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How to Create Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 6 steps

When it comes to general content marketing, the leading question brands need to ask themselves is how they can create a meaningful customer experience and show they offer the best solution on the market.

And even though I used the word “customers,” don’t think for a second that this only applies to your “normal” client base.

B2B marketing, at its core, is not that different from B2C marketing. You’re still trying to be helpful, successful, trustworthy, and people’s first choice.

Still, there are many differences between the two, with the biggest one being that a lot more is at stake when you’re dealing with B2B clients.

Imagine you’re a significant paper supplier called Mumder Difflin. If one school kid decides to buy a different print paper for their poetry class, you won’t lose money. But if a big chain of stores goes with your rival supplier, things get serious.

Simply put, you don’t have a lot of room for experiments and failure. Big companies usually make up their minds about a brand only once and have difficulty switching to a different provider. And there are so many things that can turn them off during the purchase process!

Those 77% will most likely not return to the same vendor ever again.

Besides offering a simple buyer’s journey, another way to build that trust from the beginning and become everyone’s first choice is to have a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

And if you’re wondering how to do that, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s dive in.

What are the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing?

I talked a bit about this in the intro but let’s go deeper.

In B2C marketing, the target customers are regular people that make a purchase for themselves, friends, or family members. Just as I said in the example, our fictional student is getting print paper for himself, and he will use it for his poetry class. When he finishes school, he might go to a clothing store and look for a new jacket that he will wear.

You get the gist.

A B2B marketing strategy, on the other hand, will target the needs, pain points, and interests of potential customers that represent a particular company or another business. They are the decision-makers and make choices that will affect an entire team or even a company.

To put it simply, you have two entirely different buyer personas that will require various content marketing campaigns to decide about buying your product or service.

Let’s take a look.

Goals and motivations

B2C customers are usually driven by emotion and buy products or services to fulfill their own needs or the ones of their family and friends. They are attracted by deals and wish to be entertained, so advertising platforms for B2C are usually more fun and flashy. B2C purchases are also often spontaneous and illogical.

On the other hand, businesses look for convenience, ROI, expertise, and efficiency. It’s never about satisfying a whim and more about making a purchase decision that is part of a more comprehensive strategy. Logic and financial gain are at the forefront of their motivations.

Number of decision-makers

B2C customers usually conduct their independent research and make the purchase decision themselves. Rarely would they need to consult someone else, especially if it’s a spontaneous purchase. So even if they hear an opposite opinion, they have likely made up their minds already, and nothing will change it.

On the other hand, business clients rarely decide by themselves. Typically, an entire board needs to determine whether this is the best possible solution for whatever problem needs to be solved. One person speaks to the sales team or representative, but in the end, it’s a mutual decision that requires the majority of participants to agree to it.

Purchase process

Individual clients that don’t represent a company make various purchases all the time. It’s frequently part of a routine or connected to an event. For example, every week you would do a more extensive grocery shop, and every year you have to buy presents for someone’s birthday.

The most common process is going to the shop and making a purchase. Maybe if it’s a more significant purchase like an expensive laptop or workout equipment, the person would appreciate some sort of advice from a sales professional. Still, it’s an entirely individual buyer’s journey.

Prospective customers who are part of a business need to consult with a sales expert and often accept offers from various providers to get the best possible solution. When you consider that they have to consult with the other decision-makers, the entire process might take months before it’s completed. Many factors will determine the purchase, making a B2B buyer’s journey highly specific.

Long-term goals

An individual client rarely has a relationship with the vendor and does not look for anything long-term. They buy the product, and that usually ends their interaction. If they are happy with whatever they purchased, be it some cucumbers from a local farmer, or a bundle from a streaming service, they will most likely return to that place, but that doesn’t mean they have a personalized experience with that brand.

B2B clients build a relationship with the company and require special attention, usually in the form of a dedicated sales consultant. Once they commit to becoming a client of your company, they typically have to sign a contract and pay in advance. The payment terms are service-specific, but the consensus is that enterprises look for a meaningful long-term commitment rather than a spur-of-the-moment purchase.

As you can see, there are a lot of differences between those two types of clients, and they will highly influence your content strategy and digital marketing goals.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s how to create your own B2B content marketing strategy!

Building a B2B content marketing campaign from scratch

Building anything from scratch can be difficult, but it has to start somewhere.

1. Research your target audience

This is crucial to any content marketing campaign. Inbound marketing is all about creating a tailored and personalized experience for your leads, and you can’t do that without knowing them.

So the first step is to create a buyer’s persona – the interests and pain points of that persona will guide your content creation process and generate leads and organic traffic to your website.

Here are the best ways of analyzing your target audience to help create a solid strategy for your marketing efforts besides creating a persona:

Inspect your current client base and conduct interviews;
Conduct detailed market research to identify trends and client behavior;
Realize who the people that cannot be a part of your target audience are;
Research and analyze your competitors and their client base.

2. Identify your KPIs, goals, and timeline

The other factors your B2B content marketing strategy depends on are the goals and KPIs. After all, you can’t leave the station if you don’t know where you’re going.

Priorities for B2B companies change all the time. Years ago, revenue and ROI were essentials in a CEO’s mind. Nowadays, it’s a bit different.

Think about what you need the most. Improving and building brand awareness is a trend that has recently risen to power because businesses finally realize how important it is to be visible and to be known.

Once you have your goals figured out, think about specific KPIs and metrics that will aid your content marketing strategy. Here are some example KPIs that can be pretty useful:

The organic traffic of your website or blog;
The number of content pieces produced and published in a specific timeframe;
The type of content that performs best;
The rankings of essential keywords;
The number of sales that can be attributed to your content marketing strategy;
The number of subscribers (if you decide to launch a newsletter);
The backlinks and mentions of your company or produced content.

You need to choose the ones that align with your content strategy and will help you reach your goals.

And finally, you need to work with a strict timeline. To improve, you need a deadline for your content marketing experiments – you can’t track the results of a campaign that is still ongoing.

When you decide on a strategy, content distribution channel, and everything else that I’m going to share in this article, choose an initial timeline – 3 months, for example. When those 3 months end, you will be able to analyze the results and make improvements for the next one.

Bonus tip: Make sure you talk and discuss the goals amongst the team. Studies have found that setting clear goals and expectations fosters higher-performing teams.

3. Choose the most relevant B2B content distribution channels

Experience is indeed the most valuable teacher, but there are certain aspects of content marketing that you can easily predict, and the content distribution channels are a great example. What you decide depends on a few factors such as:

The type of product or service that your offer;
Your target audience;
The type of your business – local or global.

Focus on your strengths. Do you have a fantastic writing staff that can create in-depth guides to help other businesses? Then the answer is a blog.

Maybe your design team is innovative and skilled at making valuable infographics. Then clearly, you need to spread them out.

Sit down with your team members and think about your goals, what type of content works best for you, and the platform where it will be the most successful.

Social media platforms are another popular way of introducing your brand to the world, but there is one that stands out. You’re right; I’m talking about LinkedIn.

I’ve talked about this platform in-depth in my guide on how to audit and improve your LinkedIn Business profile, but I wanted to give it its own space in this article, as well.

LinkedIn is great because it allows companies to showcase several aspects of their business as providers, partners, and employers. In addition, you can share achievements, conduct surveys, and connect with your leads on a more personal level.

Going back to the content you should put there, the best strategy is to stick to polls, case studies, videos, testimonials by clients and partners, images with statistics, company and industry news, and milestones. Invest in competitor research and see how other businesses create content and communicate with the audience.

Another thing that many professionals tend to forget, however, is that B2B influencer marketing exists, and with the right tactic, it can be pretty successful. Creating content for social media can be challenging, so working with an influencer could be helpful for your B2B content marketing strategy.

To put it simply, experiment and see what resonates with your current customers and followers.

4. Create high-quality content

Finally, we reach the different types of content B2B companies can use to attract potential customers. Remember that not all of them will work for your company and target audience; you should check your Google Analytics to see which content has historically performed best regarding your goals and KPIs.

These are the most effective content formats for B2B content marketing:

Email newsletters – Create customized email marketing campaigns that cater to the needs of your email list and remind them of your business in a non-intrusive way;

Case studies – Use actual data to drive targeted traffic to your websites and improve your reputation as a professional in the field;

Video content – Produce content that people can engage with for a longer time. Informational Youtube videos and guides are usually the best choices here.

Blog posts – Create long-form content guides closely related to your niche, include templates and examples that bring a unique point of view and help you stand out from competitors;

Podcasts – Share your expert opinion, invite other professionals in the field and create an environment of growth and motivation;

Infographics – Use interesting data and research to create captivating infographics that will get shared all over the digital world.

I won’t go too deep into all of them, but there are some worthy mentions – the first being infographics.

You can put many things on an infographic – research data, case studies, tips, advice, etc. The best part is that they can be repurposed from other content you’re already creating.

For example, if you just wrote a blog post on how to conduct SMS campaigns, then repurpose the main points (headers) as an infographic.

They can be custom, which is always the best option, but you can also use a tool like Canva, Vista Create, or Venngage. These platforms offer free templates that you can customize to your taste and make a unique piece of visual content used by companies and individuals alike.

Another worthy mention is case studies. The team at Convince and Convert regularly creates impressive case studies for their clients and makes them widely available for everyone to read. Such content demonstrates their skills as an analysis and advisory company and shares their expertise with people who want to learn and better themselves.

It’s a great tactic for creating meaningful relationships with people – from freelancers and students to mega-corporations looking for someone to help them with content marketing strategies.

Overall, creating content that brings value and educating customers should be a top priority.

5. Try out A/B testing

Split testing can be pretty beneficial, but it needs to be used wisely. Here is how you can get the maximum from it:

Make sure you have a strong hypothesis at hand;
Test only two variables at a time;
Get the right sample size of people;
Be patient and don’t make any changes in the middle of the experiment;
Learn from the data and improve your B2B content marketing campaign.

The beauty of A/B testing is that it lets you know what works and what doesn’t. But beyond that, it allows you to understand what strategies you can scale.

For example, when I started building backlinks to amplify my content, I tested tactics with free tools like Ahrefs and gradually used tools like Buzzstream and other link-building tools to scale successful strategies.

6. Track your B2B content marketing efforts

Everyone in the marketing and sales world knows that you can’t get anywhere without tracking all of your efforts. That applies especially to content marketers.

You need to know whether your content has reached the ideal target audience and if the interactions you intended are realized the way they should be.

You can do that in many ways, such as through Google Analytics, a CRM, the analytics tools of relevant social media channels, and other search engine optimization tools.

The best tactic will be to use a tool that combines multiple channels and will helps you gather data faster, so you don’t waste time between campaigns.

Many software options include a free trial, so make sure you take advantage of that and choose the best possible one for your business.

Are you ready to become a leader in B2B content marketing?

Content marketing remains one of the best ways to connect with your audience, so you need to ensure it’s done correctly. Nobody starts perfectly, and you have to consciously expect that you will not achieve the ideal results from your very first campaign.

It’s a process and not a destination. But if you apply creativity and logic, track your efforts, and constantly improve, results will come and turn your business around.

And if it sounds a bit overwhelming, just book a consultation with our B2B marketing experts and let us help you connect with your customers.

So, are you ready to make an impact?

The post How to Create Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 6 steps appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

June 13, 2022/by exposure

The Audience Experience is More Important than Customer Experience

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There’s no dispute Customer Experience (CX) is a hot topic these days and with good reason. But there is a potential problem that almost anyone responsible for improving customer experience is not thinking about. The customer is only a piece of the experience puzzle, and in this article, we’ll explain why you have to think broader than the customer experience in order to better serve the customer.

Every organization has multiple audiences with which they communicate and interact. In a recent project we led for a state-wide K-12 school system, the stakeholders readily identified upwards of 20 distinct audiences in less than 10 minutes. Each of those audiences has an experience — not just customers. We should be thinking about the audience experience (AX) more so than just the customer experience (CX).

Potential Buyer Experience Is NOT Customer Experience

For people who work on selling, they must focus on customer experience, or more accurately, the potential buyer experience. Examining your current customer journey map and see how much of it is really pre-transaction vs. post-transaction. There is nothing wrong with having the whole journey mapped out together but do recognize there are distantly different phases and different experiences associated with each touch point.

In practice, once a potential buyer transacts—becomes a customer—often the customer experience ceases. Does your customer experience continue post-transaction to foster retention, loyalty, referrals, word-of-mouth, and advocacy? Those are the actual stages of the customer experience. In our observations, most truly defined “customer experience” efforts are really targeting the potential buyer experience.

Marketers Think Too Narrowly — But Should They?

Fans, followers, subscribers, are all audiences—but not all are customers.

This is where customer experience is generically too narrow as a category. Understand that each segment of audience or stakeholders must be narrowed down, so touchpoints can be designed for those specific audiences. Marketers tend to focus on the sales-related journey and experiences. That’s understandable and probably prudent. But, who else in your organization is focusing on all the other audiences and audience experiences that all contribute to organizational success?

One thing to consider: Customer service should heavily influence the customer experience. That may in fact roll up under marketing as it does include retention, cross-sell, and other factors contributing to life-time value.

Fans and Fandom — Why It Matters

You have audiences that are not customers and will never be customers. But they are still important and valuable.

Take fans for example. What does it mean to be a “fan”? Unlike the potential-customer experience, that audience has somegoal or desired outcome or a problem and is seeking a solution. Not so with fans.

You can have an audience of fans without them being customers. They engage and transact like the best customers, but they transact in loyalty and advocacy, not in dollars and cents. In your own life, are you a fan of a sports team, a musical group or performer, or a political candidate? The best fans don’t have to be customers, except they’re transacting with loyalty to the brand and what it stands for through their individual advocacy, amplification, and word of mouth. There is strength in numbers. The larger the fan following, the greater the collective voice becomes.

If your brand is any good at all, it has fans. No need to be a rock-star band, all brands have fans. The fan experience deserves strategic planning, too—not with the intent to turn it into a potential-customer experience, but rather to acknowledge, engage with, and grow the fan audience.

Which Audiences Matter Most?

Above we mentioned a particular higher ed organization with upwards of 20 audiences, and thus, about 20 audience experiencers to address. Consider your organization and your audience’s experiences. Beyond the prospective- and customer-experience, do you pay attention to the:

Employee Experience
Fan/Follower Experience
Media/Influencer Experience
Dealer or Reseller Experience (retail)
Supplier/Vendor Experience (manufacturing)
Investor/Donor Experience (fund raising)
Parent Experience (higher education)
Alumni Experience (higher education)
Donor Experience (higher education)

We’ll stop short of 20 but you get the idea. With these and a few more relevant to your organization you can see lots of interconnected and essential opportunities to improve each experience overall and over time. Each audience, if important, needs attention to that overall experience, from inception to termination.

How Good Can CX Be Without a Great Employee Experience (EX)?

Well before the Great Resignation, employers vied to attract the best talent to achieve the business’s goals. It’s simply harder now when the talent pool is shrinking, and unemployment is low. Even so, often the talent you’re trying to attract is already employed elsewhere. This is where the employee experience really matters. Brian Solis, VP, Global Innovation Evangelist @ Salesforce writes, “The employee is also part of the customer experience. In fact, employee experience plus customer experience—EX+CX—is what will equal growth.”

“EX+CX—is what will equal growth.”
— Brian Solis

Ask your HR leader if they have a journey map that covers recruitment and onboarding and all the probable touch points that comprise the potential-employee and then employee experiences. Think of the value of each employee and the cost of replacing an employee. Think of the implication of a poor employee experience and how that may impact other areas of customer interaction. There is a real, measurable cost tied to a poor employee experience including the impact on the customer experience.

A well-tuned potential-employee experience and employee experience are powerful factors with many ripple effects impacting operations, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Conversely, a not-so-good employee experience is costly and an opportunity for the competition to steal away good talent and brain trust.

Great organizations strive to deliver great experiences.

What Next?

Do this:

List 10 audiences with whom your organization interacts regularly. Specificity is key here, to help you in the next step.
Rank them in order from the most essential to the lesser essential. Sure, they’re all going to be important or else you wouldn’t be interacting with them. Apply a filter based on which are most essential to the success of the business down to those that are perhaps tangentially necessary for success.
On your list of 10, write in the name of the person in your organization responsible for each of those audience experiences.
Ask those individuals to describe to you their process and method of measurement for the audience experience they own.

That fourth one is the kicker. If there is no process, no journey map for an audience, no definable plan for each interaction and outcomes, you have an operational liability. Great audience experiences don’t happen accidentally. It takes recognizing the need and making the investment to ensure those essential audiences all have the best experience possible. Great organizations strive to deliver great experiences.

Continue the CX Series by Anthony

The Two CXs You Have to Deal With — Customer Experience vs Customer Expectations

Why Brands Believe Their CX is Better Than It Really Is

The post The Audience Experience is More Important than Customer Experience appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

June 13, 2022/by exposure

Using Personalization Data To Reshape Your Customer Experience

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Using Personalization Data To Reshape Your Customer Experience written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brennan Dunn

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Brennan Dunn. Brennan is the Co-founder of RightMessage, writes weekly at Create & Sell, and wrapping up a new book on personalized marketing.

Key Takeaway:

The internet has changed the way we do business. It’s given your company access to a global customer base. But that doesn’t mean consumers are all the same. Their location, economy, and finances can influence how consumers engage with your business. So how does a virtual business replicate the vital in-person experience? With technology. Brennan Dunn is the co-founder of RightMessage, a software company that helps you uncover who’s on your website, what they do, and what they’re looking for from you. In this episode, we talk about how we can leverage personalized data to improve the customer experience and increase revenue for your business.

Questions I ask Brennan Dunn:

[1:21] Could you tell me about your book and what inspired you to write it?
[2:09] What has your journey looked like?
[4:44] When RightMessage came to be, were you just working with JavaScript coding?
[5:44] How does the idea of personalization play into the customer journey?
[13:56] How does the technology of RightMessage work?
[18:59] Do you have any data to back up the willingness people have to give you more information when you share how it will benefit them?
[22:15] How does RightMessage use the data it collects to personalize the website for each visitor?
[24:09] Does RightMessage work with the various page builders that are out there now?
[24:51] Where can more people connect with you and learn more about RightMessage?

More About Brennan Dunn:

RightMessage
Weekly, in-depth email marketing advice for creators — Createandsell.co

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast.

John Jantsch (00:51): This is John chance and my guest today is Brennan Dunn. He’s a co-founder of right founder of write message. He writes a weekly at create and sell, and he’s working on a new book, all about personalized marketing, which by the way, is what we’re gonna talk about today. So Brennan, welcome to the show.

Brennan Dunn (01:11): Yeah. Thanks for having you, John.

John Jantsch (01:13): So tell me about the book. Is it, is this one of these things where you get some spare time and you go right on it for a while, or is it, is its publication imminent?

Brennan Dunn (01:22): It’s somewhere in between. I’ve gotten much more structured than I was early on. So I am, I do have dedicated writing blocks that I try to keep. Yeah. And the, the finish line is coming up. So I’m aiming for about a midjune finalization, if you will, the manuscript and, uh, we’ll go

John Jantsch (01:36): From there. So, so as I said, we’re gonna talk about personalized marketing. So personalization in your emails and, you know, in your segmentation and your website, of course, and, and the technology there, you know, now, you know, makes that to something that if you put a little effort is really simple to do, I would suggest it’s probably becoming necessary to do I think, in the environment we’re in. But before we get into that, I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey because you and I have spoken briefly, we were at a, a conference, uh, together recently, and I kind of got the sense that you’ve got your hands in a few things, or at least have had your hands in a few things, you know, leading up to right. Message.

Brennan Dunn (02:15): Yeah. Yeah. So about a decade and, and change ago, I used to run a web agency. So that kind of got my experience with, or that, that built up my experience with kind of needing to sell big ticket projects, built that up to 11 people. And I think the, the big core thing that I, the big takeaway I got from that experience was how important things like dropping relevant examples were. And if somebody’s a technical person talking technical with em, if they’re just a marketing person, not talking technical, for instance, and, and so on. So I did that for a while. I got bit by the software bug, we were building apps for other people I wanted to build my own. So I built a little, a software company called plan scope. And in 2011, sold that in 20 15, 20 16, somewhere around then, right at the end of the year.

Brennan Dunn (03:00): And then I kind of started up or kind of came serious about this company called double year freelancing, which is the thing that I frankly did the best at with all these things. And that’s now a community of, well north, almost about 60,000 freelancers and agencies. And it was fun. Like we, you know, I did conferences, I had a podcast, I did the whole like bunches of courses, ebook, like info product, kind of Emporium there. And that’s really got where I got my start with personalization because as we started to get kind of broader in terms of our audience, we had copywriters, we had marketers, we had designers, developers, and really every Stripe of freelancer you could think of. Right. And the developer me thought, well, what if a copywriter is on a sales page? And they see copywriter testimonials, and what if a developer sees developer testimonials and, you know, that kind of opened up this Pandora’s box that I’ve been, uh, continuing to open ever since on what’s possible, given who somebody is, what their relationship is with you.

Brennan Dunn (04:03): So are they new on your website? They just appeared from Google or are they your most, you know, die hard customer? What kind of work do they do? What stage of their business are they at? And yeah, that, that kinda led me to eventually getting approached by a few key investors saying, we see what you’ve been doing on your own site. Can you extract that technology into a product that we can pay for? And they were willing to kind of fund the development of that. So that’s how right message came to be. And that was about 20 17, 20 18, right around then that we kind of launched it.

John Jantsch (04:36): So at the time, were you just doing that with JavaScript coding or something? Or how were you making that happen?

Brennan Dunn (04:42): Yeah, so what I was doing is back then, I was using, I switched from infusion soft, which is now keep to drip back then. Sure. And drip had a really nice JavaScript library that you could put on your website that would allow you, if you knew how to write JavaScript to query and say, Hey, is the current person on my website? Are they on my list? And if so, how are they tagged and what custom fields do they have? So it was really just a matter of writing, a lot of, yeah, custom JavaScript where I’d say, okay, if they’re a subscriber and they’re tagged customer, let’s show this thing instead of that thing. And, and it just became a lot of, kind of very brittle, very manual coding, right. Which really lent itself to building a web-based interface to set it all up.

John Jantsch (05:28): So I was gonna ask you what the biggest mistake you see marketers making today, I’m really just teeing up the non personalization, or just treating everybody that visits the website, just as you said, as the same person with the same desires, the same, you know, method of buying the same journey, all those. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, that idea of the customer journey. Mm-hmm , I think that’s something I spend a lot of time talking about the stages of and how people make, you know, decisions today. In fact, I, you know, frequently say the thing that’s changed the most in marketing is how people choose to become customers. You know, not necessarily, you know, the platforms and the technology. So how does this role, I mean, thinking in terms of how people buy today, they go, they visit, they see if they like you, they see if they trust, you know, they dig deeper. Mm-hmm . I mean, how does the idea of personalization play into the customer journey for you?

Brennan Dunn (06:19): I think for me, and, and what I typically recommend, a lot of people do, especially those of us who are trying to do kind of email first, where right. You know, instead of pushing somebody to buy or trying to get them on our list and then over time, build up trust and then get them to buy later. I think the thing that as being on the consumer end, always frustrates me is if I’m on an email list of a brand, let’s say, and I get their, you know, their latest email and drives me me back to their website, then I’m hit with a giant popup asking for my email address. Not only is it a bit annoying because you know, they presumably know that since they just E you know, they just email me , but a marketer me thinks that’s a missed opportunity. I mean, that, that’s a perfect opportunity to say, Hey, you’re on my list.

Brennan Dunn (07:03): You’re kind of already a little further down the funnel. Why not present a product, an entry level product you haven’t yet bought. And then if they’ve bought that entry level thing, let’s now put onsite called actions for maybe the more premium product or right. You know, the, the, the crazy mastermind in Cabo, San Lucas, five figure thing, if you’re the super customer, right. Like, I mean, that’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of us, I think are doing that over email with campaigns that are saying like, you know, for different cohorts of subscribers, we wanna send different marketing messages. But I think considering that most of us are bringing people back to the website, whether it be to listen to the latest podcast episode or to read at the latest blog post, or just to look at a sales page. I think having that interplay back and forth is something that most of us should be doing. It’s just, it’s one of these things that it’s a little challenging to figure out how to do, which is one of the things I’ve been trying to help ease.

John Jantsch (07:56): Yeah. I think a real obvious use case. You talk about the popups that, you know, version one, everybody saw it every time , you know, it’s like, get outta here, get outta the way. So we were constantly just slapping him away. Then they got a little smarter, oh, you’ve been here before your, in the last two weeks. So I’m not gonna show it to you, but like you said, the ultimate is I know everything, or I know a great deal about you and our relationship already. So I may have one of eight things that I would show you, obviously that’s next level, isn’t it?

Brennan Dunn (08:28): Yeah. Yeah. And doing that, but also doing, um, more horizontal things, like, depending on maybe the industry somebody’s in or the job role that they’re in, or their goal, maybe offering different products or different recommendations to them showing different messages. I already mentioned the testimonial example of yeah. Depending on somebody’s kind of business, they run, what kind of case studies and testimonials should they see even things like one of the, one of the most rewarding, if you will. Things that I tested that that has worked consistently is I have, for one of my courses, a free email course that feeds people to the paid course. Yeah. And what I did is I simply asked people when they joined the free course, which of the following three things are you trying to solve with this course? Cause the course is on pricing and the three options would be, I want to get an idea of how to price in general, I went to start pricing on value, or I went to learn how to write proposals better.

Brennan Dunn (09:18): And those were kind of the three things I uncovered were why people kept joining the email course. So all I simply did was I said, well, okay. They tell me this upfront, what I’ll do is when the email course completes and I then start to pitch the paid thing, the paid thing relates to the email core, the free course. Yeah. So let’s just say, if they said they’re struggling with proposals, make the focus of the course and why they buy it to help you with proposals. Right. Yeah. Right. And it’s things like that I think are kind of a no brainer when you think it through. I mean, it’s any, anything like if I was trying to sell you over the phone on something I would, and, and you said, you know, you, you signaled something to me that allowed me to mentally segment you into this is John’s pain point. You, I, a good salesperson is gonna right. Keep playing off that. Right. So it’s the same, same thing just in a more scalable, um, more high volume, medium, if you will.

John Jantsch (10:13): Well, and I think that that approach of narrowing, you know, the focus, because I think a lot of times what we do as marketers is we default to, well, here are the five things we know are the reasons people buy this. So we’re gonna tell you those are all the benefits. Yeah, exactly. You know, so then consequently, we’re like, well, one of those matters to me, the other’s just like more clutter that I have to read about. And now I’m just confused. Yeah. And I think that idea of being able to zero in on something, they told you, I mean, they basically said here’s how to sell me. Right. right.

Brennan Dunn (10:42): Yeah, exactly. And, and I mean, this plays out, I think in a lot of more impactful ways, like I mentioned, the first software company that I sold, it was a project management tool called plan scope. So think of task management, normal kind of stuff like that time tracking. And I, I sold to freelancers and agencies cuz really the only difference with an agency was they had multiple seats and every functionally was the same thing. But I remember I, I got on a call. This is, would’ve been like 2013. So you know, quite a while ago in internet time, at least I, I got on a call with an agency owner and I was talking with them and I was showing them our website and kind of figuring out like what was holding them back from moving forward. And their objection was anything that works for a freelancer couldn’t work for our agency.

Brennan Dunn (11:24): And you know, it was kind of this weird. I struggled at the time as the person who knew the product inside out thinking the only logistic differences is maybe some things on the reporting end, but also the fact that there’s like multiple contributors and stuff to a, you know, a, a project rather than a single contributor. But it just kind of, it floored me thinking like, is this a very, is this a common shared thing? You know, that there’s this bias of teams think solo people don’t have anything in common with them. Yeah. And maybe convert vice versa. So anyway, that was a, uh, for me that would’ve been like a prime. I, I was even thinking at the time maybe I spin off like plan scope, premium or plan scope pro.com make it completely separate marketing site, make it all about agencies. And just say, if you’re an agency, you go to this site. Yeah. This lead magnet, whatever freelancers, get that one. But really the, I think the beauty of personalization is you can have the same products. You can have the same marketing site, you can have the same marketing and you just kind of dynamically alter bits and pieces. So you can get around those core objections in a and really elegant way.

John Jantsch (12:31): Yeah. And I think one of the things that I, I hear a lot of times, you know, sales people complaining that I got multiple stakeholders to sell, you know, the sales manager cares about vastly different things than the CEO does. And so I think that idea of job title, you know yeah. In your database is really crucial because I mean, case studies you could deliver that are different. I mean every benefits, all of your messaging can be different. Yeah. And sell those multiple stakeholders came.

Brennan Dunn (12:57): Yeah.

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John Jantsch (13:54): We’ve already talked about a lot of the ways I think people can use this. Tell, tell me a little bit about the technology. I mean, how, how, without getting to a level that you have to be a coder to understand what you’re saying, you know, how does this work?

Brennan Dunn (14:06): Yeah. So what, we’re the way we’ve modeled. This is you integrate with your email database. So that could be, you know, convert kit, HubSpot, drip, whatever. Yep. Active campaign, different things like that. And the, the way we look at it is that should that record about somebody. So Brennan’s record in John’s active campaign database is the single source of truth about what we know about Brennan. So presumably you segment me when I buy from you, you know, Stripe does its thing. You then tag me as a customer. You, I buy something else. I get another tag and so on. So it’s really just extending that to say, well, can we also sync up to that record attributes about, you know, industry chal current focus, whatever it might be. And then what we do is we say when one of two things happens, if somebody opts into your list, we basically kind of do a little think of it as a bit of a hijack, if you will saying, okay, a record was just added to active campaign for this browser.

Brennan Dunn (15:12): So when it comes back active, campaign’s gonna say, Hey, we created a record and its internal ID is 1, 2, 3, and then all right message says is great. We’re gonna drop a cookie on the browser saying this is active campaign record 1, 2, 3. So then from that on out until they clear their cookies, we just query and say, what do we know about 1, 2, 3, and, and get back that, that data. So then we can pull that data down, but also push shade up. So if we learn something new about this person, like they change their focus or they change industries, that data can then be synced to that single source of truth. So what we’re basically creating a bridge, if you will, between the website and a specific record in your email database and then pulling data down and pushing data up and we pull data down and we can say, when this data’s present, so when they’re tagged customer, don’t show the sign up form at the top of the website and the hero show, the upgrade button or something.

Brennan Dunn (16:07): Yeah. Right. And being able to do interesting stuff like that. And that’s really what we’re trying to do is we’re, we’re trying to really help people. And it’s difficult because it’s a bit of a challenge strategically to think it all through, but we’re trying to help people create more holistic end, end ex and end experiences where, you know, you’re getting personalized emails, you’re getting emails that are targeting just customers. But then when you go back to the site, you’re not treating, you’re not being treated as an anonymous person. You’re being treated as that customer too.

John Jantsch (16:33): You know, CRM, maintenance and updating is, you know, is the bane of a lot of people’s existence. And to some degree, you know, this is automating a great deal of that. Mm-hmm for people. I mean, it’s making your CRM smarter without you having to do a lot of effort once you get it in place. I think,

Brennan Dunn (16:48): Yeah. It’s just feeding. I mean, you obviously need to set up the different surveys right. And quizzes or whatever else, but yeah. It’s enriching. And I like to think of it as, especially those of us who are focus focused on low touch email stuff. Yeah. So you’ve got the lead magnet, the most we know about most of our people on our list is their first name and email address. Yeah. That’s pretty much it, which again, isn’t the end of the world. But I think if you can find out a bit more about why is they downloaded the lead magnet and what are they currently struggling with and what best describes their situation. And obviously the questions change depending on the business, the underlying business and stuff. Um, yeah. I mean a good example that we, that we like to reference a lot is we have a customer that’s in the health and fitness space and they do what you would expect, which is they ask like, what are your current goals?

Brennan Dunn (17:35): Do you wanna build muscle lose, you know, lose fat, whatever. And they’re able to then just dial in on both the products offered, but also the stories told over their marketing emails to just resonate better. I mean, it allows us to, I think all of us know that niche websites typically outperform generic. And the reason for that is they just, they had their messaging dialed in to one, one type of person with one type of need. And, um, but there’s no reason you need a niche, the entire business. Right. You know, it, it can be done. It’s like when I used to write proposals for my agency, we did web mobile apps for all different types of companies. When I wrote a proposal, I was effectively nicheing down our business to fit their unique need. And that’s all we’re talking about doing is just a, a way of doing that kind of dynamically.

John Jantsch (18:21): You know, what’s interesting about this, you know, you’ve, we’ve all gone to that, uh, to get that free download and presented with, you know, 18 fields of data that they want. And we’re reluctant to fill that in because I, I, I feel typically we don’t trust that company enough yet or, you know, whatever it is that we want to really give them that much information. Plus I think it, it feels like I’m giving you this information for your benefit. Right. And one of the things I like about this approach of asking people, I think it’s very easy to get a lot more data because it’s positioned or you can position it as, Hey, this is, this is so I can send you the right stuff. You know, this is so you get only what you care about. And I think that positioning really dramatically changes, you know, how much willingness people have to give you and trust that you develop. But I’m wondering if you have any data to back that up.

Brennan Dunn (19:14): I do. Yeah. So we used to be really pushing people. And I think you and I talked about this kind of recently where we used to push people to do a lot of upfront data collection. So pre optin get industry job role, all that stuff. Right. We’ve and the calculus was always, well, if we got more data about somebody could then show them a personalized optin. So if I knew you were in this industry with this problem, instead of join my newsletter, I can say, join my newsletter, you know, focused on helping, you know, marketing coaches with X, you know what I mean? Like just being able to make that really dialed in. And, and there’s some like that can sometimes work better, but if it’s tricky, so what I recommend most people do at this point is get that data post optin. So do your usual normal optin stuff.

Brennan Dunn (20:02): And then I like using the confirmation page. So the thank you page that usually says, Hey, thanks, go check your email goodbye. Instead, use that as an opportunity to say, Hey, so, you know, thanks for joining. If you can spare a minute or two, I’d love to just find out a bit more about how I can make sure you get exactly the content you need and nothing more. So this is something that, you know, we do, I do, but also many of our customers do. And on average, we’re getting usually it’s about 80 to 85% of all new opt-ins end up going through that process. I mean, assuming it’s not a thousand questions, if it’s, you know, four or five things that are multiple choice questions, most people are willing to kind of click through that because you’re positioning it as exactly that you’re not doing this to say we wanna put together a, a slide deck to investors showing the composition of our audience, give us data.

Brennan Dunn (20:51): Instead it’s positioned as if I can find out why you’re here and what you need. I can reduce the amount of noise I send you. Yeah. I can make sure that I’m giving you exactly what you need. And people tend to agree with that and like that. So, yeah, I mean, we’re, I’m getting four outta five people who join giving me more than just a name and email. I know in my case what their current email marketing objective is, what email provider they use. If they have one, how comfortable they are with it, what they’ve done with it, if they haven’t, why haven’t they signed up yet? So for me, I’m like, well, I can go and say, send an email right now to everyone on my list, who does not use an email marketing platform and maybe they’ve struggled. Maybe they haven’t done it cuz they’re not sure which one. Yeah. Well, I just came up with this great, uh, review video I put together and I really pushed the affiliate thing that I, you know, for the platform I, I recommend. And that’s how I could target that for, right. Yeah. So I can do like so many interesting things once you have, uh, that data in your database.

John Jantsch (21:49): Yeah. So, so let’s wrap up on, uh, the idea of creating personalized messages on your website. I think a lot of what we’ve talked about implies that I’ve got that data. So now I can send better email, but a lot of us out there myself included have segments, different, unique segments that we sell mm-hmm and wouldn’t it be amazing if on the homepage , you know, when they came there, they saw case studies and testimonials that were only related or were specifically related to that segment. And so talk a little bit about the idea that using this tool and using this data that we collect, we can actually now have the website say different stuff.

Brennan Dunn (22:25): Yeah. So the way, the way we do it with the right message is we allow you to quickly like click on a headline. So what you could do is you could go into our tool within the tool, go to your homepage, let’s say, and then click on the headline, like, you know, your main headline mm-hmm and then toggle between all the different segments you’ve defined. So if you’ve defined, um, segment a segment B and segment C, you could say go to a, change the headline to a B change this, click on this picture, change it to the picture of the Panda for people in a change it to, you know, change this, change that. And it’s really just kind of very, if you’ve ever used a tool like Optimizly or VWO, it’s very similar in that respect where it’s point and click. So that that’s how we’ve designed that.

Brennan Dunn (23:07): But what I usually tell people is even if they don’t want to go that far one easy fix, it’s not the most elegant fix, but it’s an easy fix would be, let’s say you’re promoting a new product or course, and duplicate your sales page like two or three times and make those tweaks. And then just within your email platform, when you’re writing the emails, have some conditions, let’s say if they’re in this segment, point them to landing page a. If they’re in this segment, go to line page B and, and obviously it’s not the nicest way of doing it, especially when you consider that one benefit of a platform like right messages, we can do multivariate personalization. So you can say, you know, these benefits are here because they’re in this job role, this headlines, because they’re in this industry, this testimonial is because they’re struggling with this pain point and that can yield. If you just do simple math, it can yield, you know, 10 industries, times 10 job roles. You already have to have a hundred variations, which would be untenable if you were to duplicate it a hundred times. Yeah,

John Jantsch (24:08): Yeah, yeah. And is it, does it work with the various page builders that are out there now because you you’re just putting in blocks of HTML or something

Brennan Dunn (24:15): That’s right. So all we’re doing the easiest way to think about it is we’re effectively, post-procesing the page. So you put our script on the site. What we do is your page builder sends up the wire the final page. And we’re just saying, even though the server says, we should be showing the headline that says ABCs, we see their tech customers. So before they even see the page, we’re gonna change it out to X, Y, Z. So it’s just a, kind of a, the benefit there for us is it’s, it’s agnostic in terms of what you put it on, it’ll work on anything that allows you to just run our JavaScript on

John Jantsch (24:46): It. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Brendan, thanks for taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. You, you wanna send people obviously we’ll have a link to right message. But do you want anywhere else you wanna send people to connect with you?

Brennan Dunn (24:57): Yeah. I mean the, the, you know, besides right message. I, I do write weekly, like you mentioned, at create and sell.co and there, I just write about everything from, you know, tagging versus custom fields to what I’ve talked about recently.

John Jantsch (25:11): A lot of email stuff,

Brennan Dunn (25:13): Just email, like, you know, should you have design emails versus simple text? Yeah. I mean just a lot of emailing, things like that.

John Jantsch (25:19): Awesome. Well, again, uh, thanks for sub by and hopefully, uh, we’ll run into you, uh, one of these days again, out there on the road.

Brennan Dunn (25:26): Absolutely. Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (25:28): And one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not dot com.check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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June 8, 2022/by exposure