 Two parking tickets in three days That's how I started last week Now I park in the same place every day at the same time every day, but I was late for work I was flustered. It's raining. I've been trying not to use my phone. So it's in my pocket and it's raining So I forget And then I have that wonderful experience where at the end of the day you come back to the car And it's a little white thing flapping on the windshield It's surprisingly easy to get a parking ticket Paying for one Not as easy so I go to the easy park website to pay for my parking violation Add to basket. This is not shopping I'm not having fun Okay, I'll do that now what I had to basket again already did that. Where's the basket? Already in basket appeal. I'd like to appeal to your sense of reason and end this madness Where's the okay up here? All right, I'll click on that View cart. I thought I was in a basket now. I'm in a cart Presumably it because it's bigger and I can put more shit in it like what else can I get? Oh two of a one flat tires, maybe a discount on a broken window I'd like a discount on my parking ticket. What can I do? All right? Okay, I can remove it. I can cancel it I can add the violation this entire process is a violation of my human rights Let's keep going down check out. Okay returning customers log in or sign up Why would I sign up if I'm a returning customer? Guess check out. I'll try that you do not need to create an account, but we want your email address Not doing that. I'll try this. Okay get through now what? Note you must use a space in the postal code Where do I put in the postal code? There's no form So again, I click the pay now button and they take me to a different website. This is not easy park It's not even branded. There was no logo. This is a giant form. We have to put in sensitive information In case I've forgotten Must use a space in the postal code. So now I'm really really, you know, I'm gonna pay attention to this So I very carefully go down here and I put in the postal code with a space So I'm succeeding I click next payment confirmation. Oh, I haven't paid yet. Why are you confirming this? Please put a space in the postal code It's right fucking there. I did it already Click next to proceed. There's no next button pay now. There's no pay now button Purchased items. I didn't buy anything. I Spent $48 twice on nothing Now that is not content marketing, but it is content. It's part of the experience Every little thing we create we write is content and it's part of how we present ourselves That was not good. That was a generic E-commerce flow had nothing to do with paying for a parking ticket What was wrong? It wasn't designed with purpose. It wasn't designed for the purpose of paying a parking fine It was just generic no meaningful data throughout this whole transaction They didn't learn anything about me that they could subsequently use to provide a better experience And they didn't show the product now in their case the product is their app Because when you have the app, you're more likely to use them You know when you're going to park you'll often see two parking lots If I see them and I have the app I'll go there because I don't want to use the broken credit card machine And I have no coins. It's so it's a good thing if I have the app Yeah slides and everything about landing page. I will share that again at the end So why am I saying this? Well in part because of experiences lab out in part. It's It's different now when we started on balance 2009 Content was very powerful. Now everybody does that we all know that so it's more and more difficult to stand out and just the approach we take like New blog posts, let's write an e-book new webinar. Let's not make a course. That's not good enough That's not a good reason for doing it. I wrote this on a whiteboard in December Because I was angry We've always done landing pages, but the end of last year we released two new products pop up some sticky bars This represents adoption the one this is our landing page customers only six percent of them had adopted the new products That's terrible. I was really angry and I was hanging out with my co-founders and Carter our president says all right fine. Just stop complaining. What are you gonna do about it? A blog post released every day in January written by me So I committed to writing 30 blog posts about product awareness like technical demo focus like really showcasing the product and The reason I said I'll do 30 like one every day is because if I'd said I'll do three I would have done none Right. It was that challenge and the fact I told everybody I'd look like an idiot if it didn't do it So I began this process now a little bit of context about our blog historically 0.3% is the conversion rate to NTS NTS is a new trial start so I'm putting the credit card down to start a trial This again is pretty terrible, but I haven't written on the blog for two years So I I didn't even look at this time before I started I looked at it afterwards if I'd seen that I may have changed My mind entirely but anyway, so that's the context. That's how it performs. I was pretty, you know Shocked by that. This was what was in my head apparently a lot of other people have the same question And a lot of content marketers use that question to create content about this so In order to figure it out I reached out to other people other founders and Andy Crestedina is my favorite content market I respect him immensely. So I asked him or it media 90% plus of their traffic comes from their blog only 0.3% Converts that's that's even worse But he's okay with that because as he explains it and you'll know as SEOs this is what drives the links the content and Bills domain authority. So when someone searches for a Chicago web design development, they find them, right? It's that supporting role and you have to know how it converts, but also be okay with it Because it is for a different purpose, but I wasn't okay with it. I wanted to improve it because I needed more product adoption. So Someone asked me well, how you come with all the ideas for all these posts the way I did it I started with a concept that I call productizing our technology because we have more products You'll have more products than you think What I did I took across the top. This is our core tech landing pages public sticky bars These are the features these are hacks and work rounds that people in our community have come up with Our CS team has written or other people in the company. How can we use those and some integrations? Came up with all of these mini product ideas because when you combine things like that You can just brand it as a new product because if it has a functional use Here's an example when you come to an e-commerce store you it's very common You'll get a pop-up immediately. It's like it's too aggressive, but it's usually for a discount and you usually want that So I wanted to change how that that works because typically like I want to but go away So I wanted to I changed it to this concept called maybe later So you have yes or no, but then in the middle is a third option If I choose that because I'm interested but please leave me alone right now It will turn to a sticky bar that follows you on the site. It's there when you need it So this is a functional use case for e-commerce. I Could brand that put some content around that to bring people to that because it's a different way of thinking Your customers can't imagine every way they can use your product Sometimes you have to create content to guide them. So I wrote a post about it with instructions how to do it It's very useful. It helps people do a better job and it shows the product But you can't just dump your product everywhere and think people are gonna buy it. You have to make it exceptional and useful So I wrote in the end only 20 posts 37,000 words Because I got the flu at the beginning and I'm writing on weekends 15 hours a day No, he reads blogs on the weekends. So I spaced it out a little bit because honestly my wife and a cold Probably where left me if I have been ignoring her that much for the entire month Incidentally, that's half of the length of an average New York Times bestseller. So I'll just do it again sometime and publish a shitty book So at the end of it it doubled the conversion rate, right double the blog average. Yes, okay There's had an impact, right? This is not if this is something we should be doing but that doesn't scale at all I can't keep doing that So I want them to know away. How can I systematize this or just make it more scalable, you know So it is customer-centric content. That's very important, but it has that product lens And so it scales as with anything tough in your life Sometimes you just need a little bit of help from your mother So this is my superhero mom So I did all these sketches and Nicole's like could you make her a little less sexy? I'm like, I'm not that talented when it comes to this. I tried and she looked like a witch So that's how it's staying. I do not want to see any yo mama jokes on Twitter Because if you like what I'm talking about it'll be your mother at some point. So keep it clean Now because she's wise she has some rules to live by Start with purpose. This is about figuring out the aha moments of your product and using those as your goal When you start creating your content, I don't just need another blog or you book start with purpose design with intent Every interactive thing you build should be designed semantically for its purpose not like that generic checkout process Example that's just a block of text. That's an interactive device where you choose the question to get the answer That's a simple version of designing with intent Add meaning the more we actually here's an example What is that? Okay? That's the third Thursday in March. That's meaningless to me first day of spring That means something to me when we label our content In the code level often it gives it more meaning so here They're just blocks of text you'd have to read them to know what they are But if I know that's a value prop features and testimonials It has more meaning show the product I've written over 300 blog posts on landing pages And I'm probably less than five showed the product. That's not good enough. I it's probably partly because I'm Canadian and Don't really want to be that aggressive or salesy, but it's we can't live like that and make it personal use The information we gather from interactive content to then make the experience more personalized in the moment I'm gonna show you how to do that so it's not about my mother Sansa marketing optimization map and this is a content marketing way of thinking a Content strategy of focus entirely on product awareness Its base is events. It's not so much about what page they go to. It's all the little Interactions they did that led to conversion and it's designed to really focus on our moments to drive people there more quickly It looks like a funnel or maybe it's an exclamation point It's actually a tie This is our work. So the context layer. What do we know about people when they arrive? Typically, maybe search terms or a little bit of demographics. I should use my clear bit We'll know a bunch more and what do we want to know? What do we need to know in order to create a better experience? What content interactive content do we need to create to gather that context to learn about people in the moment? Oh, also, that's the that's the problem when you look at analytics to see who's showing up. They're not there anymore Right. We need to do this in the moment How can we show the product and how can we personalize the experience? Based on the context we're gathering and then there's this a behavioral event map So we can see the difference in behavior between someone who does and doesn't convert The aha moment happens Who knows who this guy is? Yes, I just needed one validation So you've heard about how moments before but usually this is where people focus I'm not gonna talk about that lots of other people do onboarding and product adoption I want to talk about awareness because that's that prior step that we're missing the point We're not doing a good enough job with our content marketing in the awareness phase Talk to your sales team CS or customers to figure out what they are But the fastest and easiest ways talk to your sales team if you have one because they're the ones that have the face-to-face mouth-to-mouth that's creepy Conversations with your customers so they get to see feel and hear the reaction When people get it simple questions you can ask them. What feature made them get it? How did they react? How do they describe that feeling? What did they ask afterwards? That's very important for context and how commonly does this thing occur because if it's just one person It's not a real, you know, aha moment. You need to see a bit of a pattern And then you get them to the product. Okay, so that's the flow That's what I'm gonna go through For examples three will be kind of higher level to explain that concept and one will be a kind of nerdy deep dive into more technical advanced content marketing the first one Put your hand up if you have a Blog your company has a blog All right, keep it up Now keep it up if you have if it's a software company About half this applies to anyone who has a blog attached to your website Not necessarily just a blog by itself, but anyone who has a business with a blog What is the aha moment we're designing for in this case? I just want people to know we have more than one product Okay, that's my that's my goal with this content what I was doing. So what's the context? What do we know? Well, I know that this is the header on every blog post on our website It's the exact same as every SaaS company in the world You cannot tell from that what we do. It doesn't even mention landing pages. This is nothing about our Products, so why would anyone click on any of that? No mention look at some heat maps Nobody clicks the CTA and the header and nobody clicks the CTAs in the sidebar Because the content was so successful in January. I wanted to kind of figure out Was it just the content or was it the the way we changed the blog design because for just that month We changed the design of we took away the sidebar and we changed the header Right, so this is the content. How can we use content to redesign this experience in this case? That's what it looks like That's who we are. That's a value prop that was missing before and those are the three products That's instant product awareness Because you can just say oh, there's three products and that's what they are Even if you don't interact with them you have seen that so you just made more aware in a really simple way So how do people interact with it and what was the impact on sign-ups? The context here is incredibly important So this was only on the 20 posts in January because it performed well four weeks ago We turned it on for the entire blog every blog post now has this design If it's a post about landing pages That's what happens if it's about pop-ups. That's what happens sticky bars. That's what happens now You might think that's a natural thing. It's just great to see it validated It's actually the case when you create content that's relevant to your products people will engage with your products Really important that it's relevant and this is the highest traffic post on our blog and it's about email Nobody signs up from this because it's not about our product in any way shape or form It's about it's because when we started out we think oh, let's just write a full-stack blog Let's just talk about everything about marketing. You attract all these different people We see that all of these things that are not core to our product. Nobody converts All right, so product signups from this Four weeks. It's been running different blog categories line of his examples. We got a lot of traffic there That's up 30% landing page category same CRO up 36 pbc Dine a little bit, but I'll take it. That's a massive improvement by having this product awareness focused experience Okay, so that's a simple run through the three kind of levels now This one's the more complicated one choose your own adventure This our content is everywhere. It's messy. We have tons of it. It's not really connected and It's missing purpose a lot of the time. So choose your own adventure. This is about helping guide people through your content but Giving those options but with kind of barriers that keep them moving towards those aha moments Not just going through any old content. Don't push them to the email thing Get them going in the right direction because we want them to experience those moments. I Started this thinking like this in January. This is a one of our this is our highest traffic page not blog posts It's what is a landing page? These are beginners because they're typing in was a landing page But I put these three nav options. I'm like, what's your line page needs? Well, I'm new I'm like, oh, go check out line page sessions. It's a video series easy to watch short and it shows the product Lining page not how sure how good it is use the analyzer I need to build one push them in to the interactive demo to try and get them to the product They're beginners. This is great information Because I know I've shown that yeah I'm kind of wasting my time with the more aggressive ones so I can then change the experience, but again That's manual labor. I want to find a way to use this type of device in a more scalable manner So I saw a landing page course and I I'm working on redoing it now This is six years old. Yeah, I don't really agree with everything. I wrote on it anymore There's videos with our product from six years ago that look terrible and nobody converts It doesn't convert at all, but it gets a lot of traffic. So I needed to do something about that So this is my kind of experimentation ground All right, it looked ugly too. I wrapped it in a new design We had but I left the content the same apart from the interactive content that I was adding to it So context, what do we know? Well, they're not only marketers I did some surveys on the on the old site who's showing up. It's not just marketers. This is designers Developers business owners CEOs managers. I can't just design for marketers because other people have that same question and the Self-identified skill level and experience with landing pages is low. So they're beginners and There's lots of different type of people. So the aha moments. I'm designing for we have about five that I work with I'm gonna go with two of them lining pages or bet and home pages for paid Beginners need to know that Cotton paste between pages is really cool for designers because it speeds up their work when they see it. Oh, that's cool Right. So they're the things I'm going to design for to try and encourage more signups This is a spreadsheet of the aha moments and all the questions I want answered the things I want to learn about people in the moment so I can change the experience For example, what is your skill level now? I know a little bit about that But I need to know in the moment so I can direct people Appropriately and what is your industry? I want to know that because we have industry specific data So I can give people access to that in Exchange for them answering my question if you get a little pole Pop up in the corner like Kuala Luru hot jar. That's one way you're giving information of someone you get nothing in return I want to build devices where it's mutually beneficial You give something of value and you get something that will help you personalize So what kind of content do we need to create in order to do that? Okay, well our wise mother says Remember to design with intent so I have I built this library of interactive objects now a lot of them are familiar Interactions, but I've changed the purpose for them So when they're I use them they have a very specific use case There's navigational ones like Anchor navigation is global nav. There's the one we saw before On demand so video playlists just like Netflix everybody likes that kind of thing FAQ you saw before and this one's called segment So this looks exactly that the FAQ tabs are just on the top The difference though is that I would use it for a question like what's your job role because I want to know that Designer marketer the difference is it will drop a cookie based on the first Response because you're self identifying that's me But I want you to access be able to access the rest of the content because that could be Useful for you in talking with your team, but I want to know who you are first like the poll question You do it and it's done this one you can keep exploring, but you're identifying who you are at the start Very different use case and then we have response reward That's like the poll question where I give you something in return. For example, what tech tools do you use? That's what it looks like when I built it Select them in this case just showing the data sometimes you give them a reward download or whatever Sometimes the data is enough like a Twitter poll people like to engage in that type of thing to learn something In this case, I just need a single answer poll. So this is what it looks like. I put this on the home page On the home page of the course if I scroll down, you'll see a poll object designed to gather some context The question I have is what industry are you in if I click? travel All right So I've unlocked the conversion benchmark report and there is the travel specific data as a teaser And you can get the full report there now with the cookie that so I've dropped the cookie now I know they're in the travel industry. They got something hugely beneficial to them Competitive analysis and conversion data and I learned something about them. It's a nice exchange So on the content side, I have a video. I'm teaching beginner information So I talked about a concept and then I jump into the app to demonstrate how to use it And then I talk some more that's great the products in there But we can make it better with that context So we take that here's the video I cut it up and I recorded the demo portion ten times So a minute long that portion is dead easy each time had a different template in it So now when someone watches this That's me scrubbing through when they get into the app. It's their industry. So the Feature I'm demoing is designed to target the AHA moment. They go. Oh, that's cool. But the accelerant That's the specific template subconsciously or consciously that would be like. Oh, this is a cool feature. Oh, wow Okay, that's cool. They'll relate to it. So that's an accelerant. It will take you to that moment more quickly And I got to use that in the moment because I gathered the context and I have content ready to have a personal experience So what does it look like on the the data side the event information that I'm collecting Adding meaning labeling the data. So on the code level if you look at any of these buttons on the code It's all labeled with attributes. What is the aha moment? What kind of object? What's the question and the answer? You can put anything you want in here in your code data dash Then anything you want that name after the dash Whatever it is Google tag manager can now access that directly GTM is amazing. You've never used it try and dig in. It's the best product Google's ever made I love it and you can start pulling all of this rich data and push it in pushing a GA So now in GA I've got oh these people are taking that quiz and this is the these are the answers And I'm seeing how many and who is actually showing up This is great for analysis after the fact But the way I built it is great in the moment Just for nerdy sakes. This is the architecture. So there's your content. That's the object library GTM kind of holds it all together. I'm actually pushing it to an Amazon database So I can have all of this event stuff and do advanced reporting because GA I'm putting it there But it's not very good for event reporting And then I can do reports from that and from the database That's kind of the architecture and I'm trying to build this thing in a way that it's kind of product ties There's a free tool so other people can use it. That's kind of my goal All right, so the event map. What does it look like you're getting all these events? Every interaction that happens. So it's kind of like this. That's the aha moment. I'm designing for Those are the objects. I'm using to ask those questions and those are the answers that are coming in Example report the gray bars are how many people are answering that and the green layer is Who actually converts so I can go all this stuff's happening, but the people that convert do that When you design with purpose you get more meaningful data But you also need more meaningful ways of looking at that data. You need metrics that are better Look at this. Okay, so visitors watch on average 67% of your video. Okay. That's that's all right, but it's not very meaningful 54% of visitors see the product in action That's meaningful. That's helpful to me. I can work on designing experiences to increase the amount of product views That's product in view. That's the metric there Two percent of visitors sign up. That's a great metric as a baseline, but it's not very rich Visitors who trigger three or more product and view events are X more likely to convert than people who don't That's meaningful. That's product view to sign up These types of metrics and we're thinking change how we create content how we measure it and how we look at what's happening In a video 304, that's where the product in view happens. That's where you can trigger that aha moment so I hacked a GTA employee in my lunar metrics for wistia videos I use wistia for my videos and Basically so on my playlists here. I've put a I've logged every moment when the product makes an appearance So these events are firing through GTM every time someone sees the product and now in GA I have all of this Exact timestamps of the video not a percentage I can see which ones they're watching where they saw the product and how many people are doing that way more meaningful data Way more accessible if you have other people in your team They can look in GA and they get it because it makes sense. They don't have to have an analyst package it together All right, so all these interactions what is the impact so I looked at some raw data yesterday and If we look at people who did and didn't convert in this instance That's the CTA at the top that takes people to our live builder preview That's what I want people to get into Those who didn't convert so average number of events Almost three times as many Interactions for people who converted choose your own venture interactions four times as many for people who converted I think this interactive Content it works in concert with these people who are ending up as people who convert and with our information Because it's more enjoyable right you're kind of gamifying it and it's better than just reading and it gives us lots of Opportunities to provide value and provide better experiences All right, that's that one done question What is the most clicked link on your home page? hard logo home Nope If you have any kind of customers, it's the login button login link right there So this is the login hijack. This is a way you can use that information to create more product awareness What a hot moment. I just want people to know what have a new feature Right, so that's a customer. I want to know they have a new feature. What's the context? 35% of our traffic comes to the coming to the homepage. They're just there to log in. They don't do anything else. I Asked other founders same stuff. I asked Twitter same stuff scary though. A lot of people don't know So they have polluted data because they think people are coming to their website and doing nothing Right, and it's also a massive opportunity. That's a lot of traffic So what kind of interaction can we use? This is like a Interstitial thing with two options. I say interstitial That's a pop-up, but we shouldn't be thinking in terms of a pop-up. This is good interruption This is Beneficial our customers want to succeed. They need to know that information So I want to learn more about that or I'll just continue to log in That is just an interactive mechanism to add value and also give me new context about how many people see and Interact with this new thing about a feature and I didn't have to do anything on the website, right? No Thing in a promo slider to announce something new. It's where people are going. I Look for data in lots of places Kiss metrics is one of them So I was pulling data for this presentation. I went to kiss metrics and because you go to the home page to log in That's what I did Kiss metrics calm right visit that Wait What now? That just redirected to Neil Battelle calm Do you want more traffic? No, I won't kiss metrics motherfucker That's not what I was looking for Would you like to allow Neil Battelle to send you notifications? I'm gonna choose not on your life And that's why that's Bad behavior the technology is not the problem marketers are the problem when they abuse it what I did before was useful That's not a nice interruption Things get better though. I have a speaker page. I got a lot of requests through it, but I got a big spike in traffic I didn't know why but I was looking at my page. I'm like, oh Rand's on there Randall know why this happened, but I didn't want to bug him. So I just searched instead Man fish can how to figure out who links to your website? This was the top response. So I click on that. It's an old post about link building I read a little bit, but it didn't answer my question and there was no product in views Nothing does nothing actually functional to solve my problem This is what I call no touch CRO How to optimize your website without touching your website? Now in this instance, I'm going to pretend to be someone from Mars Not from unbounce. So what's the aha moment? Oh? When I find out someone really cool linked to me and it explains why I got chat expect that's cool I want to design for people who are doing that because people who search for Things about inbound links often come to link building posts in that category on the Mars blog. Okay. That's the context More context. Here's the category if we scroll down There are 304 blog posts about link building Only one of them. I didn't read all of them Mentioned the solution, which is the new link Explorer that got put into beta on May 4th There it is there if I come here, I might have been useful, but I didn't so how do we solve this? What kind of interaction could have made this? And link builders link builders link builders and link builders link builders link builders and If I got this This is useful. It's talking to what I'm looking for and it's gonna send me to a solution How do we do this in a way? That's nice. So here are some It's triggers and targeting. That's what it's all about Mars domain and the blog now unfortunately Mars blog posts don't have the category and the link so I couldn't target link building But I just do link it's gonna get close We're gonna say When someone exits that's the best place to start to get a signal of do people care Are people gonna convert and then I would adjust and make it like halfway scroll or 20 seconds So it's not as aggressive, but I start there because you get the most insight only once always only once because you try to be respectful here and Show it to everyone the world apart from Seattle because I'm sure you're all sick to death of Mars Not really kidding There's a punctuation there not really I'm kidding not not really kidding And then if you want to get even nicer, maybe you drop a cookie in the app So don't show us to someone who already uses the product So if I got that I'd click on it. I'd come into link Explorer put in my speaker page Come down here Highest domain that's linking to me feed burner.com slash apple pie custard What is that? Apparently it's these guys. That's what our blog was called at least in 2007 so English Just like that guy All right, try that Mars. It's a great way of respectfully increasing product awareness in a massive way 304 blog posts. That's a lot of traffic come in that you can use to give people something. They're actually gonna benefit from Easy part at the start. What should they have done? Well, be a bit nicer because it's a bad experience Thanks for paying early because the price goes up if you don't What want to avoid fines will tell us why usually part can get app notifications at 8 a.m. That's great. They got some data that's gonna help them create more meaningful experiences And then show the app. So if I don't have it, I'll get it if I do I'll go in and set up the notifications That's the way they should have Provided that experience mutually beneficial with a focus on their product If you take away anything from this talk, it's true fact. Thank you very much. That's that landing page again There's a form on there if you're interested in when I kind of make that thing a free little tool Stick your email address and I'll never email you unless I Have that thing ready. Okay, and the slides are not there. I'll upload the PDF now. Thank you