research stage, right? We're not only learning more information, but we want to find out, what do people just like us have to say about this product, this product category or this brand. Which is why a, another primary goal at this stage is repeat purchases. Now savvy brands understand that all marketing is in service of the decision or close stage. And whenever possible, closing should be a repeat stage. That is, once a customer pays for their first product, the goal is to make them pay for another product or service and become a recurring customer, right? Your up-selling, you're constantly up selling your customers. The golden number one, goal number 1, even though I haven't listed here as number three, is transactions with customers. As I've said before, there may be a lot of KPIs that you are measuring are being measured for. It could be anything from organic traffic all the way through demos requested. But only one metric puts food on the table. And that is conversions, right? So above all else, make sure the content you created this stage clarifies any remaining barriers are hurdles for your interested and engaged leads. Now my experience, the absolute easiest way to close a prospect is through ratings, reviews, testimonials, and case studies. In fact, research shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Now by itself, a bottom of the funnel offer isn't likely to close a lot of leads into customers is basically a hard sell, right? However, when you have it mapped appropriately to the buyer journey, you're combining the compelling nature of that final offer with all the engagement you've created leading up to that point. That is why when you create a content engagement plan, based on your belief framework, you're more likely to nail the closed deals and see that lift and conversions. So at this point, your content tactically should be much more straightforward. It can involve things like clear descriptions of your products that they outline the unique value they provide to customers. It can include charts that compared your various products to one another or to those of other companies. Think of the bottom funnel content as the sales material of content marketing. In fact, your sales team may often use this type of content more than any other in order to close leads and make sales. Now, I want you to take special note of this last point. Since this is bottom of the funnel content, make your sales process as streamlined, comprehensible, and trustworthy as possible. In other words, don't use two steps. If you can do one and don't hide behind your content, right? You wanna make it easy for your prospects to understand what the purchase process expectations are. Now in the B2C world, they've, they've done it a lot better. Write a five checkout page can become two or three and there's clear indications on the top of the page which step I am presently, you no doubt have seen this whether you use Amazon or any real B2C experience, B2B should do the same when it comes to defining what the purchase process looks like. So up next, we're gonna take a look at a few examples of great Bo Fu content from today's leading. 149. BOFU Content Examples: Now as we have gone over a little bit already, and Bo Fu bottom of the funnel, content can be tricky. Many organizations I've worked with believe both who content should be a single CTA that is placed in as many positions as possible across their website, social channels, email, what have you. Now, I am all for making the purchase process streamlined. But there are ways to be more tactical when it comes to this final stage of the buyer's journey. Take Kissmetrics for example. Kissmetrics is a rock start using customer stories and data in an educational and entertaining way. This is a simple, pleasing, easy to consume infographic. Now, whereas most companies will list out their product features and a text-heavy format, what Kissmetrics did is they chose to use this infographic and other attractive visual content to help close the deal. This is the kinda compelling both who content that will help sway a person's decision. Notice, it's not overloaded with too much copy because it's bottom of the funnel content. And therefore it doesn't feel the pressure of trying to speak to every persona at every stage of the buyer's journey. Rather, it shows me in clear detail the numbers I may be interested in before making a purchase. It's showing me based upon their experience, their knowledge of the customers wants and needs and pain points. Exactly what they need to say in order to close a deal, right? It's not super-complicated. It's very specific, and it's very clear. Another great example is Zapier. Now if you're not familiar with Zapier, It's just a great tool that integrates multiple application for aggregation purposes. Now Zapier has taken the demo route to the extreme, offering a free forever pricing plan to help onboard their audience. Now this is brilliant because now I am able to jump right in, actually see the product as it would be without having to go through a heavy onboarding process. Now, as with these free options, it is a clever way to warm people up to the paid services by showing them what it would look and feel like using the product and in the process, many of your final questions are answered. I'm using hot jar right now with an organization and they do this same thing. They allow the full experience, but only up to three hot maps or a few polls, right? They give you the full experience, but only in a very limited sense. So when you sign up for a full offer, then there's going to be no surprise. You know that the limit on three heatmaps is simply removed. And therefore you can measure all of your pages, right? It's kinda like buying a car. Do you purchase a new car online Simply because the statistics look better? Or do you test drive multiple cars to get the feel for which car will satisfy you most. Now what's brilliant about Zapier example is that once you sign up for the free option, Zapier cycles you back to the middle of the funnel and continues to strategically build the relationship by reinforcing the effectiveness of their platform and steering free or demo subscribers to their premium plans right there nurturing you. They're building this relationship because something has kept us user from purchasing outright. And so they need some more information, research, and confidence before they go with Zapier. So that's exactly what Zapier is doing. They're sending you just enough information in order to hopefully answer the questions or concerns that you still have before jumping in with both feet. And this is exactly what Amazon does with their free trial offer. And this is no ordinary free trial. Right there bottom of the funnel offer is a completely open trial of the entire prime service, including everything from live streaming to free digital book downloads and f3 prime, the two-day shipping. Now, as you can imagine, once the trial is over, it's hard for subscribers to let go because they have become accustomed to superior service, experiencing all that goes along with Amazon Prime. And now they can't imagine doing it without it. Think of someone like Apple giving you a free phone for 30 days. Now if it's your first phone. Well, at the end of the 30 day free trial, you may ask the question, how can I survive without it? And that's what Amazon has done to my earlier 0.1 of Amazon's bottom of the funnel tactics to create a streamlined, comprehensible, and trustworthy sales process with one-click ordering. There's not a lot of content in the course of ordering, but that's the whole point. They've taken concision of both words and process to a whole new level and their sales obviously reflexes. Now as you may be aware, Amazon's Marketplace, safe dose and one-click ordering have propelled this online giant to receive nearly 44% of US e-commerce sales, and that number is only growing, right? These are really impressive stats. And there's a lot we can learn from Amazon with their bottom of the funnel content tactics. Now these are just a few examples of what some of the biggest players are doing effectively and no doubt with a little research and with a little experience, you can see what a bunch of other companies are doing effectively and bottom of the funnel content. Now hopefully what you have seen is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to marketing content. If you do take that approach, than your content will be bloated and ineffective because you simply cannot reach every prospect with the same material, right? It must be tailored for each persona. At each stage of the funnel. If you're trying to speak to everyone, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel all at the same time, your content's going to be really long. It's going to be confusing. People aren't going to be satisfied with what you're saying because it doesn't apply to them anymore. And so too, when you start to get more refined, like this, saying, I'm going to create targeted content for this persona at this stage of the funnel, will then you find your content is a lot lighter. It's a lot more focus, it's a lot clearer. And frankly, it's a lot more fun to produce because you're not trying to speak to everyone at the same time. You know exactly what need and what pain point, what problem you're addressing. And you can do so with the best possible research and solution. 150. STAGE 4: RETENTION CONTENT: Finally, I want to quickly discuss this bonus final states that really shouldn't be neglected in this conversation of content. And that is the retention stage. Now for the sake of discussion, let's combine all post conversion actions into this final stage. Content in the retention stage, concerns any process that encourages a customer who has made at least a single sale to either make additional purchases or to begin referring you. Now the question is, how beneficial is retention marketing? Well, the benefits of improving customer satisfaction and retention speak for themselves. As you can see here, profits can increase by up to 90% after only a 5% increase in customer retention. It's because about 80% of your revenue usually comes from about 20 percent of your customers. Plus Secondly, there is a 60 to 70 percent chance that you can convert an existing customer. However, with new customers, there's generally only a five to 20 percent chance. So convert the people who are already customers by upselling them. Thirdly, loyal customers are 70 percent more likely to refer your business to friends. So men equipped them, give them the content that they need in order to share or to like or to comment on or to print out and pass out to family and friends and coworkers in such. Fourthly, your current customers are 50 percent more likely to try your new products and spend 31% more on average when compared to new customers. Why? Because they've already trusted you enough to become your customer. There's already that rapport there. They already have this respect of your brand and your products. So if they're satisfied with the current product that they're using, well, that's why they're 50 percent more likely to try your new products. Number 5, it costs. And this is such an important statistic. You need to understand this difference per industry and brand. But on average, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Now this is amazing considering 44% of COP, Benny's have a greater focus on customer acquisition versus 18 percent that focus on retention. Right now, the point should be clear. Businesses that ignore this crucial step are missing out on the most important part of their marketing campaign. Retention marketing. They're happy customers. Make sure you keep them happy and make sure you equip them to tell other people how happy they are. Which is why in larger companies you'll see entire teams dedicated to customer success, satisfaction, loyalty, word of mouth, and other similar subsets, but all share the broader goal of keeping an upselling current customers. During this retention stage. 151. Retention Goals and Content Types: Now the primary goals of this retention stage are number 1, retention of existing customers, right? Meaning repeat or recurring revenue. That is, any revenue that comes in after the first sale or up-sell, that is, increases in services above the initial purchase level. Secondly, is advocacy in the forms of number one referrals. That is word-of-mouth marketing at its best, right? Let your customers brag for you. So what you wanna do is equip your customers to do this well. And then secondly, reviews. That is public reviews of your business. It's not as powerful as referrals, but it's definitely used as valuable research by many prospects during the buying process, specifically during the Mo Fu and Bo Fu stage of the buyer's journey. So to build your customer retention and advocacy here, just a few types of content that I have found works well during the retention stage. Remember, at this stage you are equipping, supporting, and helping your current customers to be successful, happy, and proud that they chose you. So number one, something like customer support and help documentation is extremely valuable, especially the more technical your product, right? You want them to not be confused. You want to reduce any sort of barriers to understanding your product and especially being happy with it. Secondly, special offers, right? You wanna give them kinda that inside track of, Hey, you're a customer, we want to reward you for certain upgrades, occasional discounts that can garner that extra bit of good faith that confirms, yes, they did make a good purchase by going with you. Thirdly, are inside her how to use. These are great because it makes your customers feel special, right? Because no one else has this backstage pass to expert information. In essence, it's their leg up over the competition and let them know no one else has access to this information. Fourthly, is email, outreach and follow up. That gives that personal touch, especially if it comes from a real human with a first and last name and shows that you care about their well-being. In other words, at this point, you want to be reaching out to them on a regular basis, letting them know you care about them and if they have any needs or any struggles or if there's any confusion. You are ready and waiting and willing to help them. Faithfully. Effective Product UX and regular updates to your product underscore for your customer base that your product is only getting better. Therefore, they can trust that you have the best product for them. And also that are for empowers them to share your product with others. So constantly remind them of when your product is updating. Do you do to expereince four-week sprints? If you have a software, are you constantly improving your product? Let your current customers know, let them know they, they, they've got an upgraded software or that you're updating your service or you're using better products, whatever is, communicate this to them, lets them know again and confirms to them, This is great. I am using the best product possible. Now what I want you to notice is that most of this is automated content for most of your customers. Meaning, spend the time to build out your content engagement plan with evergreen, helpful and beneficial content based upon your experience with your customers. And you will find that 90 percent of the customers are taken care of. Now in the next lesson, we're gonna go through a few examples of great retention content that you've probably seen, but didn't realize what it was exactly. 152. Retention Content Examples: Now as we go through these retention content examples, it is important to remember that retention stage content takes on a different tone and voice than content higher up the funnel, where your goal is to woo prospects to making the commitment of purchasing a product. Retention content, on the other hand, seeks to reward your customer because they have chosen a form of relationship with you. Now, your job is to build their socks off with how awesome you are. Take Starbucks, for example. A study by Mintel that surveyed customers from coffee shops in the US found that 40% of the 2000 respondents in this research survey said they had purchased a drink at Starbucks, 40 percent plus another 21% who did so either at a smaller chain or independent stores. And think about those numbers. Nearly two-thirds of respondents have purchased from Starbucks. That is not just series brand recognition, but it is brand appreciation because they were willing to spend their money at Starbucks. Now the reason Starbucks success shouldn't be surprising, right? They have done an outstanding job at creating a brand and experience that is more than just coffee. Much a Starbucks can be contributed to their customer loyalty program called My Starbucks rewards and loyalty mobile apps that has helped them achieve such success. For instance, Starbucks receives millions of payment transactions per week through the mobile app, accounting for up to 30 percent of their income, right? These are loyal customers who repeat purchase through the mobile app, but it doesn't end there. Take a look at the other benefits of being a loyal customer using the app and you get free birthday reward. You can order ahead, free in-store refills and special exclusive member events and offers. All right, a huge aspect of retention content should center around this idea of exclusivity because it's also a huge selling point earlier in the buying process. Remember, what Starbucks is doing is they are rewarding their customers for purchasing from them. And hey, if you use our app, we're going to reward you that much more because we don't just want customers. We want happy, satisfied, returning customers. Now one brand that plays the exclusivity card well is REI. Now I don't know if you are part of the REI Co-op, but their rewards for customers are outstanding, right? They are a retailer. And as a retailer, they offer loads of benefits for becoming a member and hopefully a repeat purchaser. In fact, REI has something called the REI Co-op dividend. Now according to REI, your dividend is your share of the cost, annual profit. So the more you spend, the more you're contributing to the everyone wins mentality. But when you go to the members section of the website, I don't know if you've been there or not. You'll find that you get a ton of member only special offers you get access to REI is epic garage sales. If you don't know what this is, you are missing out. Kind of depends on your state. I've been some really good ones and some really good ones, but just Google REI is garage sales. You save on our AI Adventures, outdoor classes and events. Plus you get outdoor travel protection plan and similar to like insurance. And all of this is only for 20 bucks. Well, why is it so expensive? Because they're earning your loyalty, right? They want happy, satisfied, repeat customers and customer advocates who love REI. As such, they had built up an impressive community of customers who swap advice, go on adventures together, and share in this annual co-op dividend. Now, as you may anticipate, or you may see, I am a happy, satisfied REI, customer. I have experienced the benefits. Not only do I think their stores really cool, I love outdoors, I love camping and hiking, all that fun stuff. But I love the benefits from REI. So I'm not just a customer. I am a Customer Advocate. Takes to for for instance, right? So for if you're not familiar with it is just a large makeup store and I know they sell a bunch of other stuff. So I apologize if you work for support. But the point is some force a, another example of a B2C store that crushes it with our customer retention. Not only do they have a great tiered loyalty program that you see here on the right with their three levels of insider BID and robe. But their communication and unending promotions to their customers, their current customers underscores the need to spend more. For instance, check out this email on the left from C4s Beauty Insider rewards program. Now, this is a VIP level welcome email and it highlights the levels rewards, including 10 percent off the next purchase, free shipping, a free makeover highlights the benefit of using the mobile app to stay connected for even more rewards. Write this email also shows your loyalty points status just in case you're wondering how much more you had to spend to get to the next level, right? This is brilliant because they are rewarding you with exclusive, privileged VIP or in their case, BI, BI status for spending more. And therefore it makes you want to spend more because you want to get up to the next level and get even more benefits. Again, underscoring that when you create retention content, you should always be thinking retention and advocacy through exclusivity. How do you reward your customers for being customers? How do you make them feel special? Well, also encouraging them that they could be more special. And along moral words, if they just spent more, even if you are selling widgets, you are still able to support and help your customer base in such a way that they become loyal brand advocates. Remember, gaining the customer in the first place is the hard part. Once you have them, you should do all that you can to keep them happy and satisfied and really excited about using your product. Your bottom line at the end result of all of this will thank you. 153. Measuring Success: Now as you may remember, the backbone of any marketing campaign is content, right? Without content, you have nothing to mark it because content includes anything that a buyer will consume. But your content is only as good as consumers say it is. That is when you create content, it is imperative that your users confirm if it is what they're looking for or not. Which brings up two very important points at this stage of the content discussion. Number 1. As you are going through this content strategy session. And you're thinking about the different stages and the different persona's and the different needs and solutions that you have. Just remember, number one, you're not going to nail it first time around, right? In other words, you're gonna create content that you thought would succeed, but it doesn't, right? Some of it might, others may flop, may fail and it needs to be reworked or just pulled entirely. That's okay, right? We often learn more from our failures than our successes. Try to figure out what went wrong with the content. You can use a survey tool on that page that asks a question like, did you find what you're looking for or how can we help you? Or do you have a question? Right? I've been surprised by the amount of valuable information that I've been able to glean from these types of simple questions. The end result is at the visitor has helped shape the content that I delivered to them so that it's more valuable, targeted, and beneficial. My last question concerning this point is to think that you will succeed every time you create content, right? You have to have realistic expectations. You won't, as you're going through the belief framework and you're thinking about persona's in different stages in the content that you want to develop based upon the users define needs and the solutions you're providing. Just not going to hit a home run every single time, your first time around. All right, so don't beat yourself up or, or others for that matter, as you start to tailor your content engagement plan, learn from your mistakes and your successes. Look through the KPIs that we've talked about at length, measure them. Every piece of content you create first time around, we'll probably need to be revamped a little bit, right? We'll probably need to be optimized. Some, as I mentioned earlier, may need to be pulled entirely, while others just may need a little bit more research or a little bit more content, or maybe some more imagery or in different format. Just keep that in mind. Don't put these major expectations on yourself that you have to make it perfect first time around. Something of high-quality out there that is better than anything else you see on the market. And then optimize, optimize, optimize. But in order to optimize, that brings up the second I want to go over. And that is measure everything that you can. Otherwise you can't optimize for greater conversions. Right now is we've already looked at in previous sessions, one of the greatest mistakes organizations make is not setting up a process for measuring success. Specifically, there are two stages. Number 1, determine your KPIs or key performance indicators are the metrics that you want to measure. And secondly, how do you define success? What is success going to be, or what does success look like? Is there a certain metric, a certain number of downloads, a certain conversion rate? For instance, if you develop a downloadable piece of gated content, your success metrics may be number of views, bounce rate, or downloads. Right? Now based on the current metrics of your site, you should probably determine what a successful metric looks like. More important, you should determine what a successful conversion rate is. And remember, there may be a couple of conversion rates. Conversion rates from the initial click through to your good landing page, then the conversion on that page alone. Now if you have full funnel metrics, then you can actually say how many people converted who downloaded the piece of content to actual paying customers. That's the real number that you want to be chasing after. Which again brings me to the most important point. This piece of content has a defined purpose in your conversion funnel. Meaning it should find its place in your belief framework and content engagement plan. If it doesn't fit in either, then you have to ask yourself the question, why am I creating it? What purpose does it serve, or what solution does it provide? If you can't answer those questions accurately and state exactly where it's going to fit within the framework. Then maybe this is the time to put that piece of content on hold and focus on elements and interactions and content that will actually fit within the belief framework. Now, if you notice, there is not a linear path with marketing, right? As we've just been talking about, it's cyclical. You continue to come back to the basics of defining purpose, measuring success, and optimizing campaigns. Now the benefit of this approach is that in a linear marketing strategy, the goal is quantity, right? The more content, the more blogs, more effort, more internal activity, the better. I'm going to make my numbers, I'm gonna get my bonus. My bosses going to be happy. Because in many organizations that's the generic sign of success, more is better. However, in this more modern cyclical marketing strategy of optimization that we've gone through again and again. The goal is not quantity per se, it's quality first and foremost, which means less content. But targeted content that fulfills a distinct defined purpose. That is less noise and activity and internal politics and more pursuit of understanding your target markets, wants, needs and pain points, and also less waste, right? You're not developing stuff with no purpose. Rather, your content fills defined needs and your engagement plan and addresses specific purposes and beliefs. It targets the user's needs. It provides real solutions. It may be a new way of looking at content, but it is what every consumer wants, right? I have questions and I am looking for answers concerning certain products or certain industries. It doesn't matter to me as a consumer how much a company knows about random topics in the industry. What matters to me is if they are able and willing to answer my most important questions at my exact stage during the buyers journey. Now, if you will take the time to do this, well, everything that we've talked about, you will find that you will begin to dominate your competition because you have earned the trust and respect of your target market by answering their needs and providing solutions to their specific problems. 154. End of Session #5: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass. 155. Homework 5: CONTENT ENGAGEMENT PLAN: In this homework session, we are going to look at the content engagement plan. Now the content engagement plan is simply one step beyond the belief framework. Right? In the belief framework, you had this great overview. It's really a high level overview of defining the persona, the funnel stages. And then sum these columns that you actually see here. Things like the need, the solution that Content-Type and then the CTA, right? Those are the four columns underneath each persona. In the belief framework. However, when you take a look at the belief framework, it is a great way to organize your evergreen content, but it is not getting you set up necessarily, actually go and create content. It's simply organizing the content and the content types in and titles and such. The content Engagement Plan is the next step. So again, I'm trying to break this down is simplest possible, so you aren't overwhelmed by the content creation process. You'd go through their belief framework. And then you can start to copy and paste some of these columns right in here into the content engagement plan. But as you do so you'll quickly recognize you will need more information before you go and create full-blown content. The last thing you want to do is to sit down in front of your laptop with a word processor open and you start to type, right? You want to go back to your old school days where you created outlines and you did, you're researching, you formulated your plan of attack. That's what the content engagement plan is all about. This is your plan of attack. And so what you have here is one row per Content-Type. Your belief framework is the matrix. This is simply you breaking it down for either yourself, when you write it down the road, a team member or a content writer. Now I have down here a Tools tab where I've included a number of links to different content writing communities. I've used writer axis religiously hundreds of times. They are fantastic. I will give a content writer something just like this that we're gonna go through. And they come back two to three days later with a ten hundred and fifteen hundred word article, well-written, well-researched, because they had a lot of good stuff to go off of. And so there are about $0.10 a word for the top-notch content writers. Now as you can imagine, you do the math, 1500 word article is going to cost you only a $150. That's money well-spent in my books. You can also go to something like Upwork or freelancer. There's another side I haven't. They're called boost content. They do a lot of global content and translating. Find one that works for you if you're not gonna do it. But in order for you to give a content right or something, you have to organize your thoughts. You have to organize the content. And that's what this is for. So let's walk through this really quickly. Content title is simply that catchy title that will engage your prospects. It's what's going to answer that question. Deal with their pain point, whatever it may be. Now this is a spreadsheet, so feel free to use as many rows as possible in here you can, in this one cell give 345 different content tidal ideas and let a content writer figured out right there, the content experts let them mole over it and figure out something that would work. We've already talked about type. Is it an ebook as it a white paper is a blog post. The need is the specific need of your prospect and the solutions, how you specifically with your product or service can provide a solution to that name. Ctas, the action you want them to take once they consume your content. What do you want them to do next? Where should they go next? Remember people like direction, they need direction. And again, this is mostly copy just from the belief framework you can expound on a little bit more here, maybe give more ideas for a content writer. But mostly it's just copy and paste. Again, these two columns are from the belief framework. You have the funnel stages at top, middle, bottom of the funnel, and persona. Which persona are you targeting? In these last two areas, the green and the orange, this is when we get into the details, the details of the content being written. So when I talk about details is how many words do you want it? What kind of tone and voice is this for? Where is this going to live on your website? How is it going to be used? This is the details of the content that may help a content, right? Or you can even get into a long description about where it's going to be used, how it's going to be used, and the overall theme of the content, that type of thing. Target topics and keywords. Remember, you are writing content to satisfy a specific need or search for this user. And so that's where this comes in. You want some clarity around this content. You don't want to be bounced around from five to ten different keywords you want to target. One specific keyword. Remember, each keyword should have one URL and vice versa. And so this content piece, this content URL should have a defined a set of topics or keywords all related around the same thing. Identify those here and remember it for it to be consumer-centric. These are things that should matter to the consumer. This is where you can start to break out the outline, and this helps content writers or even yourself down the road. You may have a brainstorming session and say, Okay, I'm gonna write out the three to five primary points. And I'm going to write out some sub-points or maybe some paragraphs underneath that. Feel free to use as much space as you want right inside of this cell in the Google sheets. In order for you to clarify the concept, the high-level overview of this piece of content. Lastly, our image, assets and then references and sources. Images and assets are the things that you're going to include on the content piece that make it more valuable. And I underscore the word more valuable. You don't want to include content or video or a download if it doesn't add value, just because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't mean it's right. You don't have to have an image halfway down your blog post if it's just not going to add value, right? If it's just a stock photo that you found online that's cheap and it looks cheap. It's actually going to devalue your content. So in this section, you want to include exactly what is going to provide value and add value and benefit your users. The references and sources also adds value to your piece of content and benefits to users, right? If you're quoting lots of research but you're not referencing anyone, how did they believe you? How do you exhibit you're trustworthy authority. If you're just kind of randomly spouting out this information. So here you will want to include those high value references and URLs and websites, government websites.edu, or maybe some industry leaders in here. And again, this is going to be very valuable for content writers or yourself down the road. When you start to build out this content, you know exactly where to go, right? This, this should remind you of your old school days when your teacher taught you how to build an outline for your content and you had some structures, so you just didn't sit down to your word processor and start typing. This is the step between the belief framework and the actual content creation itself. So for every piece of content you've identified in the belief framework, you should have a corresponding row here that details what this content is about. 156. Session 6: Welcome to Session six, where we will take a look at the topic of multi-channel lead acquisition. Now in today's world of the fully integrated consumer, it is more important than ever to understand the priority and role of every channel and every device in your marketing tool kit. Which is why in this session, you will learn how your business can design and optimize lead acquisition campaigns through the major channels including social search and email. Now the purpose of this lesson is for you to comprehend and develop multi-channel lead acquisition and lead nurturing programs. Because you've already developed your models in session one, the belief framework in session two, and the content that fills out the belief framework, concession five. This session is the culmination of all the other sessions. So I look forward, point together all that we have learned in the previous sessions so that you can complete this course with the necessary skills and knowledge to be an effective leader in today's business world. Good. 157. Introduction to Multi-Channel Lead Acquisition: In this final session, Session 6, we will be diving into multi-channel lead acquisition campaigns. Remember it as its point of our journey. We have set up, number one, our analytics tracking model for our specific journeys. We said that the belief framework, based on specifically defined personas, the content that should match with the belief framework in our content engagement plan, as well as CRO, conversion rate optimization and search engine optimization, which deals with optimizing conversion rates in our funnel and driving more qualified organic traffic. This is the foundation, the backbone of your marketing machine. Before you ever drive traffic to your website. That is, your main marketing collateral. You have to make sure the experience is satisfying and success can be quantified for reporting an optimization reasons. So now we get into the question of how do we integrate buyer journeys, paid, inbound social, e-mail and content marketing in order to drive lead acquisition. Well, as with organic, we want to take a smart approach rather than just winging it, right, or creating a lot of social posts or sending a bunch of e-mails are paying for ads without knowing why. So before jumping into all the possible channels and campaigns, you can run that driving engagement by anterior stellar content. Let's lay out the foundational rules first. Now we've already walked through a few pieces of these sections already. But as you think about expanding your marketing channel plays, these are fundamental elements that you should keep in mind. Now in the next few lessons, we will go over each of the topics in detail, but for now, let me introduce them. First off, as you remember, we should always take a data informed rather than just a data driven approach. Why? Well, because we can't always wait on the data. Sometimes we move forward based on our best assumption, measure the results, and then learn from it. Remember, even the best data must be mixed with experienced because experiences to always be an important factor of our marketing efforts. Therefore, if you're starting a new campaign or you just built a new product or new website, there may not be enough data for you to go off of at all. So do your best with once you have and the data will come in if you have followed the processes we have walked through in earlier sessions. Secondly, all channels are part of the user journey. Your website may have the final destination URLs where a user goes to complete a specific goal or task. But social e-mail paid and these other channels are also very important in light of the entire user journey, right? Users have to start somewhere. Our job is to figure out where the users hangout and where they start their journey and then meet their needs. Better yet, we want to wow them with a tailored content for each channel because not every one of your consumers are going to start their search on an actual search engine. We have to keep that in mind. And that brings us to number three, Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC. Know if you've ever taken a marketing course, so you have a marketing degree, then you have read multiple books on this topic of IMC because it is that important. Now the idea that the high level 60000 foot idea of IMC is that all content should be tailored. But uniformed. That is, your brand story and messaging should be uniformed in tone invoice, right? That is your branding play. But it should also be tailored for each platform or channel. For instance, you will speak differently on Facebook than you do on LinkedIn, right? This is natural. It's maybe the same audience, but the atmosphere demands that we speak differently. So speak in a tailored way across as many channels as is reasonable. But make it sure that it lines up with your brand and tone and voice. The fourth fundamental is the idea of screen or device agnosticism. Now that's simply refers to marketing content, creative message or idea that can be seamlessly dispersed across the digital diaspora that is functioning perfectly on any screen while also being instantly recognizable as part of a connecting campaign. Now again, this should bring you back to integrated marketing communications, right? You have your brand image, but it's tailored on each device. Fifthly, is a branded style guide. Now brand and style guide, if you're not familiar with it, is just a set of standards or really it's internal agreements within your brand for the writing, layout, and design of content and communication for your brand. The idea is that the brand and style guide establishes and enforces brand styles, tone, and voice in order to create a cohesive communication strategy. Now like with many of the list that I've shared across this course, this too is not an exhaustive list. However, as we go through these fundamentals in detail and as you are able to implement as much of this as possible, you will find that your multi-channel lead acquisition becomes less of an esoteric mystery that is simply too difficult to even fathom or think about. Rather, dare I say, it becomes quite doable. It becomes reasonable because you have built the foundation and you've formulated a strategy. So first up, we're going to take a look at being data informed. 158. DATA INFORMED: The first fundamental element we will take a look at is being data informed. Now you will note that this is in contrast to being data-driven. And this is an important distinction because metrics are merely a reflection of the strategy that you have in place. Let me explain. Data is powerful because it is concrete, right? I think we would all agree on that. For many entrepreneurs, particularly with technical backgrounds, empirical data can trump everything else. Best-practices guys with fancy educations and job titles and, and for good reason, right? I think we would agree that data is very important. Now, It's really the skeptics best weapon and it's been an important tool in helping startups solve problems in new and innovative ways. As you may remember throughout this course, data has been trumpeted as the all important foundation before engaging in any other marketing activities. You have to set up your metrics, your analytical tools, then publish, then measure, then optimize, right? This should sound familiar. However, let me back off the petal just a little bit and say this. It is easy to go too far. And that's the distinction between data informed versus data-driven. Ultimately, metrics are merely a reflection of the product strategy that you already have in place and are limited because they're based on number one, once you've already built, that is you can only test what you have built. And secondly, it's based on your current audience and how your current product, be it an actual product, or you can call it a service or your content, whatever it may be and how your current product behaves. But it says nothing about a different or even healthier audience. Therefore, being data in form means that you acknowledge the fact that you only have a small subset of the information that you need to build a successful product. After all, your product could target other audiences or have a completely different set of features. And therefore your data would be completely different and change. The point being is this, no one ever has completely perfect and total data. It is always, and I repeat, always partial and limited by many factors. Plus if we sell our soul to just data, then what do we do with loads of personal experience that may give us accurate gut instincts, right? I've been in this industry for over two decades and I've learned a lot. I've seen trends, I've seen movements and markets and industries shift and change and develop and grow. What do I do with all that personal experience? You see in light of a lack of data, personal experiences, absolutely invaluable. Here's my advice. In the face of having little data, as most of us do, move on what you know or feel to be true unless the data obviously shows otherwise, then and only then adjust your course and efforts accordingly. Therefore, in light of being data informed, here are some important aspects that you must know or learn. Number one, you need to know how to measure success. What is success to you? What tools are you going to use? How are you going to measure it? Secondly, make sure your accounts are sinks. And again, we're actually going to go through each one of these in detail. Thirdly, UTM codes. Now we've already spent some time in this a few sessions ago, but I want to rehash is again, just in light of the topic. Now, using Google Analytics, UTM codes is how we can drill down into specific campaigns from specific channels. If you don't use UTM codes on your different channels, then you're going to be missing the opportunity to track specific traffic from those channels for specific campaigns. Again, we're going to walk through this later in the session with you. Number four, dashboards. Dashboards are the end result of all your hard analytical work. You have to be able to display the data in a legible dynamic format. Yes, you can pull custom reports every time or you can use one of the dashboards that we created for you in an earlier session. Or you can build up beautiful custom dashboards in Google Data Studio which I really enjoy using. There's lots of templates in there. Or you can even use a custom software like Kissmetrics, mas Searchmetrics, SEM rush, or a dozen others in order to have easily printable and email ready dashboards. All right, This is, this is super handy if you happen to be really busy and just need a quick overview of your activities because we're going to go through this once you want to avoid is what a light Analytics calls the data Death March, you don't want to spend all your time aggregating data, formatting data, building out your charts, and making it all a beautiful. Only to send it to an executive who says, wow, this is really interesting and never looks at it again. And nothing changes in your organization because of it. You want to automate as much of this as possible, which is why I put this emphasis on dashboards. All right, In the next few lessons, we are going to walk through each of these in detail. 159. Primary Success Metrics: Let's start this lesson on measuring success with a quote by Lewis Carroll. If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there, right? Good old sage advice you've probably heard before. Now this should sound familiar because as we've mentioned earlier many, many times, you need to have identified your own success metrics. If you're not measuring the right success metrics, then there's no way to know if what you're doing is working or not. You can be doing all of this activity. You could be traveling down all of these different roads, so to speak. Going off the quote, we're doing all these different channels and focusing on all these different campaigns. But if you're not measuring, as we talked about in session number 1 with a model. If you're not measuring every step and you don't have a defined goal, then you have no idea. If your R, If you're achieving success. Remember, smart marketing uses a scientific rather than an artistic message. I am all into understanding your brand story and telling it in a way that resonates with your audience. I get that, that's really important. But if you're not measuring the story you are telling, then you will always be guessing at what works and why it worked. Metrics help keep us honest. They also help keep office politics at a minimum while encouraging thoughtful and pointed dialogue. So let's quickly go through this list to cover some areas we have already looked at, as well as introduce some new channels. Number one is Website Metrics. Assuming the majority of your content is web-based, then the backbone of your content measurement should revolve around your website analytics. As we've said many times again, you don't need to memorize and obsess over every single measurement and a tool like Google Analytics, right? There's a lot of them in there. However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, be careful that you're not too short-sighted and focus on just a single measurement like page views or number of sessions. Instead, we recommend that you track, analyze, and respond to a number of success measures, including the following big five measurements that we've gone over before. Pageviews, time on-site, new users, bounce rate, and inbound links. Now once you're comfortable with these five, you're going to expand a look at the other measures of content engagement and user experience that we've gone over. Again. There are many more that I look at regularly, but dial these in first before you look elsewhere. Secondly is qualitative data. As we have looked at in length in earlier sessions, do not underestimate what your readers have to say about you and your content. Do you have an inline survey tool on certain pages, for instance? Well, if not, it's a really easy tool to install and yields great results. How about your comment section? Or as you may ask, what common section exactly, right? Every marketer's goal should be to turn their website into a vibrant community, fostering discussions and listening to their readers. Gone are the days of us as the so-called webmasters using the bull horn with our customers, right? It's no longer a one-way street. But rather, today we have a discussion where you communicate and listen and respond accordingly. Another metric that you can measure, our social media metrics. Now it's pretty easy to start drowning in social media metrics and between engagement, reach and more vague measures like share voice. The truth is that social media is one of the largest sources of big data in the world. And as we've looked at earlier, social signals are increasingly tied to SEO. Therefore, you can't ignore these numbers as a measure of how well your continent received. The good news is, there's nearly as many social media tools to help you measure success as there are ways to approach this, again, start simple. And if you're going to go full bore into social media, then you may want to be using a proper tool with analytics like HootSuite or Sprout Social. Know they're not free and yes, they do cost money, but they are well-worth it if this is a channel that you are going to invest in heavily, leads generated is a, another very important metric to measure. Remember the purpose of a content marketing department is to attract qualified prospects who might one day become customers. If you're not already focusing on SEO conversion, optimized landing pages and lead generation content like e-books. In addition to blogging, Well, it is time to expand your repertoire. Some content case studies have shown as high as a 35 percent web conversion rate based on generating more and better quality white papers and other offers. As I just mentioned. However, you're not just looking for leads, right? You are looking for qualified targeted leads. Anybody can get leads, just pay for them, right? That's an easy thing to do. Hire a freelancer to get their friends and families to fill out forms. But that's ridiculous. Therefore. Number five metric on this list is revenue earned. Now there are a number of different ways this can be attributed to your marketing efforts. And we have looked at these before, like first touch, last touch and multi-touch or marketing originated versus marketing influenced. What do you need to do is find a number that works for you and stick with it. Point being is this, are you able to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts? If this sounds foreign to you, then start with session number one. Again, it will do you some good because again, the only metric that puts food on your table and keep your business afloat is the revenue number. Right? And the revenue numbers attaches we just went through to the qualified targeted leagues number. Again, it's not it's not attached to just leads in general. So leads generated and revenue earned go hand in hand. Number six is subscribers. Subscribers is a metric attached to recurrent content like a blog or article site. Now if you have nothing of the sort yet, then this metric will not be obviously important to you. However, if you do have a weekly blog or more, then the number of subscribers is a powerful measure of success because it shows that your content is resonating with your target market. Plus building a list of loyal readers is the most effective way to gain repeat visits and convert these readers into community members and ultimately customers. Now, if you're a subscriber list is stagnated or it's shrinking, then take this as a pretty clear indicator that your quality, depth, or value aren't what they used to be or what your readers are looking for. Now, while subscribers shouldn't be the only measure of your content success, it is still a pretty important metric to watch closely. If you have an e-mail newsletter, which a suggestion that you do, then email newsletter metrics is another important measure of success. The truth is, email marketing still has the highest ROI of any form of marketing. Now we're going to take an in-depth look at email later in this session. But using your email newsletter to deliver your belief framework content, engagement plan to your prospects is almost a sure fire recipe for success. The common email metrics that you should be measuring include things like email, opens, e-mail, click-through rates, opened a click-through rate, conversions, sender score, even unsubscribes. Now, if your content is relevant, high-quality, and tailored to the needs of your prospects, then you'll see regularly high or increasing results. Again, we will focus on this more later in the session. Number eight is SEO metrics. Now to be honest, there's an immense amount of overlap between Website Metrics, social media metrics, and SEO metrics that won't be changing anytime soon as search engines continue to include a wide array of factors in ranking webpages. Now for a refresher, I suggest you visit the SEO session. Nevertheless, for now, the high level metrics that you should be paying attention to include things like website rankings, organic click-through rate, increased page authority from a tool like Maus, page visits, user behavior on your site, conversions and ROI. Again, we wanted to much more in depth to a lot more metrics than just these in the SEO session. And I suggest again as a refresher, just go back and take a look at that. Another metric that you can measure our thought leaders. Now as we looked at in an earlier session and as Interbrand points out in their research, the value of your company probably isn't measured in physical assets anymore, right? Over the past 30 years. In organizations, true market value has shifted to include factors like web presence, reach, and digital influence. Meaning you have to ask the question, is my organization a respected presence in my niche, in my enjoin, invitations to speak at industry events are right for popular blogs or be a guest presenter on a webinar, or some of the other hallmarks of earning a coveted spot as a thought leader. Now while these are measures, we recommend using a tool like cloud or the pure index to determine how you're really stacking up against your competitors. When it comes to shaping thought. Again, people aren't going to buy from an organization that isn't popular or they don't respect or they don't trust. And so understanding your ranking here in kind of the peer index helps give you an idea of where you rank amongst your peers. Sales and closed loop analytics. Now I through this last metric in here, just as reminder that most of us will be asked some time over the next month. Show me the ROI. Now whether or not you've actually heard this, which I doubt because I think every one of us has felt the pressure to prove the value of their work at 1 in their studies show that the chief executives really do care about sales and Closed-loop analytics, which are measures of which content marketing materials lead to closed customers. And the value of these leads. Trust us, you probably don't want to attempt this one with pure spreadsheets unless you've got a lot of time on your hands. Chances are actually you are probably using spreadsheets right now like most people. Instead, please choose a hybrid content management relationship management system like HubSpot, that integrates with Salesforce, which makes it super easy to track each of your customers journey from their first visit to your website all the way through to pain customer. Because the goal here is you have to be able to, at least to the best of your ability, attaching dollars to each of the channels. Again, this should sound very similar to Session 1. Fun. I am a huge fan of full funnel analytics. Now, since this is just a quick high-level overview of metrics that are important to a leader. I would encourage you to view earlier sessions to dig in deeper on any one of the topics. Before we close this section, I want to remind you of a recurring theme throughout this course. What you can't measure, you can't improve because you don't know what's working or you don't know what's not working. Rather, instead of optimizing elements that are not optimized and repeating the successes. All you do is push your marketing activities on, repeat. And you just do the same thing week after week, quarter after quarter, year after year. So my encouragement to you is measure, measure, measure. Because if you're not measuring that you don't know if you're improving. Now if we had just one adjustable dial in marketing, well, then it would be easy, no-brainer. But the reality is that there are multiple personas coming from multiple channels, visiting multiple webpages, interacting with multiple CTAs, landing pages and forms, all of which end up purchasing or engaging slightly differently. The end result is a sea of numbers. So if you're not measuring, then you will not be able to identify your weaknesses or strengths, your opportunities or threats. And so again, my encouragement to you is measure, measure, measure. Alright, next step we are going to move on to making sure your accounts are seeing. 160. Syncing Your Accounts: Now this is actually just a quick and short lesson because again, we are speaking to leaders, but it is still a necessary and important point. And that is make sure your accounts are linked. Now, again, this is just a simple technical setup before you do anything else to make sure that you are actually measuring performance. Meaning, does your Google Tag Manager accurately measure events that are recorded by Google Analytics and displayed in Google Data Studio. Have you properly integrated the Facebook or LinkedIn tracking pixel with the appropriate events attached is your Google Search Console sink with Google Analytics. Does your Kissmetrics integrate perfectly on your website? Are you measuring the right keywords and competition in Manaus? Nor are you even tracking user behavior with Crazy Egg and hot jar or is Optimizely integrated with Crazy Egg? Here's the point. And none of this may refer to you because you use a different software or a different system. Here's the point. If you skim over this crucial setup step, then you will find yourself missing crucial data later on in your marketing campaigns. And then you're going to have to go back and you're going to have to integrate one at a time. And then you're going to find missing data in your reports. The point is, do it first and do it right. Now for most of the tools that I've just mentioned, it's actually quite easy. You're copying and pasting paste in a, what they call a tracking pixel. It's just a piece of JavaScript. It's a copy and paste piece of code. It's not that difficult to do. A developer can do it in less than a minute. It really is not that difficult. If you use a CMS like WordPress, then chances are your theme will allow you to do it quite quickly. There's some easy plug-ins that will help you out with this. On the software side of it, like in Google Analytics and Google AdWords or Search Console or what have you. A lot of these sinking elements happen in the admin section. All you have to do is go into the sink accounts section, whatever it may be entitled for each of the software. And make sure that you've linked up each of the accounts or as many accounts as possible. Again, this is not a difficult or thorough step, but it is a necessary one in order to have accurate data throughout your marketing campaigns. 161. Tracking & UTM Codes: Utm codes, as you may remember from an earlier session, we did take a high-level overview look at UTM codes. But now that we're talking about channels and these different channels, this is really where UTM codes shine. And so I want to take a little bit more in depth look at this topic. Now, what our UTM codes and why do leaders, business and marketing leaders need to know about this? Well, first off, using Google Analytics, UTM codes is how we can drill down into specific campaigns, from specific channels to see what is working and what is not. If you don't use UTM codes in different channels, then you are going to be missing the opportunity to track specific traits of these channels and of these campaigns. And then you won't be able to perform proper marketing attribution. Secondly, as a leader, you set the standard of consistency. If your team is not using standard UTM codes, then your data will be inaccurate and it will reflect on you and will not help you make the appropriate decisions. So view or your team are tagging an accurately or incorrectly or not at all, then you'll actually be adding to work instead of making it easier. So let's start with a basic, but a very common example. As you can see from the URL, I've included three parameters after the question mark for my sign-up page on mysite.com, UTM source, UTM medium and UTM campaign. Now, I can see that anyone who clicks on this link will be tagged as coming from Facebook as organic traffic as opposed to paid and has interacted with my fall conference posting. Now there are three primary UTM variables that you'll be using for most of your campaigns, and those are the ones that you see here. Now campaign sources, usually the search engine or platform that you're running the ads on, or you're placing your link on Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, websites, partnerships, whatever it may be. Secondly, is campaign medium. And this is used to state the type of advertising or link or marketing campaign that is using the URL. Is it PPC is an email. What have you? Thirdly as campaign name. And that is simply the name of your campaign word of wisdom here, make sure every time you create a new URL with UTM parameters and you're referencing the same campaign. Make sure that campaign name is always the same. Any variation of it will dilute your data. Now remember, these don't have to be overly complicated, but they have to be consistent. But as you may notice here, there are two more UTM codes. Now, if you're being hyper targeted in a paid campaign and you want to know how different keywords and paid ads have an effect on audience and value. Then you can use the UTM term variable. I just put in your keyword that you're using, or you can use the UTM content. This can be used for things like AB testing and content targeted ads. In reality, these are five variables that you can use to track whatever you want for your campaigns. The benefit to using Google parameters here is that this information will be cleanly displayed and accurately displayed with uniformity. In Google Analytics. The real benefit in Google Analytics is primarily filtering and attribution. Now, as you have access to all of Google's filtering capabilities through Analytics and Data Studio. But you're also able to attribute perfectly. For instance, if you asked your team, how do LinkedIn and Facebook differ in their efficacy? Walden UTM codes comes to the rescue. Or how does Facebook ads traffic compare with Facebook organic traffic? Again, UTM codes will help disseminate this information clearly noticed. Google Analytics also allows us to track a single campaign's performance across channels. When you click on that campaign, we can then dig down into source and medium. Now hopefully you can immediately see how helpful this is when you're analyzing your traffic. Plus with the other tabs, you can pass in additional information that the browser and the analytics tools simply cannot collect. For example, information about the audience that click the link or the specific element that was clicked. So as you probably are aware of by looking at this information, UTM codes are only going to work if some best practices are followed. First off, you have to have consistency. Without consistency than your data will simply not be clean, as I mentioned before, and hence, it will not be useful. So one of the most important activities, albeit laws you can implement in your organization, or at least for yourself, is having a UTM spreadsheet that lists out all the tabs you'll be using. We will go over an example of this in detail during the homework section. Next. To go along with this though, have a naming convention guide with easy to follow instructions. That is, if a UTM tagging question arises. Not covered in your naming conventions guide will add a new example or rule that abides by your naming logic. When your team has questions about naming UTM parameters, this document should answer them. As an example. Just to clarify a little bit what I'm talking about. Let's say you have a yearly conference. Now you can have just the conference title as the campaign name, but that's, again, not going to be very helpful, right? You need to show that this conference is different than the one last year. So in this guide, you want to be able to detail out how you're going to display the name of the conference, potentially the location if it changes, and the date or year of the conference, all in the campaign name. That's the purpose of this guide, which leads to the second best practice. And that is, keep it simple. As Albert Einstein said, Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Point bean, simplicity should be a design goal. Unnecessary complexity should be avoided. So aim for short, simple and descriptive UTM parameters. If you can say something in one word instead of to stick with one word. Because if you have two or the UTM parameters become very complex, there is much more potential for human error. Thirdly, avoid repetition. Never repeat yourself when creating UTM parameters, right? Because repetition makes reports difficult to use. Utm source and UTM medium must be different. If you have a Facebook post, then make sure the source equals Facebook and the medium equals paid or organic, or whatever your personal naming convention dictates. Don't fudge on this and just say source and media and all they're the same because your reports are going to end up being confusing in the long run. Fourthly, lowercase. Now although this point does fall with inconsistency, I pulled this point out to stand alone because of its importance. Google Analytics is case sensitive, library or impede that. Google Analytics is case sensitive, meaning capital conference name is different than lowercase conference name. Even using camel casing can be a risky human error that can skew your data. So to reduce your chances of air, stick with lowercase, which leads to number 5. And that is use dashes versus underscores or even spaces, right? Because spaces will break your URL. I will let Matt Cutts explain why this is important. And here's a direct quote, and he's from Google. If you've been around at all, you know the name Matt Cutts. With underscores. Google's programmer roots are showing if you have a URL like word, one, word to Google will only return that page if the user searches for word one underscore word to, which almost never happens. If you have a URL like word, one, word to that page can be returned for the searches. Word one, word two, and even word one word to. Google doesn't algorithmically penalize for dashes in the URL. So just be sure to use dashes instead of any other symbol just for consistency sake. As I shared in an earlier session, Google has a helpful tool called the campaign URL builder. And you can find it at the URL on your screen or simply just Google, google campaign URL builder, which I will also share in the homework section. Now as you can see, you simply enter your information in the top two to four fields. Again, I strongly suggest at least four fields. And voila, your newly created URL will appear below. This is the URL that you enter into Google AdWords, facebook, LinkedIn, e-mails, send a partners wherever you use your URLs. In the homework section, we'll take a quick look at this tool as well as the UTM spreadsheet and the Utopian naming conventions guide. Our ideas are just that though. They're ideas that have worked for us. If you want to implement something internally that works for you, then please do so. Again, the purpose of the UTM codes is to have helpful, useful, and accurate reports for all of your marketing campaigns. So do just that. Make sure it's helpful for you. 162. Homework 6 UTM Codes: In this homework lesson, I want to take a look at UTM codes. Now we talked a little bit about UTM codes, the three primary elements being source, medium, and campaign, and, and of course the URL as well. In here I listed out an idea, kind of a starting list of different sources and different mediums. So you get an idea of what is a source and what is a medium, a sources, where do they come from? What major platform was it an e-mail? Was at search. Was it social or was it a partner or was it your own website, promotion, what have you? The medium is the element within the platform, so to speak. For instance, Google have both organic and paid, right? Linkedin, it is social, but you can also do paid. Now, this isn't your master list, you need to create your own. So use this as a template because some people will use CPC here or PPC or paid. Find a naming convention that works for you. Edit this list as much as you want. Remove, add to it until it becomes your master list. The idea is that you and your team, whenever you're creating a URL that will live anywhere outside of your basic website, then you will use these as your UTM parameters. Now, under the naming convention, tab, I have a list of very small list of best practices that we went over in the video lessons. Number one is lowercase, and secondly, use dashes and then the date, choose your own date. This is a format that has worked for me because I want to be specific. Other people will simply have the four digit year and then they will spell out the month. April, May, June, whatever. For instance, here are some examples. Ceo newsletter takes place on August actually, July 15, 20th, 18. The webinar, the cost of living. That's an August, August third, 2018 in the fall marketing conference and so on. So this is what it would look like for your team to use it. They would go to the UTM codes. They would select one of these. Ideally, they would copy and paste. But I'm sure they can probably type and spell this correctly. They would select a source, select a medium. They would select the campaign. And then they would come to Google's campaign URL builder that you saw in the homework. The source would be Google. The campaign will be paid. We will come back and we would literally just copy and paste the actual campaign name. Now, as you scroll down here, you're going to see this URL pop up. This is your actual URL that you're going to then put into Google AdWords. If, for instance, this is what this URL would be used for. Now I can change us up and I want this to be faced. Now I'm creating a Facebook ad. Here is my Facebook ad. Now the benefit of this is that now you know the difference between these two cliques. They may be going to the exact same page. But now you've specifically identified between Facebook paid versus Facebook. Facebook organic or social or just a generic Post. Google paid versus Google organic, all going to the same page. But now you've simply helped build out your analytics that much more. So again, not too difficult to do. The challenge is in making sure that you create these naming conventions and that your team will use these naming conventions. 163. Custom Dashboards: The last topic of BIM data informed is this idea of dashboards. Now you may remember from our CRO and SEO sessions, the importance of developing dashboards. I would strongly suggest you revisit those earlier lessons to make sure you are properly visualizing your data. Now the benefit is that you can quickly scan over all your numbers in one report that can be emailed, distributed, or printed. Refining and perfecting this report over time will help you lead your marketing efforts more effectively than trying to dig into all the data on a daily basis. Word to the wise. Don't try to get this perfect right off the bat. Try to put in there maybe 12 or three metrics that you're constantly looking at and build from there. Don't try to put in 12 different metrics because hey, that's what all the great dashboards have just put in what's useful for you. And over time, you may need to put in another metric in order to answer another question. Now as you may recall, we have placed prebuilt reports in the homework section from an earlier session. We'll do it here as well. So you can view them again. As we've mentioned earlier, tailor your dashboards for your product, your market and organization, right? These are to be helpful for you. So customize them until they are helpful. Don't be afraid to delete some of the elements and the metrics. And if you do eat too many, well, just download our copy again and start all over. The purpose again is for you to get one overview visual of all that is going on in your website, which is why I have different dashboards for different reasons. Some are based on channels. Sum is entirely about organic traffic. Some are purposely for a specific section of my website. And so I personally have anywhere between six and 10 dashboards per website that I just quickly scan through. And even among those dashboards I'll find I'll have my top two or three dashboards. Again, the reason is, is I don't have time to dive into all the analytics tools and start to process all that information. I want a dashboard that I can quickly look at. Email it, printed, distributed, whatever it may be. And so it's helpful not just for me, but for those who are asking similar questions. 164. Homework 6: DASHBOARD & REPORTS: In this homework section, I want to go over the Google Analytics dashboards and the Google Analytics reports that we have generated for you. Now, you can click on these and you can attach them to your specific Google Analytics account. And so these dashboards are already pre-built. We've used these for years. We've optimized them, continue to improve upon them, as well as custom reports. Now as you can see here, lets start with dashboards. Actually let me use this as an example. This is a typical dashboard. I got this from analytics. This is just Analytics is a great website. If you haven't been there, please go there. They've got a lot of great tools for you to use. But this is just a great image of a typical dashboard. You can start seeing right now, real-time, who's on your website? Real-time page views, real-time active users, where are they coming from in the US? Revenue by metro, right? Because there's this there's revenue section here. So this is, this is a really nice, just quick overview. What are the device categories people are using mobile versus tablet and desktop. This is what a Google Analytics dashboard is like. Now we've created a custom ones for you over across all these different categories. There's the typical overview, which is your quick snapshot. So maybe you look at this once a day or once a week. But you know that you have a bookmark somewhere in your browser that you can just click two and then see this custom dashboard. But we've also included all these others. And you can, you can include all of these in your own Google Analytics account, or just a few of them, let's say to really running on social media and Google AdWords. This is really valuable information to see, just a general snapshot. How is your Google AdWords performing? Where are people clicking? What's their engagement like? What's the bounce rate? Like? Something like SEO is great for organic, right? We're gonna go over SEO in the next session. But I wanted to include all these dashboards here for you to install now so you can start taking a look at and getting familiar with what a leader should be looking at. Alright, I'm, I'm not having you go in. I'm not teaching your Google Analytics and all the intricacies of segments and filters and all the admin features. But what you should have are just basic reports. Plus it makes you look good as a leader to say I've got my own dashboard reports and built out in Google Analytics, where you can dive in a little bit deeper and generate custom reports. Now Google Analytics is really a set of hundreds of different reports that you can then analyze and tweak a little bit. Well, that's what we've done here. We've found the most important reports, the most valuable at least to me. And then we've included them here for you. They've already been tweaked, they've already been edited. Such things like all traffic sources. This is a fun one hour and day. What is the most popular hour in the day for your website help day of the week. Internal site search. If you have something like that, popular pages versus popular landing pages, these are the pages people landed on when they came to your website versus just pages in general. So include each of these. All you have to do is click here, click on each one of these reports and each one of these dashboards and they will be included right into your Google Analytics account. Or you can just come to the solution gallery and you'll see actually all the dashboards right here. So have fun with this. Again, it can be overwhelming. So I would suggest you install all of these first, see which ones you would use. Maybe you don't use all of them. You can still keep them in your account is not going to hurt anything. But just take a look at them, see if you can't start understanding and comprehending the data enough to start making informed CRO decisions. 165. Homework 6: SEGMENTS: I wanted to share with you another tab here in the homework section for CRO. And this is the Google Analytics segments. Now just like the custom dashboards and the custom reports, we've also included Google Analytics segments. Now, remember when you're looking at a typical report in Google Analytics, you can look at it for all visitors or specific visitors that have certain attributes about them, such as converters, one visit versus two visits versus three visits. I find this valuable to figure out how many visits does it take before people convert? You can do something like customer versus prospect, right? If you have a log-in page on your homepage or a login button on your homepage. Well, you want to exclude all this traffic because it's just going to ruin your numbers for CRO and all your testing down the road. So you want to remove customers when you're taking a look at your prospect traffic. This is just a browser one. I find this one fascinating. Who's using a really old browser? I worked with an organization that sells to government agencies. And you would be surprised how many people are on IE nine? Yes, this is from many, many years ago, IE9 or less. And so this is just important. Nonetheless. This is a good one. This is based upon the demographics, and this is just millennials. So based upon the age, you can dive down further. You can change this up, uses as just a baseline, right? Uses as a baseline for generating more segments. So you say, well, I'm not interested in this. I'm interested in people 65 and older, or maybe 49 to 59 or whatever the case may be. Use this segment as a template to build out more same thing with this, who's on Chrome browser versus Safari. Or you can even go the country route or the regional route. So use these, install all of these just by clicking on them again. Installed them into your Google Analytics account, but then start generating more. Take a look at what I've done in here. And in my Google Analytics account, I have about a 100120 different segments for different organizations. But just because I like to dive in different angles depending upon what I'm testing and what I'm looking at. And so take this as just a baseline. You can find a lot more custom segments online for free. Just type in Google Analytics segments or suggested SEO, Google Analytics segments, whatever the case may be. And you will find a whole bunch of these at, you can just add to your account. Again, if you add too many, you don't really know what they're for. Chances are it's gonna be too overwhelming and you're not going to use them. So start off with something simple like this. You don't even have to have all of this, right? Let's say you want to figure out who converts after three or four visits only. Keep it simple. Use them, get rid of the ones you don't use, and then search for ones that you think you might be able to use down the road with future testing. 166. ALL CHANNELS ARE PART OF THE JOURNEY: The second fundamental rule is that all channels are part of the journey. And before we dive into this section, let me underscore an important truth. Each user is unique and probably has found you through a different series of events and touch points on different channels, right? I think we all understand that. Therefore, since that's the case, each channel requires tailored content that resonates with the user in that environment. Now we're going to look this subject in depth in the next lesson. But for now it's important to note that each channel can play an important role in the buyer's journey. And certain channels simply were better at certain stages of the funnel. Now you may remember this very basic buyer's journey from session 1. During the top of the funnel stage or the tofu stage, you're creating a belief that there is a problem or a need, a pain point, or even a desired right? It's it's very high level and non-aggressive. During the middle of the funnel stage in the buyer's journey. This is where you create belief that there is a solution to the problem or pain point or need that you have already identified and that's worth investing in. The bottom of the funnel stages when you create the belief that you and you alone have the best solution to their problem or need. Therefore, taking this one step further, our job as marketers is to take into consideration the entire buyer's journey and the buyer stage and then serve tailored content in the appropriate environment. For instance, social media may not be the best place to target bottom of the funnel, consumers not saying it can't be done. Facebook and LinkedIn have lead ads. But generally speaking, trying to sell a product when people are watching videos of cats are catching up with her friends is generally the wrong venue. I personally have found very little benefit from doing this. I'm spent thousands and thousands of dollars trying to market to people who just aren't ready to buy it. I think we all can understand to some degree how annoying this can be. Have you ever had a friend who at the same time is a pushy salesperson, right? Don't get me started on multilevel marketing because it's such a great way to lose a lot of friends fast. Why? Because people are expecting friendship and casual conversation. But what they end up getting from you is a hard sell. I had a friend and is in quotes here who recently reached out and wanted to get together. I obliged then was frankly looking forward to it. Well, after we sat down, he started walking through a clearly memorized a script and then he asked the question, Hey, do you have the right assurance that your family will be taken care of after you pass away. And and oh, by the way, here's some really good insurance that I am selling. Now what made it worse is that he brought along what I thought was his friend but was actually his insurance coach. Yes. It was a disaster. But that is exactly what countless companies do every day. They speak the right language and craft the right story, but they deliberate in the wrong venue and on the wrong channel. It's simply cannot be well-received. However, coming back to social, social media is a great place to start a conversation and position yourself as an informative, creative, helpful, trustworthy expert. I seen it done well over and over again, right? Facebook, for instance, is a place for friends. So be a friend of funny front of creative friend, a, a likable friend, and watch what happens when you tailor content for that channel specifically. Now to help comprehend this concept again, here's a list I've, I've shared with you earlier of just the different content types for each major stage of the buyer's journey. Again, I want to be clear that this is just a guide for content types, right? There's no real scientific consensus on what types of content work best in each stage, because it really does depend a lot on your sales cycle, your industry, your audience, and so on. Pause, I think is important to note. There is a lot of overlap between content types and stages. However, based on my experience and what I've heard in the industry, this really is a good guide of where you can target specific consumers at different stages and what content just seems to work best. Remember, all channels are part of the user journey. So be sure to use each channel to the best of their ability. Not that you have to use all channels all the time, but generally only larger. 167. INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS (IMC): We now come to one of my favorite topics in today's marketing world, and that is Integrated Marketing Communications or IMC. Now, as I mentioned before, if you've taken a marketing courses or you have a marketing degree, or you've been a marketing conferences. You will probably have heard this term used and maybe even overuse time and time again. But nevertheless, it is more important than ever that we grasp this concept of integrated marketing communications. So let me start this section by asking a question. What is the current state of your lead generation success rate? Well, according to a Content Marketing Institute, roughly 85% of all marketers are making lead generation, their primary goal for this year. But as we saw in the last lesson, not everyone can dump millions into multiple marketing channels to reach their target audience. If you are like most companies, you have to be selective. So the question is, what are savvy marketers doing to save time, money, and generate leads, right? If you have a limited budget, how are you going to generate those high-quality leads? Well, these savvy marketers are using IMC, integrated marketing communications to build consumer trust and boosts our ally. So rather than giving you a textbook definition of IMC, let me share an example from Red Bull. Let's say Bob likes red Bull. Bob is an adrenaline enthusiast on the weekends, but is a coder developer during the week and he happens to watch sports in the evenings with his friends? No, this is not me. This is just an illustration in case you are getting any ideas. So this is how Red Bull would essentially tailor content for Bob on, let's say just a typical Monday. Using IMC. Monday morning, Bob is on Twitter checking in with his fellow techies and he sees this ad, right? It's a generic ad, but it's targeted for him and it works on Twitter. While working on a major project. Later on in the day he'd been, sees this ad come through his LinkedIn profile. Wow, it's catchy, it's kinda cool. It speaks his language. Yeah, this makes sense to him. Well, as he's leaving work, he sees this ad in the train station. He's like, Oh man, this is exactly what's resonated with me. It's been a long day and wow, that looks good. Well that night at a pub with his mates, he is watching sports and this ad pops up. He's like, wow, this is incredible. And you guys are glued to the TV and you're laughing. You're talking about how awesome it would be to do something like that. Notice the Red Bull on the side. Well, a television ad comes on during this Sports Show reminding him of how he used to be more extreme in his evenings. And so he's watching this and he's like, Wow, that used to be me. That's kind of cool. Red Bull gives you wings. I want to be young again or whatever it may be. Well, on his way home later that immediate catches up on Facebook and sees a short clip of some fast vehicles in icy conditions. And this is an ad on Facebook that has targeted him based upon his last clicks, he's into vehicles and racing and, and snow and stuff. And so Red Bull creates an ad specifically for this target audience. Now before closing out for the night, he jumps on Instagram to show off how great his Monday was, only to see another incredible add of the latest extreme sports action, which works really well on Instagram because it's artistic and it's adventurous and it's probably got some really cool tagline. Well now, as you remember from the last session, this simply represents telling a cohesive brand story through tailored content on each channel. Now as you can imagine, this is a really silly example, but you get the idea right. Throughout your day, you start to see different ads for the same brand. But it's shared differently. It speaks differently. It has a different tailored aspect to it for the channel and for the environment that you are in. Thus, what Red Bull would do in an instance like this, is there just simply meeting Bob, right where he is that you see our job as marketers is to take into consideration the environment that our content is being consumed. Now back to Bob again, how awkward it would it be to show a video clip of extreme sports on his LinkedIn profile, right? You can't really consume that content on that channel. Well, he is at work without without it looking a little weird, right? I recently worked with a young gentlemen, we'll call them that who would watch those kinds of videos while at work? He was known as the YouTube guy and n was unfortunately let go shortly thereafter because that's the wrong, then you, that's the wrong environment. You have to understand what people are going to consume at work and then give them content that works in that environment. How will it on social media or on their phone, or at a pub, or in the morning, or on the train. You have to be thinking of the environment that they're going to be consuming your content. 168. IMC Defined: Concerning integrated marketing communications. Let's now move on to the heavy side of this discussion for a few minutes. The term integrated marketing has been in the nomenclature of the advertising community for decades now, right? If you've been around at all, you've heard it again and again. The original idea of IMC was to blur the lines that separate creative media, television, radio in an input. Today, the same is true. Integrated marketing communications is a creative, cost-effective strategy that makes the most out of your marketing budget by reline on brand identity and storytelling to create a strong, singular message, to focus on the message, keep this mind is singular, but the content is tailored. Imc is simply the idea of using multiple marketing channels to communicate your tailored content in the most cohesive, consistent, continuous and complimentary way. Otherwise known as the four Cs. Just like we saw with Red Bull, each ad had a feeling of Red Bull, right? But it was tailored for the environment that channel. So first off, as you create content for each of your different channels, make sure number 1, it's cohesive. Alright, each channel is tailored, but there is a logical connection across all marketing channels. Video marketing, print, social media, what have you? It must tie back to your brand story and emotions. Secondly, it must be consistent. Campaign narratives are consistent and non-contradictory, right? No mixed messages or variations of brand style, tone and voice. This means you must know who you are. For instance, coming back to red bold, they're extreme. They're always pushing the edge of the end, the limit. Now, you wouldn't want to see a Red Bull ad taking place in a British tea shop, right? Because that just doesn't resonate to see maybe some of the older generation sitting around with Doyle's on these cute little coffee tables sipping tea and trumpets is not your idea of Red Bull. So Red Bull has to consistently be about this. Adventurers, outdoorsy, pushing the limits type of persona. Thirdly, it needs to be continuous. There needs to be a continuous stream of marketing output across all specific channels over the course of the campaign, right? You need to avoid the one-offs. Therefore, only utilize the channels that you believe that you personally, your brand can be consistent width. In other words, don't bite off more than you can chew. And fourthly, it must be complimentary. Alright, right, it's this harmonious relationship between all the parts of your strategy that we continue to talk about. Did each part complement the other? Was there a natural flow from email and social to website? Did it work with your audience? Were there drops ofs? This is why you have to measure it. This is why metrics are so important because you need to know, was it complimentary or was there a part of the journey that just didn't resonate, that wasn't working with the audience. So when you think of IMC, think of two things, above all else, tailored for each channel and unified around the same campaign and story. Now there are many definitions and arguments for IMC, but I think one of the best versions comes from Nicholas can ports, who's the VP of Strategy at noticed agency. And he says this integration means mapping your strategy to the reality of the customer. Where does she go and what does she do every day? Your marketing message must be aligned across all of those touch points, which today are usually experiential smart phone and news feed app driven. If the message doesn't align, you've lost her and she likely isn't coming back. That's the new reality of the ultra short attention span consumer. Now to underscore his last point, I think it's interesting that recently researchers have found that the attention span of the average adult in the US is seven seconds. Seven seconds attention span. Now, just for a benchmark, the attention span of a goldfish, well, is eight seconds. Yes, drink that in. We as adults have less of an attention span. Then goldfish, meaning we like shiny objects, were easily distracted. And if we are not consistently receiving tailored messages that resonate with us, that makes sense to us in the environment and with the attitude that we currently have, then we're simply going to bounce or we're going to keep scrolling past the news feed, or it's simply not going to resonate. And so your goal is to capture their attention and hold their attention. And in reality, you have a maximum of seven seconds to do it. Next up, we're going to take a look at some modern integrated marketing strategies. 169. IMC Strategy: Concerning integrated marketing strategies, my favorite campaigns take a message and tailors it for every part of the customer journey, then they tie it all back to the end goal, right? Advertisers want their message to resonate with as large of a target audience as possible. Which is why the modern holy grail of mass communication is the integrated campaign. Because you are capable of using all the different channels to create a reach and frequency of message that can never be accomplished in a single media. So using a website alone, yeah, it's a great start. But using a website was social and paid, and email and all these other channels speaking in a way that resonates almost channels. Well, it simply multiplies and compounds your efforts. Now concerning the topic of strategy, here is a loose IMC framework that is similar to other frameworks we have shared with you. This is more of really just a general best practice for business today, but you can still use it for IMC specificly. Number one, researcher target audience. All right, We saw this during session two, belief framework when we built out our buyer persona's, we analyze their demographics, wants, needs, and pain points, and much, much more. Secondly, complete a swot analysis. That is analyze your brands, strengths. That's the S weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Swot is, SWOT is just an acronym. And then make a chart with your leadership team, then distribute to your team and update regularly. The purpose of a swot analysis is some low hanging fruit, so you don't miss some obvious shortcomings or opportunities. Remember, you're in a competitive environment, you can never let some things just slide. You constantly want to be analyzing your strengths, your weaknesses, and in the marketplace, the opportunities and threats. Number three, set your marketing goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve? What numbers are you trying to move per channel, right? This should remind you of our earlier sessions concerning metrics. You have to be able to set your goal and objectives and you and your entire team have to be aligned on that. Number four, set your budget. This is a key element to session 1 when we talked about building your model. In other words, don't waste your money on channels that you were not able to define. Roi. Fifthly, develop your campaign strategies. This is the bulk of what we're going through in all of Session 6. And then number 6, analyze and evaluate your campaign results. This is obviously help you avoid the set and forget mentality that we went over in an earlier session. Rather, you should implement, measure, analyze, evaluate, optimize, and so on, right? You can often learn more from your failures than your successes as we've gone through. Hopefully, this is all review. But nonetheless, this is the basic framework that we continue to go over in this course because it needs to be done. Otherwise, we've fallen to that mass production mentality that says more is better. So in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at a few examples of companies that have done IMC really well. 170. IMC Examples & Marketing Mix: In this lesson, I want to take a look at companies who have done integrated marketing communications really well. Remember as we go through this, successful IMC campaigns are a full featured customer experience that sets the user as the centerpiece of campaigns. Now for Levi, as you see here, they went back to their roots to create an effective, nostalgic integrated campaign. This is, they're ready to work campaign. You may have seen this across different mediums. And it simply reminded people that before Levi's became fashionable, it was and still is the number one industrial jeans brand. The campaigns multimedia focused around and industrial all American steel town in Pennsylvania. And the imagery was a mix of masculinity, classic industry and obviously the new faces of Levi's, as you see, kind of the modern hipsters sporting that cool Levi jeans, right? Overall, it was a brilliantly displayed and distributed campaign across all mediums. Again, a great example of integrated marketing communications. Coca-cola is yet another great example of an IMC campaign. This is their viral Share, a Coke campaign and became one of the most recognizable and effective integrated marketing campaigns to date. Alright, Coca-Cola used their clever campaign hashtag, Share a Coke, as you see here, across all social media channels. And they also publish effective videos that transformed the phrase into this like all inclusive experience, which highlighted a sense of pride and a sense of personal ownership in the brand. What Coca-Cola did is they created an IMC campaign that was a full featured customer experience that set the user as the centerpiece of campaigns. And so you could buy Cokes with your name on it. You could share the hashtag of you drinking it across all social medias of Oh, wow, My name is Zach and I'm drinking a Zach Coca Cola. May sound a little cheesy, but man, it was effective. It was simply a stroke of genius on Coca-Cola's part. Now I want to pause really quick because a question that you may be asking right now as well, which channel do I select and where do I start? Well, one of the challenges of marketing is in a selecting the right marketing mix, integrated marketing campaigns. It need a logical mix of marketing communications to work. Marketing communications are simply the channels that you use to effectively communicate your campaigns message to a targeted audience. But having said that, not any type of marketing communications will do, write a critical part of strategising your IMC campaign is to select the most logical and measurable marketing channels for your campaigns, otherwise known as your marketing communications mix. For example, this could be your campaigns marketing communication mix. Something like I'm going to create a press release. I'm going to have some limited time only coupons. I need a campaign hashtag. I could do a three-part web video commercial that's published over time. You can do in-person demos in select locations such as obesity or B2B. You can do social media product giveaways and maybe a microsite, a landing page with exclusive offers. This would be an example of your campaigns marketing communication mix. Because you've weighed all of the responsibilities for each channel. You understand the metrics, you realize how much it's going to take your brand and your organization to produce. And you say, out of all the channels out there, these are going to work best for the campaign that we're developing. Remember though that more than 80 percent of millennials still shop at brick and mortar retailers. So don't put all your eggs into social media marketing, for example, thinking that's where they all are. Therefore, I'm going to speak to them there. Now it may be true that most of them are on social media, but at the same time, they are in other locations and you want to be speaking to them as much as possible. Now as we saw in session one, market research will save you lots of money on wasted marketing campaigns. Because as you start to do your market research and as you build out these persona's of your target audience, one of the goals of developing a persona is to figure out where are they, what, what channels do they use most? Where did they purchase the close, for instance, how do they purchase? What devices are they on? Alright, because you want to be where your target audience is, not where they're not, right? Otherwise, you're just wasting your campaign dollars. Just make sure that what you select is the logical OR, or doable. And it's a measurable as well. Now, another example I want to take a look at. A great example is Apple. Right there. Brick and mortar locations look nearly identical to their website. But that's exactly the point, right? Apple has this fluid brand identity that fully integrates both their physical locations and their online presence and really their product as well. So they're able to maintain their signature customer experience, whether IT customers browsing online or in store. Now what you may or may not know is Apple's iconic branding strategy has always focused on emotion. That's the cornerstone of their branding strategy. And as such, Apple has created such a relationship with users that they don't just like Apple in return, No, they adore Apple, albeit a border on worshiping the brand. I've seen people with Apple tattoos, they loved the brand so much because their branding strategy has as a cornerstone emotion. Steve Jobs once said that the chance to make a memory is the essence of brand marketing. By engaging a consumer's emotions and not just reason. Apple for Zack connection to create a memorable identity. And then building upon these emotions we feel while discovering, owning, and using Apple products. The brand capitalizes on the lifestyle, imagination, passion, innovation, empowerment, and aspirations of Apple users. What's more? They create eight this emotion across all their channels. Be it physical stores, online presence, or even their product, right? It's all seamless. It's streamlined, simple, and classy. But there's brand image can only be achieved through a consistency across all experiences online, in the store with the product or even opening and Apple product with the packaging. It all shouts the same message. The message found in Apple's mission statement reads like this. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals, and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software, and internet offerings. In other words, did you catch that? The put the consumer at the heart of everything they do? And that's the point. In every interaction with Apple, you can expect the same stellar emotional experience. Now I know we've been talking about big brands, and this talks about the biggest brands created integrated marketing communications isn't just something big brands think they should do. Know. Rather more importantly, integrated campaigns are exactly what the public wants and craves from brands. According to the annual consumer insights survey, more than 72% of consumers prefer integrated marketing campaigns. What's also interesting is that content and media published on at least two different marketing platforms receives 24% more engagement. The media shared through only one channel, right? The purpose of integrating an IMC approach is to create a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with your branding and enterprise. The goal is to meld all aspects of marketing communication, such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, social media, whatever it is, through their own respective mix of tactics, methods, channels, media, and activities, so that all work together as a unified force. It's a process designed to ensure that all messaging and communication strategies are consistent across all channels and are centered on the consumer. Now a quick reality check. Does your email look and feel like your website? Now the messaging is going to be different. But does it have the same feel? So when someone opens up their email and they clicks on your CTA in that email, do they land on a page with a similar message, but the same feeling, if they don't, you'd be surprised and shocked at that skyrocketing balanced rate. Why? Because they clicked on an e-mail expecting to find something that wasn't the same. How about your social media? Do your social channels have the same feeling as maybe your office or your communication on other channels. Remember the user is at the center of it all. And the more consistent, fluid and tailor the experience, the better for everyone. The opposite is only confusion and ultimately frustration. Take school, for instance, let's say your second grade math teacher just felt like thrown in their own math curriculum. That didn't prep them for third grade. Well, that would be confusing, right? Because second grade has to prep you for third grade and third grade has to prep you for fourth grade at all has to be somewhat integrated. So to think of your communication strategy the same way, your social media channel is prepping that audience. For another channel. It may be email, it may be what they find on your website or landing page. But it's all part of a process. And if the experiences are two disjointed, you're simply going to lose your target audience. 171. DEVICE AGNOSTICISM: Another fundamental element of a multi-channel lead acquisition strategy is screen and device agnosticism. So let me start this lesson with a question. What device are you consuming this information, this lesson on? Is it mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop? What does your screen width? What browser are you on? What's your internet speed? How old is the device are you on? Is the latest model or use your phone for years old, right? These are just a few of the many questions you should be asking yourself when you branch out into other channels. For instance, do you know how your consumers will read your e-mails? How about your website? Is your social content consumed mostly on the phone or laptop? The idea of screen or device agnosticism refers to marketing content or creative or message or idea that can be seamlessly dispersed across the digital diaspora. Functioning perfectly on any screen, while also being instantly recognizable as part of a connecting campaign. Again, bringing us back to this concept of Integrated Marketing Communications, IMC refers to the consistency of the messaging screen and device. Agnosticism refers to the consistency and accuracy of the experience. Years ago there was this idea of graceful degradation in responsive design. It basically went like this, designed for the desktop, and then remove pieces of your website until it kind of fits on mobile device. Thankfully, that idea was replaced quickly by something called progressive enhancement. That is, create a beautifully branded experience on the mobile device with all the most important information. Then you can expand in and replicate it for the desktop version, maybe you might add in more information or a few more features because of simply the screen width, but with added enhancement based upon the technological capabilities and screen width. Now think with me, sometimes there's progressive enhancement for mobile devices simply because of what you can do on there. Maybe the phone number is much more prominent. Maybe you're going to remove form fields on mobile, but add those form fields on desktop. You can take advantage of some swiping features on mobile that you can't on the desktop, right? Same brand, tailored experience. Sound familiar. Let's look at a quick and easy example. Now if you use the Internet at all, chances are you have shopped with Amazon or at least have heard of it. I'm assuming. You've all heard that Amazon provides an incredibly seamless, consistent, and yet tailored experience across all devices, right, look at this example. For instance, here I have a product, same product on both a mobile device and on the desktop. But as you can see right off, There's a few other buttons on the mobile device. There's more features on the desktop. Now I can get to all those features on the mobile, but, but they're hidden behind tabs or what have you, because the mobile experience is simply a much smaller screen size. And so they've made the buttons nice and large, easy to use. I can change the quantity. Whereas on the desktop they've added much more texts because there's simply a lot more room. Now although the interaction is different, since it is tailored to each device, it still has the same look and feel, right? That button on the mobile device is the same as the button on the desktop device. The color scheme, the layout, the font, it's all the same. B at the mobile or desktop and any screen width. Amazon has provided this same experience. Now let's talk about why screen and device agnosticism is so important. Both Google and Facebook recently have released findings from their individual research, which shows that people use multiple devices throughout the day and for different purposes. The research shows that, and I'm quoting here, more than 60 percent of online adults in the US use at least two devices every day, and almost one-quarter use three devices. It's also reported that over 40 percent starting journey on one device and finish on a second or even third. Now Google's research offered a more dramatic finding. They found that 90 percent of consumers move sequentially between different screens during the same day. In reality, the studies showed that the more devices you own, the more likely you are to switch between them. 53 percent of people who own two devices switch between them to complete tasks or activities. And 77 percent of people who have three devices do the same. But here's the kicker. The research shows that we are addicted users of our phones. Be it at work on public transport in our car while driving a shame on you, or while we're watching TV, we are constantly searching, viewing, or plane with our mobile phone. It's like we're not capable of interacting with the world around us unless it is through the lens of a phone. I recently visited family and we were having this conversation about something that happened a month ago and they couldn't quite remember what the circumstances were. And so rather than spending two or three seconds thinking, hmm, what happened, they actually had the phone in hand open up. The phone says, hang on. Let me, let me remember as they start scrolling through their social feed, really, what's going on? Well, this trend that we see all around us where people are just heads down all the time in their devices is only going to get more ingrained in society. As you can see here on your screen, this is research from Google in 2016, currently 65 percent of US internet users start shopping on one device, but continue or finished on another. Now, I used to do this all the time until the mobile experience gotten that much better. And that I really don't mind putting in my username and password anymore in website profiles or apps. But yeah, I would start my research on my phone. And then when I had found the right product or the right website or the right brand, then I'll go to my laptop and then finish it there because I just like typing in all my personal information that much more on a desktop. Obviously, I think most people are like that. Now, 65 percent of US internet users do this, whereas that number cleanse up to 84% for millennials. 65 percent of US shoppers start on one device. 84% of millennials do this. In fact, to underscore this recent research from E marketer shows that the top characteristics today's teens are looking for our pricing quality. Okay, I understand that exclusive benefits makes sense. Fourthly, mobile experience. Why? Because 56 percent of teens use their digital advice for online shopping, right? They want a good mobile experience. Remember, they are the future and really not just the future, they are the present. And they are spending billions of dollars every year. And this is their behavior, right? Device agnosticism is no longer the future of marketing. It is happening now. So we, as marketers must adapt quickly or risk frustrating and losing touch with our consumers. Over half of the global population is now using smart phones. And that is predicted to rise year over year. In emerging territories including Asia, consumers have now switched to a mobile first method of connecting to the Internet. Meaning this isn't more important than ever. Point being this, if the average consumer is switching devices so freely, are they experiencing the same design, brand, user experience from device, device and channel to channel. As marketers, we cannot start designing our websites on a desktop version anymore, right? Have you, have you ever done this? No doubt you have. Where you hire a design firm and they begin by designing a new web page or e-mail or social posts. And the deliverable is in desktop format. And often there is no mobile version 0. And if you want a mobile version, you have to pay extra, right? So rather than making you feel bad, I just, I want you to see this, this shift to having a screen and device agnostic mindset is difficult. I get it especially considering how much the Internet is changing in his first couple of decades. It is going to take purposeful intent on your part to start thinking of your consumers first and how they interact and engage rather than just how you personally interact with your brand online. Again, I want to underscore this point with recent research from E marketer that showed that 40% of shoppers who bought a computer at Walmart had searched Amazon within 24 hours. And nearly 80 percent of keyword searches also included a retailers name, meaning this. Users are searching for deals before they get to a store. And while they are in a retailer's store. Ever done that. Now, I may be guilty, extreme Gilly on both of those points. But the idea is this, right? It's divisive Gnosticism. Their home on the laptop, checking their mobile phone, they go to a brick and mortar store, they're on their mobile phone. It's all kinda becoming more fluid and blended together. Now concerning this topic of mobile experience, and what I find extremely interesting is. Research that recently said a number of users, 29 percent of users start on mobile just because it's a better experience. Now can this be said of you? Let's say you have a mobile app or a mobile website, whatever it is, and a brick-and-mortar store. If people are in your brick and mortar store, are they opening up your app or your website on their phone? Because they know they can find it quicker or it's a better experience, right? So often I think this cuts right to our heart because mobile, or at least the mobile version of our website is just this afterthought. It's well, we've got a few people on that. We don't really have to concern ourselves with those things. Well, E marketer recently found that 76% of consumers preferred to research online versus only 17 percent in person, right? Because people realize entering in details into a search engine and receiving the results in a nice format to display with imagery and price and everything else, right there is a lot easier than walking around the store. Even though they may be walking around the store while they're doing this search, they still prefer did a search on their phone. Now, in the midst of this discussion, let's pause to make a very important point, and you can't miss this. Although marketers like you are, I talk about different devices. Consumers talk about brands. If a brand has a good desktop experience, but an awful mobile version, while their experience with your brand was bad, they don't view you as a mobile brand and a desktop brand and an e-mail brand. Why? Because consumers are device agnostic, they only see you as a brand. Take any big brand out there, be it Amazon or Apple or Coca-Cola or whatever. If you're doing your research about a product on Amazon and you're switching from laptop to mobile phone to your desktop or whatever it may be. If you have a bad experience on one of those devices, your view of Amazon has just diminished, Right? Because you don't view Amazon as just a desktop computer company. That's the only way you interact with them, know what their shipping, right. If you have a bad experience with the shipping on several occasions while your view of the brand has diminished. Why? Because it's all integrated and we have to view our brands in our organizations the same way when people interact with us, whether it's sales support, website, mobile app, in store, whatever it is, they view it as one and the same experience. If they receive a poorly packaged product and is broken by the time it gets to their house. Their view of you, no matter how Stella your desktop website may be or how sweet your mobile app is and how much you spent on it. If they receive a broken product, your brand has just lost their trust. As one final reminder of this necessity, I want to show you this chart that shows when people check their e-mail because it shows how fluid we are as people, right? You can see how people use different devices intermittently throughout the day. Now the lines are only going to get more blurred year by year and we're seeing that trend. Again, the point should be clear. If consumers are this diverse, well we too should be as well. Meaning, do you view your brand or your content and messaging through this same fluidity of devices. The point is this, we cannot think about each device as a separate unit. And then one day we will get to mobile, or one day we'll get to tablet, or one day will fix our emails. When we think of our website or social, or email or display ads, whatever channel we're talking about or device. We have to ask, how are people going to access our content? And will it be a good user experience for as many people as possible? And that will lead us to our next lesson on creating a brand and style guide. 172. BRANDED STYLE GUIDE: As we approach this topic of branded style guide, you may or may not have heard of such a thing. But going through this course, you will be familiar with the necessity of such a guide and how it is to be used. Now, a brand and style guide is simply a set of standards or really internal agreements for the writing, layout, and design of content and communication for a brand. The idea is that a branded style guide establishes and enforces brand styles, tone, and voice in order to create a cohesive communication strategy for a team or any organization. Really, it ensures consistency within a document, web-page, social post, e-mail, and across multiple other channels, and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, or photography and typography and so on. You can generally tell an organization that does not use a brand and style guide by simply counting the number of different font styles on just the homepage. Now if you count more than six, chances are there's no style guide, or at least no one is abiding by that style guide. In fact, many of the websites that I revamped for organizations will have anywhere from ten to 15, even 20 plus font styles just on the homepage. And even during the design stages, the organization or CEO or whoever it is, it has a lot of input, will often say, hey, can we just bold this one sentence? Can we make this font just a little bit larger or this one italicized? And after a while you'll see the same input coming in because there's no brand style guides. Now style guides are nothing new. They've been used extensively across different disciplines for many years. For instance, train timetables have a rich history of exact measurement, font types, and layout. However, since the web has only been around a short while, webmasters in the nineties, as they were so called an early 2000s, were left to make up their own versions and their own styles. There was no guide, there was no standard across the web. And so I'm going to cycle through a few of these variations so you can just get a glimpse at how varied the different designs and textures and font sizes and layouts were, and frankly still are today. Now without some sort of standard, you can imagine how dangerous this was because at first, when you visited a website, you didn't know how to interact with it. Even within a website, the interactions change dramatically from page to page on, on the more artistic websites. I mean, in reality the philosophy was basically, if you can, then you should. In other words, while your audience by all the crazy things you could do and tragically an embarrassingly, we did right back in the 90s and early 2000s, we implemented every sort of JavaScript and Flash interaction imaginable. Now, the result was obviously users were confused and frustrated and ultimately many of them balanced because they simply didn't know what to do, right? This is one of the many reasons Facebook overtook Myspace. Myspace let you have complete control of your personal profile page. Remember that where you could add your own JavaScript and CSS and you can flip things. And there was like CSS template files and you can just make it all crazy and random. So much so that it was difficult to understand, comprehended, interact with a person's MySpace page. And then came Facebook. And Facebook gave one profile page, one style, one design. And it was consistent across the site. And it was almost like this breath of fresh air of weight. There's now this guide, this kinda, this style that is the same and it's synonymous and there's consistency across every page. It made it much easier to consume the real content that people wanted. And that was they didn't necessarily want to consume templates, right? They wanted to consume images and text of their friends and, and events and groups and forums. That's what they were after. They weren't after these really fancy styles and templates. So what Facebook did is they introduced one style, made it simple, and it was refreshing. This is where style guides should come into your organizations. Style guides simply introduce an agreed upon consistency for your entire brand. Let's use an example. Imagine if cars decided to not have an agreed upon style, well, you would end up something like this. Nissan P VO2, whatever that is. And frankly, I don't even know what this is. I've never seen this before, but I was just looking up a random card designs. Or how about the Rinne speed booty? I guess that's maybe how you say it. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, why is this steering wheel backwards? Like what do you do with this? How do you drive it? Right? Imagine though, if you rent a vehicle and this is what you got. This is why I am so thankful that there has been at least some agreement among car manufacturers on a standard layout for where the gas pedal goes or brakes, steering wheels, headlights. Right? Now I get that each car has its own flair. But for the essentials, there has to be agreement. I mean, I could tell you story after story of driving strange vehicles in different countries down dark roads. Because I simply couldn't find out how to turn on the headlights. And yet exactly what we do with websites right now I get that since we are all snowflakes, we have to be unique and artistic. And I agree there's some necessity of that to have our own unique brand style. But there was bolt of going too far down that road of thinking is that we can confuse our visitors. For instance, I had someone come up to me last week and said, hey, all my website. I would love the main menu to be a series of icons down the left-hand side of the page with no words, no descriptions, and just kinda this thin little 50 pixel wide list of icons. Well, I had to share with him very gently because it's not standard. You have the potential and it's a very real potential of confusing people when they come to your site. They're used to menus being across the top, or at least on the sidebar on the left. With using words. Really simple, very descriptive words, right? We do this all the time. But the end result is that we simply confuse our visitors. So that brings us to this topic of style guides. 173. Manual of Styles: Now most style guides will have simply a manual of styles. That is, there's going to be some elements that would appear in a branded style guide. Now you don't have to necessarily have all of these start simple and build from there over time. For instance, communication style is a great element to have, right? Every industry and brand frankly, has its own unique language of insider terms and acronyms. Even if you don't realize you're using industry jargon, these terms can alienate readers. So define the ways your company should and shouldn't use certain buzzwords or acronyms, as well as the importance of explain acronyms, right? The longer you work in an organization or industry, the more acronyms you use, eventually we just stop using words altogether. A brand and style guide will help you catch yourself when communicating externally through your marketing campaigns. Another element that can be included in your brand and style guide is tone. This is important because an appropriate tone can build an incident report the reader, while writing in a style that misses the mark will likely alienate others. Think of certain tech behemoths that have seemed to have engineer's right there, marketing copy versus something like Groupon. I don't know if you've ever read through Groupon's copy, but it's, it's very lighthearted and casual, fun, almost flippant, but it's engaging, right? The most effective way to define your tone can start with a list of adjectives about how you want your content marketing to be received and perceived. Are you sophisticated, slightly aloof, or a reverent and fresh? Or you technical or more accessible. Just make sure you define how you want yourself to be perceived on each channel. And again, it can be slightly different on each channel, right? If you want to be slightly irreverent and casual and hip, that might work really well on Facebook. But you might want to tighten it up just a little bit if you're approaching something like LinkedIn. Another element is text styling. As we have looked at in the last session, digital readers don't actually read, they scan. Some studies have found that the average blog visitor only sticks around for about a minute and a half. So if your content creators aren't carefully formatting your blogs and your webpages and your articles in your downloads. For maximum scalability, then your average time on site will probably decrease. So in your branding style guide, be very specific when it comes to content formatting. Things like the use of headers and subheaders, what tags to be used, and why and when, when do you bold and italicized? How about this spacing around the texts, the whitespace? How about image placement, aligning and text wrapping, even button font styles and sizes, right? If there's not consistency here, you are simply making your content damage harder to read. Graphics is another great element, right? Sourcing images is serious business on two fronts. Firstly, if your content creators have simply been pulling pictures off of Google, well, your company could be held legally accountable for image staff. So just make sure in your style guide you spell out appropriate sources for graphics, as well as how often images should be used in your content. But secondly, images have the power of setting the emotional mood for any given collateral. Take for instance, these two stock photos. All right, we've got a good stock photo here and a not so good stock photo. What are your impressions? Right? Both are free stock photos, but the emotional feeling is completely different. The point is, is don't muddy or content with horrendous imagery. Makes sure it's appealing. It makes sure it hits the target market that speaks to them, that resembles them. And in reality, is an identity that they can associate with and aspire to. Another element that could fit within your brand and style guide is a layout. Have you specified your layout so that each page on your site is tailored and unique, but also fits within the framework of your overall design. Your homepage may have a slightly different layout than the rest of your site, but the feeling has to be the same. Things like headers, modules, elements, spacing, number of columns. All of it should be consistent from web-page to imagery to PDF download. Another element that fits really well within a brand and style guide is colors, right? And having a rainbow of colors may have been really cool about 20 years ago or 15 years ago. But today not such a great idea unless, unless it is your brand, right. But most of us, that's not the case. For instance, if you have a blue color as your base color, have you defined it clearly? Or is any slight variation of a blue acceptable for your design team? Do they just kinda when it? And the end result is you have about 15 or 20 different color values that all resemble about the same blue. Well, what you need to do is find your four to six colors that you will use across all your channels. Primary, secondary colors, base and background colors. So that anyone who designs or develops knows exactly what RGB hex code or CMYK to use. It doesn't have to be that complicated, but it must be done. Now if you want some examples of great color schemes, I love using Adobe Color. A KSQL ER, it's trendy, it's hit, but they've got some really great examples of color schemes there. For instance, they'll have a three color scheme, a four color scheme, six color scheme. But use those and use those RGB values and just put it in a Word document, right? It doesn't have to be super fancy at the beginning, but just make sure it's documented. One element that is a requirement in a brand and style guide, his logo. Logos are a big deal, right? If you don't define the light and dark versions, as well as the appropriate sizes, backgrounds, and styles of your logo. Then some junior marketer or designer will have a field day and you probably won't find out until much, much later. Even people in sales or support will will somehow open up Windows Paint or some online paint program and doesn't go to town thinking they're super artistic. So what you want to do in your brand and style guide is the layout, the appropriate sizes and colors and variations, and uses of your logo before it becomes the Wild West. Buyer persona's are also a great element just to attach onto your brand and style guide. Now we've spent a great deal of time talking about and developing your buyer persona. They too should be in your style guide, right? Even though you probably shared among marketing and sales and product or whatever teams you have, put it in the style guide as well, because even the world's most brilliant riders can't deliver relevant web content unless they know their audience. And since you already have other information that content writers and designers are going to be using in your brand style guide might as well put in the intended audience. Now Dr. Stephen Hale pointed out, if you don't have a particular intended audience in mind, your writing will be as general as your intention. So include thorough buyer persona profiles in your content style guide, which includes psychographic characteristics, demographics, priorities, budget, and emotions of your ideal customer. All the things that we've already gone through, just attach it to the end of the style guide. Now, obviously this is not an exhaustive list. We're just getting started here. But you can see the direction this can go, right? The list goes on and on. My suggestion would be to take a look at the top style guides, learn from them and use what is relevant for your brand. Just make sure you start small. Do only one element first. It might be colors. It might be your logo, might be font and texts styling. That's great. Start with that. And when you see errors or discrepancies or inconsistencies crop up. Well, those are then other opportunities that you can then say, Hey, we wish to define this in our brand and style guide, right? It doesn't have to be overly complicated. Just start somewhere. 174. Example Style Guides: So to help you get started, I've included this initial list of brand and style guides that I love and I've gone through in the homework section so you can see what the gurus out there who've gone ahead of you have already done, alright, learn from them. Some get really detailed, maybe overly detailed for your company or organization, while others keep it fairly straightforward. Take Google's material design, for example. Now hopefully, you'll have run into materials design being used out in the wild. Whether that's from using Google's own products and services, such as the Android mobile operating system and the Google Now tool. Many other products that have been influenced by this popular web design trend. Either way, Material Design shouldn't be new to you. Or take for instance, BBC gel. If you're looking for a style guide that doesn't leave anything to chance. Then the instructions that make up the BBC gel or the BBC global experience language document. And they're great example, right, is created for web designers building websites for the BBC. But the document also covers much more than just that. You'll find information covering the pixel width of calm gutters, grid layout rules, logo positioning guidelines, and everything else you could possibly think of when it comes to creating online content. Again, you don't have to go as far as the BBC did. Yours may be a lot more simple than that, but uses as a guideline, right? If there are some areas in here that you find in your own organization that you continually be hitting a wall with certain team members, designers, developers, writers will then incorporated just copy it, learn from it, and incorporate it into your organization. Another great style guide that I like to look through is MailChimp. Mailchimp style guide covers everything from grid layouts and topography through the icons and dialog boxes. No matter what platform you're designing for, you should be able to get some pointers from the Mailchimp style guide. Plus, it is a good source of information when it comes to enforcing consistency in your projects. Again, there's plenty more out there. So have fun looking through your favorites, glean some valuable information, learn what you can start simple and add slowly over time. And you will find that this will become one of your most valuable internal documents for consistency, right? It's something that you're able to hand to every new employee, to every person that you work with, including agencies, consultants, freelancers. And you can let them all know with one document. These are our expectations. Whether you're designing emails or social posts or webpages, or flyers or banners or TV spots. This is our font styling. These are our colors. This is our expectation when it comes to our marketing campaigns. A gets everyone on board. It brings in consistency and fluidity and removes those kinda surprising moments when you say, Wow, what logo is this? This isn't ours, but it looks like ours. That's not what you want to run into. And so a brand and style guide will help keep your team altogether with consistency and uniformity. 175. CHANNEL: EMAIL: Now that we've covered the fundamentals of starting multi-channel campaigns, Let's take a look at some of the best practices of each channel while keeping within the brand. First off, we're gonna take a look at email. Now, what we are not going to do in this section is teach you all about how to send the right email. Alright, there's too many great tutorials online about such topics. However, what a good marketing leader needs to understand is the strategy of email marketing. How to measure success, analyze and report performance, and then optimize future campaigns. Email remains and will probably always remain an important channel for most marketing organizations. This graph underscores the effectiveness of email marketing among the B2B marketers. As you can see by this research from exact target, based on the question, how often do you use each of the following. 91% of respondents, that is, marketers said they use e-mail at least every day, and then 5% at least weekly, that blows out of the water. All of these other channels like Facebook, text messages, Instant Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. E-mail is so important because we see such a high return on investment. In fact, anytime I'm doing kind of awareness campaigns, I find consistently that email outperforms every other channel that I invest in. And so for that reason, we want to spend a lot of time first off, out of the gate focusing on email. And to underscore this point here, our performance and user stats from opt-in monsters research. E-mail has 2.6 billion users compared to Facebook's 1.7 billion, and Twitters 313 million. Now, obviously these numbers are changing consistently. 58% of people check their e-mail before anything else, while only 11% their Facebook account and 2% check Twitter first, the average email click-through rates for email sit at 3.57% for Facebook, right? Look at that, 0.07% and Twitter point 0, 3 percent. E-mail also gets more conversions. On average, 66% of users make a purchase after email messaging, whereas only 20 percent for Facebook and 6% for Twitter. Email also comes in with a better ROI, 21% compared to 15 percent on average for social media. Because as you can see, there are far more customers acquired through e-mail then either Facebook or Twitter. The point should be simple and obvious. E-mail remains a powerful tool that should not mean then collected or underutilized. If you have neglected e-mail than what great news, right? You have access to some very low hanging fruit that has proven to be very, very valuable for many organizations. So as we go through this section, take careful notes. So you start your e-mail marketing with the best possible advantages. 176. Email Metrics: Concerning this topic of e-mail and the e-mail channel. When sending an email, everything about the e-mail should be branded but tailored to the e-mail channel and how it will be consumed. Now there are three distinct e-mail interaction points. First, customers see your envelope content right before subscribers open an email, they see the from name, they see the subject line and in some cases the snippet text. Secondly, if they open the message, then they see the body content. The body is what subscribers see when they open an email, right? Again, the content of the email, it's your imagery, it's your texts, and so on. Most marketing e-mails are a mix of just that text, images and CTAs, with promotional messages being more image heavy and transactional messages more text-heavy. Now keep in mind that subscribers don't read e-mails just like they don't read websites or most articles or blogs, right? They scan them. At a glance. Subscribers should know what you want them to do next and what's in it for them. Therefore, in the body content, you should always have a call to action or something you are desiring your reader to do. And really it's a promise, right? Sign up, will sign up for what, What's the promise? What am I going to get when I sign up or purchase? Well, what's the reward for purchasing? Register, register for what, what am I going to get in return. So the call to action should always be in essence a fulfillment of a promise. And thirdly, is the landing page. Now, landing pages are webpages where subscribers arrive when they click on that call to action in your e-mail. Because you somehow convinced the user to click on your CTA. Make sure you satisfy and the delight the consumer for clicking through, right? There must be also this strong connection between the e-mail content and the landing page content to reassure subscribers that they've arrived at the right place, right? So if you just have people landing on the homepage for some sort of CTA like register now or buy now or sign up. That's not a logical connection. That's simply you not taking the time to build out an appropriate landing page. That's why though, it's also advisable to consider repeating headlines or images from the e-mail to the landing page. Remember it integrated marketing communications. When they see and read your email and they click on the call to action, they should land on a landing page of similar content style and messaging. That really, as I said before, is a fulfillment of the promise from the email. They want to see something that's similar. They want to interact now with the messaging. They have committed by clicking on the call to action. Now it's your turn to serve up the content that they were looking for. But these are in essence the three e-mail interaction points. The envelope content, then the body content of the email, and then the landing page. Now, since these are the three primary interactions or reader has with your email, then this makes up some of the key email metrics that you should be measuring. Remember, with each email sent, you are able to measure the success rate based on a number of key metrics. First off is open rate. As we just saw in the last lesson, email, open rates are the first and primary hurdle that you need to overcome, right? Open rates simply refers to how many people have opened up your email message. Now, it doesn't sound too complex on the surface, but it does get murkier from there because some email clients, like Yahoo or your phone, for instance, automatically open emails. Thus skewing this measurement. Now we will take a look at how to improve this in the next section. Nevertheless, this is the most important metric you should be measuring, reporting and analyzing because this is the gateway. If they're not opening up your email, then guess what? They're not going to be clicking on the CTA in your e-mail or landing on your landing page or filling out forms or buying your product. So hurdle number one, measure open rates and tried to get people to open your emails. Secondly, or click-through rates. Click-through rates refer to how many people interacted with your email. In other words, how many people click the link or the big shiny button in your email, Right? The click-through rate measured as a percentage is how many recipients out of 100 and click somewhere on your email message. If 25 out of 100 people clicked while you have a 25 percent click-through rate. Now keep in mind that you can measure the click-through rate for all the different buttons and interactions on your email. For instance, if you throw in a few coupons in there or links to different pages that people would be interested in. And again, I don't suggest to many CTAs. Well, you can measure each one of those CTAs individually for their individual click-through rates. Now there is a variation on click-through and open rates that is fairly common to measure. And can be quite helpful. It's called the click to open rate. Now click to open rate refers to how many people who opened your e-mail also clipped on it. If you've got a week open rate, but a strong click to open rate, it suggests your email subject line was a little weak. Also, if you have a strong open rate but a week click to open rate, then it shows that your body content or CTA needs some work. So in essence, it is a valuable metric and again, it is simply a percentage. Fourthly is your unsubscribe rate. This is how many people out of 100 unsubscribed from the email message you just sent. Now, each email has its own unsubscribe rate, which are generally best kept to a fraction of 1%, right? You will have your own numbers. But again, this should be a very, very, very small number. Therefore, what you should look for is a spike in unsubscribes because it is a clear sign. You sent an email your readers didn't like, or it didn't resonate or as off-topic, whatever. Learn from it so you can repeat your successes and diminish your failures. Number 5 are hard and soft bounces. Hard balances happen when you've sent a message to an e-mail address that no longer exists. Now if you ignore hard balances too long, it can get you in trouble with the major ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo. So just make sure you monitor hard bounces closely. If you see a hard balance being diligent and remove these emails from your list after even one hard balance. Again, some e-mail service providers will do this for you, but don't sit back and wait for them to act. Be responsible for your own list or you could get penalized. Soft balances though occur mainly when you send an email to an inbox that as full. As soon as that person deletes a few emails, they'll get your new email. So keep a close eye on hard bounces. I wouldn't worry too much about soft bounces. Sixthly, as ROI, this is a less discussed measurement, but actually one of the most important, right? Because you need to tie your e-mail marketing efforts to specific goals. Whether that's placing an order, filling out a request for a quote, signing up for an event or conference, whatever it may be. Remember your e-mail, we'll have a CTA with a corresponding landing page. That landing page should be asking the user to do something and that something should be given a dollar value, as we saw in Session 1. For instance, how valuable is a hot lead to you? How about a demo request or a free trial? If they are signing up for a conference. Well, that's fairly easy. It's the dollar amount of the conference. Knowing how much income your e-mail marketing is generating is essential for a profitable business, right? You should track it just like you measure and track the profitability of your pay-per-click efforts or anything else you do. Fortunately, though, this is fairly easy, most e-mail service providers offer a way to specify goals so you can get reports that clearly and easily show you what's profitable and what's not. Now again, as a leader in business and marketing, you should be viewing and analyzing a report with these metrics for every e-mail you sent, as well as an aggregation of emails for campaigns, months and quarters. Remember, your email marketing campaigns aren't as effective as they could be. How do I know? Well, unless you're getting a 100 percent open rate and click through rate on every campaign, which you're probably not. I'm fairly confident about that. Then there's always room for improvement. 177. Email Design: We now come to the topic of email design. Now if you're not familiar with email design, then you'll have to take my word for this. Email design is like nothing else. The unique challenge of email design is due to how email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook actually accept HTML code. Now what you have to understand and this is really important. Emails are not many webpages, right? You're limited to using HTML tables while there are restrictions placed on JavaScript styles and other tags that it can be quite frustrating at times. So due to these various limitations, there is no consistent standard across different email clients. So it's important to keep testing over time, checking on all these different clients to make sure that you understand what is supported. And so that you can keep tabs on rendering errors or changes, which may finally explain to you why so many e-mails can be so boring like the one I have shown for you here, right? It's, it's easier and almost flawless to have just sections of text. However, utilitarian emails like this will rarely well your subscribers. So as a marketing and business leader, when you think of emails you send, understand from a high level that each element in that email must number one, stand on its own. Number to flow with. The immediate elements are rounded. And three work holistically with the entire email content to convey a single message and create a unified experience. Now, if you're familiar with web design, that's completely different than web design. Web design, there are layers and things can interact with each other. And there can be JavaScript and all these fun flaring things, but that is not the case with email. Email, each element is its own. There are no layers. You can't have all these fun interactions. In fact, if you have a countdown clock in your e-mail, it actually has to be an animated GIF that every second changes. It's crazy, right? Because of the limitations of these email clients, point mean is this, it can be harder and more limited than you may realize for your emails to render and function than the way you intended. Additionally, your emails will be opened on a multitude of diverse devices. So it's important to know this. E-mails render differently on different devices and some emails, and they even have images blocked, so it's not advisable to go the All image route. Studies regularly show that the majority of females are read on mobile devices. Fundamentally changing email design for the better, including responsive messaging. So that is good. And as you can see here, even on the screen, emails just look different on different devices. So you'll have to consider all of these combined factors and more every time you create an e-mail. So as we have gone through, email marketing is an effective tool, but it's only as effective as the design strategy you use to develop it. There is an art to create an e-mail that your customers will want to open, read, and engage with. If your email design as lacking. While your recipients will naturally disengaged in their subscriber list can dwindle. So here on this screen are five common email design mistakes you need to avoid when designing emails, plus tips to help better engage your audience. First off is text heavy Email designs. As I've already mentioned a few lessons ago, and adult attention span in today's day and age is less than eight seconds. While knowing this, you can assume people aren't actually reading your campaign emails word for word, right? But instead they're scanning through looking for points of interests. Designing an e-mail is as important as designing your webpage. So what you need to do is structure your content at a visual hierarchy that makes your email easy to scan and ensure that the key points grab the recipients attention quickly. All content should lead to the ultimate call to action. Secondly is low quality content. You may remember that content counts as one of the most important aspects of an email. So striking a proper balance between quality and quantity offers optimal value to your customer. So you have to obviously know your audience, right? There is no one size fits all when it comes to how much text you should have in an e-mail. So make sure you know who you are targeting and tailor your content to connect with that audience and make sure you keep it compelling, right? Beware of these long blocks of content that we'll have people skimming to the end or just simply losing interests after the first sentence also makes sure that you always offer them more. That is, engaging content will have your audience always wanting more. So offer your audience the option to read or sign up for more, or provide you with feedback or even share your e-mails with others. Also make sure you give your audience value, right? That's the ultimate point. Make sure you focus on educating, entertaining, and delivering value to your audience rather than just a hardest sell all the time of your products or service. Thirdly, are hard to read fonts, right? You want your customers to be able to read your email with ease. So just make sure that you use fonts that are consistent size, size 14 from body texts tends to be a good rule. Also use consistent simple fonts throughout your e-mail. If you would like to use various fonts, and it's recommended to use two fonts at the very max, one for your headline and one for your body content. But be careful that you do not use multiple colors or fonts. Again, keep it simple and keep it dark, such as black or a dark gray. Avoid color on color and text on top of pattern backgrounds. Save the brighter, richer colors for your call to action buttons. Remember, treat your email design as an extension of your brand. If using color is a natural part of your brand, then you can use it in your emails. But again, you want to make sure that your emails are easy to read. Because again, your email is not the end goal. All right, well, we've talked about this. You are leading your customers with your email to something bigger and better. So you want to remove the hurdles to conversion as much as possible in your email. Fourthly, are complex and confusing imagery. Images have been known to help convey messages effectively, attract users and increase click-through rates, they are valuable. However, there are various ways abusing an image will hurt your email success rates. Things like unrelated images, right? If images don't relate to your content, then readers are simply going to be confused. Also, overpowering images, right? You don't want your image to overpower your content, distract or even offend readers. So it's best to use basic clear imagery that everyone will immediately associate with your message. Because remember, images, should it be used to enhance your message, not deliver it, right? It adds value to the overall e-mail. And lastly, at least on this list, is neglecting mobile and other devices. Now, as we've looked at before, 56 percent of emails are read on a mobile device. So you'll want your email to look great on mobile tablet and other browsers. Always choose a responsive email template design and you will be set, avoiding these five common design mistakes. When you draft your next email will help optimize your e-mail campaigns for conversion and valuable clicks, sales and revenue for your business. Also keep in mind there are a ton of great tools out there that take care of a lot of these issues for you. But even having said that, a tool like Mailchimp still let you break your design. If you don't follow these five guidelines. 178. Email Personalization: One major modern solution to increasing the effectiveness and appeal of your email marketing campaigns is personalization. So let me ask you, do you send the exact same email to everyone on your list? Now, that may not be a big deal when your list is small and you're still building it. But once you begin to accumulate hundreds and thousands of names and addresses, will personalization becomes paramount? Let me, let me point this out really quickly. Personalization when we talk about this topic doesn't end, shouldn't stop with Hi Barbara. Now that was cool in the nineties. But well, it can get a lot more personal than just a first name and an e-mail body content, for instance, segmentation based upon the persona's that you created is the best way to start personalizing more effectively. Write many email marketing tools, allow you to collect and analyze customer behavior across platforms to create highly targeted audiences. For instance, you would e-mail people who have interacted with multiple resources and forms differently than, let's say, a first-time subscriber. Then when you send your email, make it really like you are sending it to your friend or family. In other words, show your human right. Overly professional. E-mails read just like that. Overly professional. Let me translate. It's boring. Also. People, even friends know when you are trying to sell them on something. So make sure you always look to add value by having a genuine conversation and honestly trying to better their lives through giving them information or access that would benefit Them, Right? That is a huge form of personalization. You make it personal. You may also consider sending your email from an actual humans first and last name, rather than just a business or some random email address like info, right? You may also want to add a picture of the team member or signature at the end of the body content. Remember, you're sending this email to a real human being with emotions, cares, and concerns. There's nothing wrong with being human yourself. Also, when crafting a message to a persona, one thing humans do is ask questions. I love this exercise because it gets me out of expert mode where I feel as though I have to come up with clever facts and pithy statements. But this puts the emphasis on the subscriber and increases the likelihood of engagement. So try that out. Tried to ask some questions and engage them rather than feeling like it's a one way dump of information and research and expertise and branded products and services. Also, if you're targeting a region, then make use of location and time, right? There's something powerful when an email is addressing me and my city, state, or region. For instance, if you're addressing people, let's say in Texas or the UK or in India, use some local references or at least the language of your intended audience. Now a huge key to increasing ROI is matching personalized e-mails with landing pages. This means two things. Primarily. Number one, if you can personalize both e-mail and landing page to be unique, then do so. For instance, someone from New York and a specific industry should receive a personalized e-mail and then through the CTA, be sent to a landing page with the same information concerning their stake, industry and pain point, right? Match personalized e-mails and landing pages. Now if you have access to a marketing automation system, then you have access to a load of benefits. And one of the benefits of these type of marketing tools is that it allows you to collect data about engagement and interaction, buying habits, and shopping history. Then with this data, you can send an automated behavioral triggered email. Now, according to recent research by DMA, over 75 percent of email revenue is generated by personalized trigger campaigns rather than just these one size fits all campaigns. Now, what this means is basically you sit down and you look at all the different possible interactions across your website. And then you write emails based upon these interactions that are automatically sent. If the user interacts with this said piece of content. For instance, you'll see this in the B2C world with abandoned shopping carts. Research shows that if you send a reminder email within one hour of someone abandoning their cart, well, then you're ten times as likely to convince that visit or to complete the purchase, then if you waited two hours, that's 10 times more likely, right? That is a great example of an automated behavioral triggered email. Same thing is true in the B2B realm. When a user requests a demo or scheduled an appointment or starts a free trial, you should immediately send an email, right? It's a triggered email, recognizing their form submission and then let them know of what to expect in the next steps. It's proper, it's cordial and downright a friendly thing to do, right? It's personal and that's what we're getting after. You want to remove this hierarchy of business and organization in your e-mails and you want to present yourself as a real human being with real cares and concerns for your target audience. 179. Lead Nurturing Campaigns: And now we come to the all important topic of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and through every step of the buyer's journey. Just like we saw in the content session. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers they need at each stage of their journey. Did you know on average, 50 percent of your qualified leads are not yet ready to buy from you. That's according to Mark ketose Research, Marketing Sherpa. Their research showed that almost 80 percent of new leads never become and sales. Well, if this is the case, then why do we try to sell people so hard in our emails all the time? We have to step back and look closely at our motivations for sending emails. And the proper motivation should be to help this subscriber where they are at. Selling them with every email is not only unhelpful to them, it's sure to be unhelpful to you as well. That's why Marketo research show that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales ready leads at a 33 percent lower cost. Not about a reason to invest in lead nurturing, but on top of that, nurtured leads make 47 percent larger purchases than non nurtured leads according to the minutest group. Well, how did we do this? Number one, you could technically do it manually, but this would be a tedious chore even with a small lead list. So effectively developing leads in today's buyer driven marketplace means using marketing automation software with a strategic lead scoring system, and then filling out that framework with a thorough content marketing plan based on your belief framework, let's take a look at some of the most important elements in a lead nurturing program. Number one, buyer persona's hands down as we've gone over again and again, the most important thing for lead nurturing, along with most of marketing, is to tailor your content to your buyer persona. Write your goal is to send the right content to the right persona and its content that they would be interested in. Meaning if you are going to do it right, then you will have to have more than just one lead nurturing campaign. Then, based upon your segmented user base, you will want to number to define a workflow. This is the crux of lead nurturing or e-mail drip campaigns. The reality is that your leads won't be convinced to buy your product with the first email you send. At least most of the time. If you send one-off e-mails, then chances are you are going for gold with every single send because you only have one email to do everything you want to do. But your goal should be to systematically enable your customers to make a purchase decision through a series of touch points, not just one huge grand slam email. All right, these are called the workflows. And these workflows can then be automated based on your user's previous actions. Now this extract that you see here is from an infographic bipartite. And it explains how a lead nurturing workflow could possibly work from left to the right of the graphic. Right? You're trying to deliver content that is relevant. If they open one email, all that opens up a gateway to maybe a couple of other emails. If they don't, then you want to give them another email based upon their inactivity. The benefit of doing this is that you can start to see what content is relevant and what content is not relevant based upon the stage the subscriber is in. Thirdly, is maintaining a lead at nurturing calendar. This is generally for larger organizations that have regular campaigns and the bandwidth to create a lot of content. Basically, a lead nurturing calendar is an effective way of organizing the workflows and assigning responsibilities of who is going to create the content. And when. Having a visible calendar can help to remind everyone on your team and your organization of an ongoing flow and avoid any overlapping of e-mails which can happen, right? You don't want to be sending one persona for different emails because they're all in these silos. Fourthly, and this is something that happens over time. Test when to send your emails. Now there's a longstanding debate on the best time to send a business e-mail, weekday or weekend, morning or evening. How about event or conference emails? Is it the six to seven AM window or is it the 10 to the noon? When is it? Well, expert opinions vary greatly in this topic, but no one will understand your audience as well as you do. For instance, if someone doesn't engage with your first e-mail, do you wait three days, five days, seven days? Well, keep track of all of your email metrics that we've already gone through. Learn from the numbers. When did people engaged the most? When do they not? When do they open up your emails? What time of the day? Learn from these numbers and then repeat your successes, right? You may also want to take a look at a re-engagement campaign for those who have not interacted with you over the last 60 days. Here's an example drip campaign with a little more detail. Now what I want you to note about this drip campaign in particular, are two specific elements. Number one are those critical junctions of did they click the link? Did they engage with this email yes or no? If yes, then they go down a different drip campaign. If not, well, then they continue on down the original. But secondly, notice the pause. See the pause, five days, five days, seven days. You have to figure out what works for you, right? If someone doesn't open up your e-mail or engage with it for five days. Well, at that five-day mark, that's when you send the next email. Is it going to be three days in your instance? Is it going to be two weeks? Figure out what works for you. Also keep in mind if people are engaging with your email, that means they're interested. And so what you want to do is look back at your belief framework, your content engagement plan. Take a look at the next question problem need that that consumer that persona has and then deliver that email. Again. Great opportunity to test. Now sometimes you will have auto responder campaigns, meaning the moment someone signs up or submits a form on your website, they are dropped into a lead nurturing campaign just like this. At other times, you may put them in manually based upon emails that you receive from a trade show or a legalist that you purchased. Either way, these examples that we're going through are simply to get you thinking holistically rather than one-off e-mails. Think of this series of three to five emails or more, based on a progressive series of topics that nurtures a leader persona through the buyer's journey. Then keep track of your metrics and make the tweaks where they are needed. And again, over time, you'll have a fairly successful lead nurturing framework for each persona based upon each initial interaction. 180. Different Types of Lead Nurturing Emails: Before we end this section on lead nurturing campaigns, I wanna take a look at the different types of lead nurturing e-mails you could and should be sending. First off, our emails that educate. Now if you send only one lead nurturing E-mail, the educational email is the one to choose. Educating your prospects is a crucial step in closing a sale, and it's one of the easiest ways to shorten your sales cycle. So what you wanna do is focus on one topic per email and then educate them over time as they move through your sales cycle. Remember these e-mails shouldn't be overly salesy. Most organizations a mistake they make is they only send salesy emails. That is every email they're trying to sell, so on. They only have one CTA and it's the same CTA every time. That's not what an educational email is about. It should correspond to your product and service offerings that solve their problems, right? You are educating people on their needs and the solutions that help solve those needs. Secondly, our emails that get you to connected. The more ways through which you and your prospect are connected, the better chance you have of closing the sale. So you can send lead nurturing emails that invite them to subscribe to your blog, connect on LinkedIn, follow each other on Twitter or Instagram. Join you at a conference or trade show or an event or any other place you both live in the web or in person. The more interconnected you are, the more you become a part of the prospects daily life and increase the opportunities to impress them with your content solutions and brand. Thirdly, our emails that offer your offers. Now, these are the ones where you get to give your prospects at chance to reconvert by sending offers that correspond to their stage in the buyer's journey. For example, prospects that just subscribed to your blog or probably at the top of the funnel. So you need to figure out which topics they're interested in and if they even have the potential to become a customer. So don't send them, say a free trial offer, right? Instead, take a look at their site behaviour, see what topics interested them the most, and then nurture them with offers related to that subject matter. Now as they become more engaged with you and your website, you can use that information to send more targeted offers that move them further down the sales funnel, right? You can imagine this takes a lot of work, but holding your prospects hand through the buyer's journey as much as possible has a much higher potential of pain off. Then the basic generic sales offer e-mail. Fourthly, our emails that help them improve. Now whether you're a B2B or B2C company, everyone's looking for something that will make them better, better at their job, better at their hobbies, better as a human being in general. And so you can send lead, nurturing emails that speak to these personal goals. So what you wanna do is position these e-mails around showing ROI or convincing their boss of something, or getting promoted, or impressing friends and family, or losing weight or whatever it is that motivates your prospects every day. In the process, what you're doing is asserting yourself as someone who can make their lives better. Because in the process again, you make yourself their ally and you help establish the trust you need to turn them into a customer. Fifthly, our emails that re-engage. Now if prospects have fallen off the map, either they click through your emails less frequently or they aren't responding to your sales team as much or at all for that matter. Send them something to re-engage them with your company. People love giving feedback, so ask your subscribers for feedback on things like email frequency, content quality, and subject matter, just to see if there's something you can alter to better suit their needs. Now, a best-case scenario is you get the knowledge you need to better customize your prospects, e-mails, worst-case scenario, your prospect either doesn't respond or opt out of your e-mails, which helps you, again by weeding out leads who wouldn't have been a good fit for your product or service anyway, either way, it's a win-win. And sixthly, are e-mails that are personal. As we have already looked at every lead, nurturing E-mail should be personalized, that is tailored to your prospects, actions and behaviors. But some of them should also be personal. Now, not all lead nurturing emails have to be automated, right? Think outside of the lead nurturing tracking. Consider when an e-mail from you, a member of your sales team, your founder, or even an engineer or support rep, might help you close your sale. Now this is particularly helpful near the end of the sales cycle to help address any of the issues that had been plaguing the prospect. Personal touches like this can help push a prospect through these last stages of the sales cycle and make your company stand out as the one that goes above and beyond for their customers. Now having just look through these lead nurturing emails, what I want you to note is how little what we talked about had to do with hard selling. Again, a mistake I see too many organizations make is they tried to hard sell at every stage, with every email. It always has to lead to buy my product, requested demo, free trial by this thing, whatever it is. But that's not going to help your customers solve their needs and problems. And so your goal is to again position yourself in their mind as the trustworthy, authoritative expert who can help them, who has their back in a personal way. And so when you look through your lead nurturing emails, always think in the back of your mind, how am I making their life better? I'm I focusing on me or their needs and their problems. Is this coming across as just another sales pitch? Now, keep this in mind. I am not against the sales pitch at all. That's what keeps our company's afloat. But at the same time, if that's all you ever do, which is kinda like the knee-jerk reaction of most new businesses and large organizations for that matter, then you're going to find your unsubscribe rates get higher, your open rates and engagement rates are simply going to dwindle down because people recognize this email isn't valuable to me. So again, position yourself in their minds, make your emails valuable and you will find the engagement will only increase over time. 181. Growing Subscribers: Finally, if you are going to go to the e-mail route, which I strongly suggest, then you need to be fully focused on growing your subscribers. Now, if you are purchasing a lead list or an email is just be careful because you do get what you pay for if you've found an excellent deal on 30000 e-mails, well, chances are most of it's going to be spammed and that's going to come back and bite you in the long run. The best lead lists are those you have earned with your great content. But again, this is the long game approach. So here are a few quick suggestions for capturing emails and growing your subscribers. First office, something just like a general email sign-up form on your website. It's not very attractive and effective, but it still can capture emails, something like subscribed to our newsletters or subscribe to my blog or wherever it may be. Secondly, our sign-up requests specific to different sections and offerings on your website, right? Again, this is where you can have something like subscribe to my blog or article or press release section. How about a loyalty program or offers and promotions, right? If you promise a reward, chances are you will receive more email addresses. Remember, don't be afraid to capture emails on any of these parts of the websites. It's not going to hurt. Just have a little form and one little button and just ask away. You can also use gated content as a great way to reward users for sending you their information. So spend some time, as we've talked about in the content section, invest in some great content. And the reward for them downloading this great content that you've produced is they give you their information. Now you can also do this through the general demo requests, free trials, or any other connection related offerings. You can capture emails via Facebook and LinkedIn as well, thanks to lead ads. Now, although this form of lead capturing costs you money, the effort on the prospects part is minimal, so they may be more prone to give up their information. Don't forget though, your sales team can capture emails through a live chat or inbound sales call. So make sure you make them aware and you educate them on how to do this and how to slip in that question or receive an email address as easily as possible. Now if you have an account section of your website, you will be able to gather e-mails here as well, right? This this often works if you incentivize registration with some value add promise, whether it's a try our 14 day free trial or first month is free or whatever that may be. Now, right? These are just some examples. This isn't an exhaustive list, but the goal is to implement subscriber growth tactics online or offline, depending on how your customers prefer to interact with your brand. So meet your customers where they are. They may be online, they may be offline at conferences or events wherever that is. And refine your strategies as each communication channel evolves over time. 182. CHANNEL: SOCIAL: Next up our social networks. Now this is a topic that is far too reaching to cover in just one session. But from a marketing leaders perspective, there are some key things you must understand before you dive into social. For instance, there is no point in us talking about how to post a social, social ad sizes, scheduling, building audiences or the like. My suggestion is find an entry level marketing specialist, a freelancer, or a consultant, or a small agency, just to do the daily tasks. But as a leader in either business or marketing specifically, we need to be able to answer questions like, why, which one? When? So let's start this leadership discussion by pointing out that each social network has their own purpose, their own audience, and certain quirks. Meaning, when you are wanting to promote on social, you should not think of social as one big bucket where you can create one piece of content, throw it in and expect to see results. You should think of it as social Facebook, social LinkedIn, social Twitter, social Instagram, social YouTube, and so on. Do you see what I'm doing? Each one is unique and has a unique audience, purpose, style, design, tone and voice and so on. Here is a great social media cheat sheet from leveraged wage media that I have used numerous times, even printed out, kept it next to my desk. Now, let me point out that if you are viewing this than these numbers are outdated, right? In fact, if I updated these numbers today, they would be outdated next month. However, cheat sheets like this are extremely helpful when you start to think about prioritizing your social media campaigns. For instance, you may come to the conclusion that your target audience uses social media. First off, Through qualitative and quantitative research, you should be able to narrow down the top one or two or three social networks used by your target audience. Now, a cheat sheet like this can help you narrow it down. If your target audience are a creative females, then you can see Pinterest may be a great starting point. Or if you are targeting working professionals with technical software, then LinkedIn and Twitter may be a good place to start. Point being is, since you have already created your persona's, try to see if you can't map your persona's to a few of these specific social networks. Once you've pinpointed a few potential social networks, then you can begin to craft platform specific campaigns. Now again, just as a reminder, one of the reasons I suggest you find the top one or two, or potentially even three, is because your audience may live on every social network to some degree, to some percentage. But that is simply way too much for anyone to tackle. Start with the top one, then moved to this second one, and then the third one as your time allows. Because if you are anything like me, then the list of social networks can be daunting, especially when you're starting out. That is wide, most people are fine with facebook, right? But as a leader, you should know where and how to promote your brand depending on the demographics and culture of each social network. For instance, here are a couple of other charts that I have used, which simply shows some basic demographics, gender and age groups for each of the main social networks. And again, if your target audience is within a certain demographic or age range, then you can use cheat sheets like this to simply say, You know what, I should avoid these networks and maybe focus on these other ones if I want to have the highest ROI or ROAS return on ad spend. And the reason these charts are so necessary and so beneficial is because many organizations and people think of social media as distribution. And therefore they use the same messaging on every platform. But as we have looked at earlier, social media content has three mandatory prerequisites. Number one, it must be on-brand. Now, as we have seen, don't try to be someone you're not right, it's confusing to the end user. There's no firm brand style tone or voice for your audience to get behind. So just make sure you are yourself, who you really are. If you don't know what that is, then clarify it and then follow it. Secondly, it must resonate with your target audience. Remember who your target audience is and speak that language that makes sense to them. Don't speak down to them or confusing with too technical or product folks in focus speak, speak in such a way that addresses the external, internal and moral problem or pain point of your user. Thirdly, it should be tailored for that specific network. The last thing you want to do is create a social ad. That's the same thing as saying, I wrote a book. It doesn't matter what's about. All books are the same, not true. You don't create social ads. You create an ad for Facebook and the audience there. You create an ad for LinkedIn or for Twitter. Specifically, each network is not just a distribution. It is a community of individuals that think and act and expect certain elements within that community. When people go to LinkedIn, they have different expectations than if they went to Facebook and Twitter. You see people visit different social networks for vastly different reasons and we have to take that into account. In fact, a great way of thinking of the different social networks out there is a graphic similar to this. Now, you can find many different versions of this donut example online, but this is one that I like. Let's say you're eating a doughnut at your local donut shop. This is potentially how you would interact with each social network differently. You sent out a quick Tweet announcing you're eating a doughnut with a quick hashtag. Facebook, you tell your family and friends you are currently eating a doughnut, you updated your status or you may check in at four squared. I'm at this donut shop or share an artistic photo of you stuffing your face for instagram. It's got that really cool filter on it. Or maybe even create a montage video of your donut eating experience for YouTube or whatever other social networks that are. Now, you get the drift right? All of there is a clear overlap between social networks. You wouldn't share the exact same information on all social networks, right? What works on Twitter would be lame on Instagram as shown by how few likes or comments you receive. Now, you could even talk about the numbers and the growth in revenue for this donut shop on LinkedIn and that would resonate on Facebook. It would be boring. It says Brian Clark from Copyblogger pointed out remarkable social media content and great sales copy are pretty much the same. Plain spoken words designed to focus the needs of reader, listener, or viewer. So let's take a few minutes and talk about each of the social network so we can create this great social media content and great sales copy that resonates on each social network. 183. LinkedIn: Let's spend a few minutes looking at LinkedIn. Now, generally, people go to LinkedIn for business reasons, looking for a job, reading business news, finding a business associate, and so on. Now, the searches and topics on LinkedIn are centered around business. That's why LinkedIn brands itself as a business and employment oriented social networking service where you can, and this is a direct quote from LinkedIn. You can manage your professional identity, build and engage with your professional network, access, knowledge, insights, and opportunities. Therefore, if you create content, be it organic posts are paid ad. This is the type of content you want to create. Let me illustrate. Let's say you work at a Fortune 500 company. Now you present to your CEO the marketing goals and strategy for the coming year. Our detailed and focused presenting a ton of research charts, graphs, expenses, goals and objectives, and everything else. Your pitches tight and practiced. Now that weekend you were at your community pool and you see the CEO of your company who happens to live in your same community. You're both playing with your kids, eating chocolate chip cookies and soaking in the sun. You chat about life, family, and work. Then you somehow get on the topic of your presentation and how it relates to you, your life and your goals and, and where you hope to be two years down the road and, and maybe a part of the company and what your goals for the company are, right? Just really high level, very casual, very fun. Now, although in both settings, corporate and poolside, you were talking about your marketing objectives. The corporate presentation fits within the style of LinkedIn. It's focused, business-related, contains facts and figures and is engaging from a business mindset. Whereas the poolside presentation fits more in line with Facebook. It's casual, it's friendly, it's non-confrontational. There's not a ton of facts and figures and research. It's more laid back. So in the next video, we're going to take a look at the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook. 184. Facebook: Facebook describes itself as a social network where you can connect with friends, family and other people, you know, share photos and videos, send messages and get updates. That's all a direct quote. Now, whereas we just looked at LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a business centered first. Facebook though, is people-centered first. Meaning Facebook is the place to hang out and catch up and watch videos, view images and the like. It's been described as the CEO smoke break, right? A place to get away and turn your brain off and catch up with life and laughing cats and whatever else. Now, since this is the case, would you create content that shows in-depth stats and research that appeals to the brain? No, generally that's not the case, right? You would create content that appeals to the heart emotionally and can be consumed very quickly. I heard a member of the Facebook ads team wants share, create your Facebook post or add with the recognition that it may appear between cats and waterfalls like that. Because in other words, if people are scrolling through images of cats and waterfalls on their news feed, does your post, does your ad fit in? Does it work? Does it resonate or does it feel out of place? Therefore, when you need to talk about your business on Facebook, recognize that people are not in the brainy work mood, right? They want to be entertained and spoken to from heart to heart. This is where you address them moral and philosophical aspects of your product. That is, what does your product help conquer? Hunger, waste, legal issues, brokenness in the world, right? Go beyond the external and internal problems and address the issues that empower an impassion people to action. This is what garners Facebook Clicks and shares. Because in a place like Facebook, people share what's so important to them that they have to make sure their friends and family see it too. The other thing I want you to consider about Facebook is the metrics. Now the amount of metrics you can gather from people who engage with your ads or posts or pages is staggering. Now to make this point, just look at your screen, look at the different segments you can adjust in just Facebook ads alone, right? It's everything you can learn about education, finances, interests, behaviors, relationships, life, stage, demographics, everything. Now, this is much different than something like Google, right? A lot of the demographic information you get in Google AdWords is from people's Gmail accounts. Now, since gmail isn't necessarily a social network and most people don't use Google Plus, that demographic information isn't going to be very accurate. Whereas here in Facebook, this is people social community. And then they want to make sure everything is as accurate as possible. Their job title, their family, their friends, everything to do with demographics, education, location, you name it. Now on top of that, you can use Facebook Audience Insights to learn more about your target audience. Gathering consumer insights really on any topic. Now if you don't advertise on Facebook, at least have an account. So you can dive in and start making use of some of Facebook's incredible userData. Because that again, is one of the benefits of Facebook. You can dive headlong into these great analytics. Learn all about your audience, have probably learned things that you never knew about your audience, just by seeing who interacts with your pages, with your posts, with your ads. 185. Twitter: In the modern world, twitter is one of the best places for consumers to engage with a brand. It also contains a vast majority of young adults. Think of all the ways that consumer can communicate with a brand. They can call you, email, chat, visit your place of business or social. Now from the modern consumers mind, Twitter is the place they can reach out to you immediately. And the expectation is that you would immediately or within a few minutes respond. Now concerning brands, twitter is seen as a direct communication channel with any department at an organization. Let's say you have an awful flight with an airline. You send the airline an email or a tweet. Well, of course you send them a tweet because chances are you'll get a much better and quicker reply considering your conversation is now public. Right now there's accountability. Or let's say a clothing brand has done something that you find offensive while you post a Twitter so others can jump on the bandwagon and join your movement, right? Twitter is fast pace, it's concise and it's an easy way to connect with your audience. And for that reason, Twitter can be a powerful tool. Although for most industries that's not necessarily a platform that works well for advertising from an ROI perspective. It is a channel that must not be neglected if you have consumers who want to reach you on it, I just wouldn't spend too many dollars on it because the ROI is so low statistically. Now, there is nothing worse than a brand that is neglected their Twitter account. First off, you will see consumers reaching out to an unresponsive brand. And that's obviously not good, right? That speaks to your unresponsiveness. And if you're unresponsive to prospects, well, chances are you're not going to be a good brand for customers as well. Secondly, if you're not posting regularly, it looks like you are asleep at the wheel, also not good. It looks like you're not relative and relational and upon the times. So if you have the Twitter profile, just make sure you're posting regularly, engaging influencers, retweeting industry experts, and quickly responding in a professional, empathetic and helpful manner. 186. YouTube: Now, I would be remiss if I didn't spend a couple minutes talking about YouTube, if you are able to create videos of your product or your organization or your customers with testimonials or anything that can be beneficial to prospects or customers than it should be on YouTube. Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google, of course. Now, this place was fought for insanely and by being, that's Microsoft child and Yahoo and they both lost. This should give you an idea of the power of YouTube plus Google and YouTube. So there's this mysterious symbiotic relationship between Google, YouTube and Google Plus. However, what you need to know is that nearly everyone is on YouTube. So much so that nearly every user intuitively knows how to engage with YouTube videos. Because we do it all the time, right? Whether it's on YouTube.com or on some other website embedded as a video. There is no learning curve. There's no surprise. Plus, YouTube is much more than just a video hosting service. This is important to remember. It's a community, a massive community made up of over a billion very active users. As you can see the stats here, with 300 hours of video uploaded every minute and nearly 5 billion videos watched every single day, right? These are numbers and this is not a channel and you can ignore if you have video. Plus, you're able to gain real demographic insights and valuable usage data concerning what kind of people watch a channels. Now on top of that, there are opportunities for members to like, share and embed videos with their community. And yet, despite these absolutely huge user engagement metrics, only 9% of us small businesses use YouTube. Now I get that the fact that it's not for everyone. But again, if you are able to teach or to entertain, then you should be on YouTube. Find a freelancer, a small agency or a consultant or whatever it is. Whoever it is that is familiar with video, spend 500 bucks to have an intro video to your brand or your product. Try to come up with something clever or maybe testimonials that you can put out there, right? Any way to get your foot in the door on YouTube will help you. 187. Other Social Networks: Now of course we can talk about all the other networks, but that's not the point of this session. My goal is to have you think like a strategic leader and not just for social, but for every channel. Each channel has a distinct purpose, tone and voice and audience. Pinterest, for instance, is all about aspiration or utility for fashion, art, home, decor, food, or anything else that you can create beautiful images of. Snapchat is a goldmine for businesses targeting millennials. Google Plus is great if you are targeting Brazil or India. Strange, but it's true. Instagram is all about real imagery and has an incredibly engaging audience with 59% of users checking the app every single day. The point is this, if you create, measure and optimize your content on a channel by channel, network by net basis. Then you'll begin to see your audience engaged with you. If you are finding very little interaction with your target audience, then make sure you do a quick reality check of your content. Is it tailored for your audience on that channel? And are you targeting the right social networks to begin with? You may be spending your time and dollars on a network that your target audience doesn't spend much time on. Again, there's no magic formula here other than being really perceptive to your audience wants and needs and pain points. Remember, they are the hero of their own story, not you. The more you show how you care about your consumer, the more they will be willing to entrust themselves and their dollars to you. 188. CHANNEL: SEARCH MARKETING: Let's talk about search engine marketing. Now, there are a lot of different terms that are thrown around in the modern marketing environment, and this is one of them. So let's start with a definition. So we are sane and meaning the same things. What is search engine marketing, or SEM? Sem is a part of a larger umbrella called search marketing. Search marketing is a discipline that encompasses both SEO and SEM. Seo is we looked at his organic, it's optimizing your site for search engines. Sem is paid. That is marketing on the search engines. Basically SEM is everything, SEO is not and vice versa. For instance, when you look at a basic search engine results page on Google or Bing, you see two primary results on the page. Results that are pulled organically through Google Search algorithm and results that companies or anyone really pays to be displayed. The challenge for marketers today is that we are always looking for the most efficient way to get our product or service in front of the most qualified people. Now, although there are a lot of similarities visually, the tactics, approach, cost, and benefits of SEO and SEM can be quite different. However, when these two marketing disciplines are used in tandem, well these two tactic complementing each other perfectly. Keep in mind, as we saw earlier with Integrated Marketing Communications, every channel can and should play well together. And that is just as true for SEO and SEM, or organic and paid. 189. #1: Be Found at Every Stage: So in this section we're going to look at a few reasons that you should have this integrated approach with SEO and SEM. First off, your goal should be to reach consumers at every stage of the customer journey. Now the length of the customer journey depends on your industry, right? But most likely your customers will have more than one touch point before converting. Now research from the Online Marketing Institute shows that it takes an average of seven to 13 touches to deliver a sales ready lead. Now whatever your industry, this multi-touch customer journey has become the norm for today's savvy consumer. For example, have you ever booked a vacation after searching just a single query and landing on a single website, right? Most likely not. Let's say you would like to vacation in England. You may start with a search like great places in England. Well, after looking at the results on the first page and be honest, how many of you actually click on the second page? You may refine your search to historical places in England or tourist places in England. Now after a week or much longer of this ongoing search that you have used your phone for your laptop, your work computer, your parents tablet of friends phone, right? You get the point. After this ongoing search. You can see why creating compelling content at each stage of the funnel is so important, right? Because if you owned a B&B and bath, then you would want to ensure that you are visible through out this entire journey. Each touch point, whether it's desktop and mobile, search and social, organic and paid. The point is this, the best way to capture today's buyer comes down to having integrated campaigns that are working together simultaneously across different channels and each stage of the funnel, right? Does this sound familiar? The more times you can interact with this customer, with the prospect during their journey, the more your brand is going to see, be seen as a trustworthy source of information and hence hopefully a trustworthy product or service to purchase. 190. #2: Drive Dual Strategies: Which leads us to the second reason why you want to take an integrated approach with SEO and SEM. And that is you can use PPC data to drive SEO strategy and vice versa. Now, it should be no surprise to you that organic user data has become more limited over the years. Thank you, Google. Meaning you cannot just visit Google Analytics and crawl into the minds of the organic visitors. You can't see what keywords they are searching on for the most part. However, this information, or at least limited amounts of this information is available if you're willing to pay for it. Thanks to SEM and PPC. That is, you can see through PBC like Google AdWords, the exact search phrase that a user entered before clicking on your ads. Now, it's going to cost you money for that ad. But the end result is that you actually get to see the actual search phrase. But there's also more. You can also see demographic data such as age range, gender, and geographical locations. Now, using the Google Keyword Planner, you can to some degree C, the average monthly search volume for industry terms. And I, and I say kind of because Google has averaged out these numbers into big blocks instead of exact volume and to really not accurate. But with the Google Keyword Planner, you can get suggestions on similar terms for your keyword brainstorming sessions. The point is, it's not perfect data, but it can be helpful data. Because using this data, you can drive SEO initiative such as creating unique pages based on high volume target locations or search terms. For example, if you found you had amazing volume from three states about a certain topic, then you may want to think about creating state pages that delve deep into those search terms. Now, this is not just great organic content, but it can be used in more targeted PPC campaigns over time. However, what if you want to create 10 state pages based on search volume, but only have the budget to promote three of those state pages. Well, this is where SEO can help bolster your paid search strategy. Many PPC campaigns had these keywords that are just not worth paying for because of budget or competition. Well created few optimize pages around these high cost, high volume keywords to see if you can move up organically. It's a great way to gain search ground and brand awareness without having to increase your budget. Now if you see a couple of host pages resonating and having high conversion rates, well, then you know, you can put your money behind those pages. Do you see how they work in tandem? Ppc, SEM, it costs money, but you tend to get immediate results, immediate click-throughs, and you can see keyword data organic. It's, for the most part, it's free, but it takes a long time to see the results. So make sure that you use both hand in hand. 191. #3: Boost Conversions: The third reason for using this integrated approach with both SEO and SEM is to boost conversions with remarketing. Now, even though remarketing technically falls under search engine marketing, that is paid search, we are actually going to spend an entire section of this session on remarketing, since it can be such an important part of your marketing toolkit. But for now, let's just take a high-level look at remarketing. Remarketing is a great way to leverage your organic traffic on the PPC side, that is, using a little piece of JavaScript code on your site. You can collect data on who has visited certain pages on your website or who's visited your website at all, or taking certain actions, and then target those visitors via paid re-marketing ads. Now we have all seen these haven't when you go to Amazon and look for some, a nice new dress shoes for instance, but didn't actually purchase anything. Later in the day, you visit other websites for work or recreation and then you notice that dress shoe ads start showing up everywhere. All right, this is the idea of re-marketing. Now, here's why it's effective. For most websites, only one to 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. For many, it can be much lower than that. Meaning remarketing is a tool designed to help you reach the other 98, 99 plus percent of users who didn't convert right away. Now this is why it's so beneficial. It focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interests by visiting your website or even taking specific actions on your website. That's why most marketers who use it ca higher ROI than for most other digital channels. Also, because these remarketing clicks come cheaper than those from search. So it's really a win-win situation. Plus on top of that, remarketing provides an opportunity to get more creative with your ads based on how visitors interacted with your site. We saw how Amazon does this in the B2C realm with something like dress shoes. But however, in the B2B realm, you can also do this based upon specific pages are specific actions. Let's say visitor visits your pricing page, but doesn't fill out the demo or free trial form. Well, since they were interested enough in visiting your pricing page, there may be a pricing related barrier that is keeping them from purchasing. So now you have the opportunity to create unique content that showcases your value, or even potentially a promotion or coupon code offered specifically to them. Remarketing is a tool that lets you dynamically target this small group of site visitors with Uniquely valuable messaging. 192. #4: Dominate the SERPs: The fourth reason for using this integrated approach with both SEO and SEM is to dominate the surface, that is, the search engine result pages. Now because there are a number of different elements and visible on circuits today, you have multiple opportunities to be visible. So your goal should be to dominate the search landscapes so that when he searcher types in a phrase that you are targeting, Will you show up all over the place, right? Having a result up in one of the top paid positions, as well as being on the first page organically increases the chances that a user will click through your website instead of a competitors. This strategy will also further a certain brand confidence and visibility for your site. Now keep in mind there are other elements and visible on the SERP that you should be targeting as well. For instance, is there an image pack that is a list of images displayed horizontally across the top? How about a local pack with a map? Is there a Knowledge Card that seems to answer that question perfectly that the user typed in. How about reviews or videos or shopping results in news boxes, right? You can see that there are a lot of ways to get listed in the SERP and hence dominate the syrup, with paid and organic being two of the most important ways. Now maybe you saw this graph put out by Google a number of years ago. Let me preface this though by saying, this is Google putting out this research, but I still find the information very intriguing nonetheless. Now, you can look at this image in detail to get all the numbers. But here's what it is saying in the bottom right. You get incrementally more adclicks when you have both a paid and inorganic search result. For example, if you have the first organic search results, you would get 50 percent more clicks if you purchase the first position in the paid ads results. Meaning, according to Google, those visits would not have occurred without the ad campaigns. So here's a graph showing similar results from Ken shoe. And this is from, again, a few years ago. And it's simply a research report on the synergy of SEO and PPC. Same thing, shows that PPC traffic specifically rises and falls in conjunction or the organic search results. However, the lower your organic position, the more important the paid ad becomes. Now I'm sure we can pontificate all day about why this happens. But the takeaway is at least twofold. Organic, is more powerful. But paid ads are still effective, meaning it's not one or the other. It should be if you can afford it both. And it is this integrated approach with both SEO and SEM because they help each other out. 193. #5: Conversions: We now come to the most important reason for integrating both SEO and SEM, and that's conversions. Now if you've ever played around in Google Analytics, you may have seen this multi-channel funnels report. It simply shows the path by channel that users take before converting. Now you can see how users are all over the place, right? Meaning each channel compliments each other. And if you also notice that there's no real direct path from start to finish. People are starting on multiple different channels. There are second channel to get to you is completely different, right? There's all these different path. It's fluid for the user. So using this data in your GA report helps explain the importance of a holistic digital marketing strategy. It is a quantifiable argument that success is not confined just to one channel. So if you're putting all your eggs in one basket, same, we're going just the social route or just the organic route or just the paid route. Well, you're missing out on all these all these other opportunities to reach out to your customers where they're at and to convert them through those channels, right? Organic is extremely important. But so too as paid search. So to his partnerships and remarketing and social right, they all have their own place. Now strategies involving organic content marketing and paid ads and targeted displayed are great for driving traffic, but they don't help with conversion optimization. Conversely, remarketing can help increase conversions, but it doesn't drive people to your site initially. Your best chance of success is using multi-channels to drive traffic and then remarketing and get the most out of that traffic, which we're going to look at in upcoming lesson. The point being is they all play a part in the puzzle. As curt or underscores, advertising is just one part of a marketing plan. If that's the primary pillar of your marketing strategy, you're doing it wrong. 194. Integrate, Don't Separate: So as we come to the end of this section on search marketing, including both search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Here's the point I want you to take away from this lesson. Integrate. Don't separate. If you're intelligently integrating your paid and organic search activities, then the synergy provides greater results in search engine results, page domination. After all, they're all part of the same real estate that your brand needs to invest in. Now, as we've looked at what's important here is not only recognizing how the two channels impact one another, but how you can inform your strategy in either SEO or PPC based on data from the other channel. So as a quick overview, here's a quick list of the pros and cons of each channel. Paid search. It's easy to invest in. It's high cost, but fast to get started. That is, you can be up and running on paid ads in less than 15 minutes. It's that quick. So for this reason, though, it's incredibly competitive and it tends to be the case that people are bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio. Meaning, unless you have an incredible business model that's way better than all your other competitors. There's not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned it and return on investment or in cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC. You should remember all of these numbers that we worked through in the model session. So this is why again, if you remember from session 1, you have to build your model, then you will know how much you can spend per click on average. And if it's going to be beneficial for you, there may be some keywords that you simply have to avoid because it would break your model. However, it might weed out some other keywords and phrases that fit within your model and doesn't break your budget. Now, SEO, on the other hand, takes a longer time and it's a lot of investment. But, and this is key. It's evergreen. Now it's true that an organic click is free. That is, Google doesn't charge you anything for it. However, to get a good organic ranking that earns you a lot of clicks will often cost you quite a bit of time. And it generally doesn't come free, right? You have to create this piece of collateral or this web-page or blog posts, whatever it may be. You have to think though, of SEO as a six month or a year process, at least before you start earning big returns, which is why very few people invest in it strategically. Organizations are impatient, sometimes rightfully so, and therefore they need to see results immediately. However, organic results offering much bigger competitive advantage if you're willing to wait for it. Not only are there organic results trusted more, but they are evergreen. That is, they hang around for a long time. It euro or two or five, and people trust them. So if you know and appreciate the differences between PPC and organic SEO and SEM, then you can capitalize on each of their strengths. 195. CHANNEL: REMARKETING: We now come to the topic of re-marketing. Now as we looked at a few lessons go, most visitors to your website simply don't convert. As we saw, less than 2% on average, of people actually convert to becoming a sale the first time they visit your site. Now this number might seem surprisingly low, but the truth is that you really need to win people over long before they make the decision to choose your company over others. This is the idea of a user journey, or a buyer's journey, or a sales and marketing funnel, right? It insinuates time and time-lapse and progress. Either way. You like most businesses maybe getting a lot of new incoming traffic, which is great. But you may not see those numbers directly translate to sales, which is normal. Think about if you had the opportunity to direct targeted people who have visited a specific page or your website, or performed a specific action on your website, or even digitally interacted with you in the past. And that's even how hyper specific your messaging could be. Well, that's where remarketing or retargeting comes in. First off, which one is it remarketing or retargeting? Well, let me point this out by saying that the brainy active industry don't seem to be agreed on a distinct difference. Some have sought to define remarketing his email based while retargeting refers to the use of display ads only. But in truth, I honestly don't see an obvious distinction in the industry or by the experts. What I do see is that both terms refer to the targeting of visitors who have anonymously engaged with you, your content or your shopping cart. And then left. Then by using this behavioral data and tracking pixels from their site visit, you're able to find them on other platforms, right? The benefit of remarketing is that it allows you to reach the customers that are even more likely to purchase from you. Then first-time visitors because they already know your brand. Let's take a look at an example of remarketing, and this one comes from Forbes.com. Here's an example article in older article that has loads of great insights, but I wouldn't suggest going there unless you love waiting for three seconds through ads and all the other fun stuff that happens on forbes.com. Be that as it may, I want you to notice two things. You've see the ad in the top and the ad on the right. Now what's interesting about these two ads from Asana and bonafide. I have recently visited both of these websites with a client. I did not log in. I did not purchase. I did not enter in any information. But lo and behold, here are these ads from these two brands. Now, as soon as messaging is that great teams rely on Asana to get work done. Now this is fascinating because these are the pages that I was looking at with this client. It's great messaging, right? Because I was debating on which software to use to improve collaboration with 13. So I was looking through some of the features and voila, they are speaking my language. Bonafide, in the bottom right talks about their award winning solutions. Now this is important because it is a lesser known newer tool on the market. Meaning bonafide has to remind me who's just visited them, that they're not just a legitimate player in the market, but they are an award winning player and they can be trusted. So what's happening here? Well, once I visited their websites, clicked on a product, taking a certain action or interacted with them digitally in any way. Then a cookie was set in my browser and this information was used to retarget or read market to me. And even better, the messaging is tailored to my specific interactions with them. For instance, would you want to message to a visitor differently depending on if they visited your pricing page or if they downloaded your e-book. Exactly right, you would want to do it. And that's where we marketing comes in. You are targeting people who have already interacted with YOU, meaning they have to some degree, showed interest in your brand or in your product and service. So to explain it a little better, here is a simple little diagram that shows how remarketing works. To set up re-marketing for your website, you must implement a small piece of code into your site depending on which remarketing company you choose to go with. It's just a simple piece of JavaScript code you copy and paste into the header of your pages and does not affect the performance of your site at all. Your visitors will have no idea that it's even there. Every time you get a new website visitor, your site will drop it. Anonymous browser cookie. The user then leads you website. However, when your cookie visitor goes to another website, you're re-marketing ads service provider be at Google Admiral, whoever will know when to deliver an ad from your website. Now there are ultimately two different ways to target your audience, on-site and off-site events. Now this great infographic from Django summarizes seven different types of effective retargeting, broken down into these two categories, on-site and off-site. Now Chang, who is one of the top retargeting remarketing companies. They're on par with companies like add role, retarget are fetched back and Google. Now what I like about this infographic is that it shows ultimately re-marketing can be placed into these two categories. Meaning you can be very specific in the different strategies you take depending on the kind of interactions you want to target. So let's walk through this really quickly. First off, off site interactions. Offsite interactions refers to individuals who have not previously interacted with your site, but they do have similarities. There's the keyword similarities with your previous customers. So if you choose to target and an individual based off their offsite interactions, you could be looking at targeting their searches, their demographics, or topic of the website there on. Now, in other cases, you might choose to target individuals who searched or interact with the web similarly to how previous customers have, or based on interactions with distributed content. Facebook page or an app, for example, or with a partner site that is similar to your own. Now, all of these different type of interactions happen off site, that is off your website. But they share common elements with your specific site visitors, right? This is a great way to draw an, a bunch of people who have not even yet heard of your brand but may be interested. Now as a side note, this is how Facebook's lookalike audience works as well. On Facebook, you upload a list of e-mail addresses of leads, customers, whoever. And Facebook will target your ads to similar people along a plethora of data points. Secondly is targeting onsite interactions. Now, onsite interactions were first to targeting visitors who have already visited your site and have interacted with your products, services, or of taking some other action but may not have completed the sale. This is the type of retargeting or re-marketing that we have talked about at length so far. Now, remarketing onsite interactions is what we actually just saw in the previous example with Asana and Spotify. I visited them, that is their website. Then they targeted me with specific messaging that they knew I would be interested in. Since I already recognize and know their brand, they could skip the introduction stage and launch right into the more important messaging for me personally. For instance, you can target visitors based on a specific product they interacted with, how they found your site through social media search, a partner site or other inbound events. It could be based on those in your e-mail list who have expressed interest in your brand but have not yet converted to a purchase. There's a ton of different ways that you can retarget these consumers. Now in most cases I wouldn't suggest an either or but both. And that's because both off-site and on-site interactions are valuable tools to reach different audiences in a meaningful, valuable, and beneficial way. 196. Why Remarketing Works: Before we close this section on re-marketing, I wanted to address this question. Why does remarketing work? Well, remarketing is effective because it offers several benefits that we can't take likely, number one, brand awareness, right? It increases brand awareness and recognition with a constant exposure to brand ads. That is not only do visitors visit your website and interact with you there, but after they leave your website and visit other websites, they are constantly reminded of your products and your services that they viewed or engaged with. Which then drives. And we're to repeat traffic to your site. That is, do not forget, most sales are not made during that first site visit. Now, what's interesting though is that research shows of the visitors who didn't make a purchase on the initial visit. Two-thirds of those though, who visit a store again, end up making a purchase. I mean, you're going from one to 2% on the first visit to upwards of 60 plus percent on the second visit. Now, I would say that is a solid case for remarketing. Thirdly, re-marketing improves ROI based on increased user touchpoints. As we kind of just saw. That is not only is remarketing clicks less expensive than regular ads, but you are gaining value and frankly not wasting value from your initial ads, right? You've already set out initial ads that got people to your website and frankly, you paid money for it. You paid a lot of money for those initial clicks. So don't waste the opportunity to then convert those that already clicked and appeared genuinely interested. Which brings us to number 4, persistence pays off. And remember in a previous session when I showed that recent research on covered the modern person's attention span is only seven seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish. Well, in an era where our attention is diverted nearly every second is something new, it's important to stay in the forefront of an individual's thoughts. Remarketing is the very effective tactic to do so. For instance, I just engaged remarketing for one of my clients a couple of days ago. Now, everywhere I go, I am seen their ads because I've interacted all over the website. Now that's the point, is I cannot forget that brand. I cannot forget that claim, which is actually good as an agency because I don't want to forget them. But at the same time, imagine if that was someone who showed a little bit of interest in their product or service. Now they cannot simply forget that brand. They go to a new site, they go across the web that go to social. They are going to be seen that ad and that brand with their products and services and targeted messaging all over the place. That's why remarketing works. 197. Different Types of Remarketing: So far in this discussion on remarketing, we have primarily focused on one type of remarketing and that is site remarketing. However, I wanted to quickly introduce you to the different types of remarketing out there. First off though, let's define site remarketing. This is one of the most popular forms of remarketing simply because it's simple. And there are a number of companies that will help you get up and running for a minimal cost and basically under an hour add rule, for instance, even create your first seven ads for you. So for that reason, this reduces the amount of friction for site remarketing. However, you can also do search remarketing. Surgery marketing is we talked a little bit about an off site. Remarketing targets users who are making specific keywords or phrase searches. Now these individuals are displaying an interest in your industry and are probably looking for more information or a solution that has to do with you. So if their search falls within the parameters that you have said, then your ad will be displayed to them. Thirdly is social media remarketing. Now, unlike the re marketing you might do through Google ad network, for instance, social media remarketing focuses on displaying remark that it adds on your social networks. As an example, go to visit Amazon or Zappos, for instance, and then go to Facebook. You will instantly see ads for these companies, right? That can be powerful. And so if you want to display your ads on social media, you can do this through Facebook for instance, and you will just need to copy Facebook's tracking pixel, copy and paste it onto your website so you can engage in social media remarketing. Fourthly is email remarketing. Now if you use an e-mail client like Gmail, you'll have noticed contextual ads typically based on your email client, displayed up at the top of your email results. But you can also remark it to the ads within an individual's e-mail client. Now, although you are able to create and display ads on each of these different platforms, ultimately, remarketing campaigns show higher engagement than non remarketing campaigns to, again, this goes back to the fact that it is a lot easier to market and advertise to those who have expressed interest in your brand or your industry. So my suggestion to you is that if you want to learn more, check out Google AdWords or admiral, and see how quick and easy it is to get set up. I promise you you will not be disappointed with the results. 198. End of Session #6: Well, congratulations for finishing this session of the marketing masterclass. As you know, there are quite a few hours and videos and lessons to take part in, but you have completed it so well done. There are before you move on, three things that I want to go over very quickly. First off is the homework. Now, I call it homework, but in reality it is your marketing playbook. It is the same style of marketing playbook use by many of today's marketing leaders. It is really your game plan for your business or your brand to be effective in today's marketplace. So often what today's marketers do is they read a blog post about how they should be blogging more. So they blog more. Or they read a social posts about how they should be posting more on social. So they, do. You see how this goes? We're very reactive as marketers, the latest trend or the latest idea, the latest technique. But true marketers, the most effective marketers are those who having marketing playbook, who are proactive. They have a game plan for their marketing program. So I encourage you to go back, make sure the homework is completely filled out so that you have an effective strategy from here on out. Secondly, I wanna make sure that you understand all the topics in the videos, these video lessons that you have been through his really me 0.20 years in my own experience, along with hundreds of hours of marketing classes from universities into a succinct marketing course. I have whittled down the most important information that you as a marketing leader need to know. So I understand that it may be a little heavy at times, but I encourage you to go back and understand the concepts before you move on. And thirdly, I encourage you just to go back and leave a good review for me on this course. I read every single review. I take it to heart and I implement the feedback. The better the reviews, the more opportunities I have to come back and continually improve and update this marketing course. So again, well done on completing this session of the marketing masterclass.