How to optimize your marketing content strategy to reach more potential customers

Are you sure that your marketing content strategy works for the benefit of your business? Are you able to get additional potential customers? Where to begin? How to find a good idea? Of course, you can form your strategy by trial and error. But is it worth it? We suggest you listen to the advice of Elliot Schmukler, a former product manager on LinkedIn.



He suggested that any optimization tactic goes back to one of three options:



1. Increase exposure (for example, so that more people read your site).

2. Reduce friction (for example, one-click purchase on Amazon).

3. Stimulation (for example, buy one - you will get another one for free).

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This theory underlies Growth Hacking, and it offers a solid base for developing tactics that can be applied in any area of ​​your business - including content creation.



Here's how three levels of optimization of Schmukler can help you develop a serious marketing content strategy that will bring you even more potential customers.



Part I: Increase Exposure



You cannot convert blog visitors to customers if the blog has no visitors.

If you do not seriously think about how to attract visitors, everything may end up with the fact that potential customers you may even appear, but they will be "low-quality", i.e. they will not care what you do.

When Jason Genyar was just beginning to promote his entrepreneurial lessons, thousands of visitors flocked to his site, but they did not register for the event. Why? They were the wrong audience.

Here are a few tactical models that will attract to you (and convert them into customers later!) The correct visitors — targeted visitors.



When you make a post on a third-party resource, leave a link to the landing page



When Manish Seti began to compile a mailing list for his blog, which was dedicated to productive work, he decided to write to various other people's blogs and literally “catch” his readers there.



Hoping to get 200 new subscribers, he wrote a post on Scott Young's blog. At the end, he added a link to a special landing page from which readers could download exclusive material ... but only after a subscription.

The post was published, and Manish was almost torn to pieces. 200 followers, talk? Yes it is in one day! In a couple of weeks, this single post brought 1070 new subscribers.



Want more? Make specialized landing pages for each of your publications on third-party resources.



As a rule, the audience of blogs is clearly targeted, so a new post to the right blog can work very well - if, of course, you have made it interesting for people, and they can easily and simply subscribe.



Expert Council:



Alex Turnbull advises to optimize specialized landing pages, super-accurately targeting them to the reader:

• Share content with them that looks like what they just read.

• Show that you understand where they came from.

• Offer an exclusive spoon of honey to make it even sweeter.



Write to thematic communities



If you are an active member of communities like GrowthHackers, then you can study there, share ideas and learn about those who work in the same niche with you. Once the relationship is established there, this kind of community turns out to be a great place where you can share your articles, collecting traffic and increasing the number of potential customers.



Perrin Carrell had an idea for a new product; all he had to do was convince people that they would be interested in buying this business. For this, he decided to ask for the opinion of the League of Legends community on Reddit.







His post attracted a great many people (only likes of the likes of more than 1,900 ), and more than 6,300 people from this community subscribed to the Perrine newsletter.



Looking at this result, there is simply no strength to resist the temptation to immediately write to Reddit. However, before you start broadcasting about yourself, you need to find out something:



• Find the right subdits that fit your blog topic.

• Pay attention to popular topics and comments - they can say a lot about the demographics of your target audience.



But the most important thing is what? The most important thing, as explained in detail in the Social Media Examiner article, is that you have to give something to the community: “Send adequate content, offer competent answers, ask questions related to what you do, and respond to people who are interested in you. "



Launch your own podcast



Scott Britton knew that many people prefer podcasts to blogs. Therefore, I decided to make my own podcast The Competitive Edge.

Some eight weeks after launch, the Scott podcast reached a score of more than 50,000 downloads and became number 1 in iTunes in the New and Noteworthy business category (something like “New and something that is useful to pay attention to ").



The popularity of his podcast was reflected in his newsletter: during these 8 weeks he had 2500 new subscribers.



Here’s how Scott’s download statistics for these 8 weeks looked like:







And how did Scott achieve such instant success with his podcast? Long ago, when even the first part had not yet been published, Scott scrupulously planned his growth strategy, and this was the basis of his rapid take-off.



Expert Council:



We must try to achieve as many downloads as possible in the first 8 weeks - this is how you can get into the “New and Noteworthy” iTunes rating. This will give your podcast a head start compared to thousands of other new projects.



Ready to start? Take a microphone, get on Skype with a friend and record your first podcast right and right now!



Part II: Reduce Friction



When I first started my blog, I probably got somewhere for one new subscriber for every 100 visitors. It was very regrettable. Now I get six . Still ahead, but it is much better than what it was before, and this happened partly because I removed the stumbling blocks from under the feet of visitors.







My mailing through MailChimp grew to the extent that I optimized my blog for conversion.

There is one interesting fact about reducing friction, resistance and cleaning up stumbling blocks: if you achieve at least a small success in this business, this success affects all posts, even those that have not yet been written.



Split testing of subscription form elements



When you write a text that should encourage visitors to action, you just have to hope for intuition and pray that your brains are better than average to predict the behavior of the user.

And you can use split- (sometimes also called A / B) testing to accurately measure how subscribers respond to different labels on buttons and to different headers.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obama team wanted to create a large mailing list, because it turned out that subscribers are more willing to become volunteers, sponsors, even participate in voting more actively and generally support them in every way.



Here's how it looked at first:







To develop success, a split test was conducted on 24 different landing page options. With the help of polyvariant tests (when several elements change at once), the Obama For America team tested various variants of registration buttons and images of the main character.







This option won: the number of registrants increased by 40.6%.



The winning option (at the top) increased the number of people registered for the newsletter by 40.6%. It sounds impressive, but what did the Obama campaign really mean?



For all the time before the election, an optimized subscription form brought 2.9 million new subscribers and $ 60 million additional donations .



Want more? Split-test your forms. In the case of Obama, it worked.



Your subscription form can be pretty darn attractive, but you will never know how well it works until you experience it all.



Did you check your calls to action, headlines, pictures and composition? If you need help, Michael Zipursky wrote something here.

Do not complicate

We are human, and we like things that we understand. The simpler the thing, the more comfortable it is for us. In Gestalt psychology, this phenomenon is postulated by the law of pregnancy.



So how can we use our pursuit of simplicity to increase the number of subscribers?

Derek Halpern experimented with this law by testing three different subscription options.



Three options: control, second, first:







Option 1 (right) appealed to the principle of social trust, arguing that "already 14,752 people have done so." Option 2 (in the middle) used the law of pregnancy, cutting off social evidence, leaving everything to a minimum. The control version (left) had a slight variation in the title.



Knowing about the power of social trust, I thought that I would win number 1 — who would think of it if they didn’t want to join 14,000 others ?! But the law of pregnancy (or simplicity) at this time showed itself in all its glory.



So, simply by removing the social evidence, Halpern forced potential subscribers to focus on the form itself. The simplest variation increased the conversion rate by 2%, which is 102.2% better than the social evidence option.

By developing subscription forms and landing pages, reduce friction by simplifying.



The main thing is to find a middle ground between reporting subscription benefits and not creating too much friction for potential subscribers.



If in doubt, test.



Add a popup with a subscription



Your visitors will not be able to subscribe unless they see the subscription form.

Trite, no? But how many visitors pay attention to the subscription unit, which is hidden between popular posts and sponsored advertising? Or on the tiny “Details” button under your post?

It seems that many of your visitors simply did not see the subscription form.

When I realized this, I decided to try a pop-up plugin that would make my form more visible.







Different pop-up options converted about 6.4% of new visitors to great subscribers who were looking forward to my next post.



The results of the week pop-ups.







Installing such a plugin is a matter of five minutes, and this window is not so annoying. To make it even less annoying, you can:



• Postpone floating for some seconds.

• Show the window only on certain pages.

• Show it only for beginners.



How much does your potential customer simply subscribe to your blog? Your popup will not necessarily be excruciating pain.



Part III: Stimulation



After you have created the exposure and removed the friction, you should come up with a suitable incentive.

What is the incentive to use to get your site visitors to subscribe to the newsletter? And how to strengthen this incentive?



E-book - the best gift



When you offer people to subscribe, “to get more such articles” - what's the point? You offer them something vague, some vague perspective. This, of course, not a horrible horror, but it could be better.



When you offer people to subscribe, "to download Four things that they will not be taught in college" - what is the lure? You offer them to subscribe so that they can immediately download the insanely important e-book.







Feel the difference! E-book as bait promises instant benefits and gives a clearer call to action.

It may seem that to write such a book is a mission almost impossible. But it is not.

No need to hurry.



It is necessary to break the process down into small subtasks and solve them step by step. Remember that piece by piece you can eat and mammoth.



Run your own webinar



If you do this correctly, the webinar can give a solid boost to the growth rate of your mailing list. And it is not so difficult.

The timeliness and usefulness of the webinar once or twice will turn many of the visitors to your site into its participants (as well as into the participants of the mailing list). Subsequently, you can share the recorded video, and, perhaps, translate the audio into a podcast.







(Unbounce webinar landing is in the picture)



When Derek Halpern was disappointed in what he was able to achieve with his “enticing offers”, he decided to organize a webinar and thus activate the subscription on his website. He planned everything out, made the landing page, and in some 28 days received 1054 new potential customers .



Bonus Reception:

In addition to increasing the number of subscribers as such, webinars provide an opportunity to build relationships with new potential customers, which can seriously revitalize the newsletter itself.



Attract people with an event before and after. Get feedback, find out what people would like to hear next time.



Tie zaanuhi to the topic of the post



You can be infinitely proud of your glorious e-book, but what if it says about landing pages, and a visitor came to you to read about advertising on Facebook?



The visitor may not appreciate your efforts, if they do not correspond to what he is looking for.

And here the power of thematic bonuses comes to the rescue.

If you read the blog of Nov Kagan, you could not help but notice it. In some posts on this site, he uses themed bonus content that is directly related to the topic of the article.







In the above example, he added a good bundle of bonus content to a post about marketing books on Amazon. If you try to download it, you will be asked to subscribe first.



Bonus Reception:

Unlike e-books, bonus material is prepared much faster.

Think about the resources that you already have at hand. Mail scripts, table templates, cheats, some notes and lists of resources - all this can be a tasty bait.



The dry residue of a successful content marketing strategy



If you optimize the resource for the three indicators described (exposure, friction and bonuses), there will be more potential customers. But in the long term, all, of course, comes down to what you need to do just one thing: to continue to create great content.



No matter how you optimize your marketing strategy, no matter how you aim it at growth, success will not come at once.

It will come in years of hard, ungrateful work, when you squeeze out every article, every post, every podcast, drop by drop. All this is not easy, but customers will be grateful to you. No one said it would be easy!