 This is improving the ROI on your Drupal website with an updated content strategy. And we're stuck on the one slide. There we go. I'm Dawn Borglund. I'm a senior digital strategist for Media Current. I've been in the web industry for about seven years now, and I started on the branding and advertising side of things, moved over to project management, and now I'm in digital strategy, which is super cool. I get to help our clients from the very beginning, you know, when they've got an idea for a website or an idea for what they want to execute, all the way through the build, and then ongoing support. So Media Current, we build really awesome, elegantly designed Drupal websites. And we do those for clients like the Weather Channel, Habitat for Humanity, NBA, we've got a really strong presence in the higher ed space, and it's kind of cool because I get to wear a lot of hats. It's like instead of doing just one industry, I get to do them all. So during this time, over the 70 years of my career, I've noticed an interesting paradigm shift and what clients are asking for up front and what's working for them and what's working for us as an industry. And so that's what I want to explore today. So old school, digital marketing, looked a little bit like this. People trusted your intuition as an expert. Budget was controlled by IT, and IT was very focused on the technology. You know, what can your website do for me? What's the functionality? Can I do backflips? And it was pretty easy to prove ROI because ROI was a lot easier to get back then. So whether you were a developer, IT, marketing, or the client, you kind of walked to work, and you could do whatever you wanted because it was so easy. Today, the first thing I hear is show me the ROI. And it's not just, you know, at the end of the project, you know, did I spend my money and get something back. It's at the very beginning. So I've had clients come to me and say, Don, show me what the ROI is going to be on this project before I even start it. And I'm like, ooh, that's going to be a little hard, but you know, here's some expectations you should have. Budgets not controlled by IT anymore. I'm getting more and more marketers come to me because they're the ones who are dealing with lead generation and they're the ones dealing with sales. And no matter what, I'm being required to present hard before and after numbers. So not only for my client, but in the case studies that we've done with other clients. So it's this different and interesting place to be in right now. And I think the Drupal community as a whole has done a really good job at appealing to that IT director. But now, I mean, we really have to partner with our marketing teams and not be siloed. So for me, what I hear from marketers is it doesn't matter how many tricks your website can do if it's not bringing me leads. And the flip is also true. You know, if your website isn't working or it looks spammy or there's something presenting the user connecting to that brand, it's worthless too. They're not going to convert. They're not going to be customers for you. So I'm a big believer that from the very beginning, from the very first meeting, we need to have developers, strategists, marketers all together in the same room so that we are creating a good, cohesive strategy from the beginning. And I'm also a firm believer that it's not like strategy exists in one phase. We're all strategists. And so we have to approach every problem like that. So today, I want to explore some of the questions I get asked a lot by my clients, my potential clients, and my teammates. So first off, how do I increase conversions? Because that's a direct reflection on my ROI. Why aren't my traditional tactics like SEO, pay-per-click, why aren't they working anymore? Hey. Yeah. So conversions, for me, it's whatever that website's supposed to do. So if it's an e-commerce site, the point at which they make a purchase or if it's a lead generation site, it's the point at which they maybe fill out a contact form or request a demo or something like that. And then there's what I call secondary conversions, which is like moving someone to a back channel. So they sign up for your email newsletter. So they're not a customer yet, but they're in that like, I'm interested and I want to know more about your state. And same thing for like downloading content. You know, they've entered your sales funnel, but maybe they're not paying for it yet. Yeah. How do I reach a larger audience? Because larger audience usually means more money. How do I find a balance between advertising type content and like lead generation type content? What Drupal tools specifically can we use to get them there? I work exclusively in Drupal now and there's a reason for that and I'm sure you guys all know that too because you're here. And then what metrics should I be looking at to prove long-term ROI? So let's start with a hard one, increasing conversions. So I know you guys have already heard that content's king and that it's a big deal. And you know, content's this thing that's going to get you, you know, all of these conversions. And you know, because every person who ends up and talks about content strategy, they always follow it with, there's no silver bullet. It takes a lot of hard work. And it's hard when you don't have a process to be able to do that. So I'm not going to get into why content's so great because I'm guessing if you're already here, you already know that, you know. Instead, I want to talk about how content, you know, the success of that content not only depends on the quality, but also on distribution methods and how those distribution methods have changed. So, and I probably should have put easy in quotes because we all know nothing's easy. It's kind of like in our keynote presentation yesterday when they were like, there's only 14 or 15 remaining bugs. We all know those bugs must be really hard and that's why they're not fixed. So it's, you know, easy in quotes. But first and foremost, looking at your website to make sure the technology is up to date, that there's not any kind of weird errors happening that people can logically move through your website down a conversion path. You can increase traffic to your site. So even if your conversion rate stays the same, if you increase the number of people running through that conversion rate, you're going to get more. More ROI, more conversions. Getting the right traffic. So making sure, you know, if you sell birdhouses, people who are interested in birdhouses are coming to your site, and then improving your pitch. So if whatever you're saying isn't resonating with your audience, making sure that you adjust it. So it's true for not only you, but also your audience. And these are like my basic principles to increase conversions. You'll notice like everything in my talk kind of relates back to one of these tactics on how to do that. But that's like a high overview. So let's talk a little bit about why traditional tactics like SEO, content marketing, social media, pay-per-click, why that's different today than it was before. So if we're going to step back in time. Step back in time. When a company wanted to get more money, they had to rely on paid media. So that was, and this is way back in time. Step back before websites were super prominent. So they would have to run a TV ad. They'd have to get in the newspaper, maybe do a billboard. And that was the easiest way to expose themselves to these different audiences. And the good thing about that is it's instant eyeballs, you know. As soon as someone saw it, they knew your brand and you know, you were set to go. And it was easy. If you had the money, it was very easy to get that audience. The other side is that paid media or advertising is only good for the time in which you're paying for it. You know, so you don't own that audience. You know, they, you know, go wherever the advertisements are. And it's all subject to market pricing that you don't control. So it was pretty rough. When the internet became popular, companies had this access to an owned media channel. So owned media is anything that you control your voice over. So like your website, your, like what you say on Facebook, what you say on Twitter. That's all stuff that your company owns. And you can control, you know, what you say, when you say it, how you say it. And the best thing about it is that companies had direct access to their audience. You know, you could say that, you know, Facebook's kind of a middleman still. Maybe Google's a little bit of a middleman because that's how they get to your content. But for the most part, you don't have to go through an advertiser to be able to talk to your audience. Anybody could. And it was theirs forever. And this is still true. And then I think what the magic part about the internet gave us as marketers was an easy way to get earned media. So earned media is like any time your customer or your audience says something about you, that you, you didn't write. You know, so that might be a review. It might be a share. It might be like a retweet or something like that. And, you know, back in the day, it was really easy to get that. You know, you would post something on your blog and your audience would grow pretty organically. So maybe you would post your blog. Maybe you'd mention it on Dig. And then because there wasn't a lot of stuff going on, you know, you almost had to just wait for the links to roll in because there were bloggers who were writing about you. There were people who are, you know, retweeting you. And because you gave them something interesting to talk about, it was, it was good fuel for them. But the companies that have been in this business from the beginning have noticed you can't just write something and then wait. You know, it's totally a different game now. And so why? I believe right now we're competing. We're competing against each other because there's a lot more people in the space and there's a lot more companies. And so, you know, we're competing for space not only on Google, but we're competing for space on social platforms. You know, we're competing against other advertisers. We're competing against other people, you know, your friends and family who are writing on Facebook too. And we don't know when a new social platform comes on the market because they come out all the time, right? I don't know if you guys are like this, but I'm like a habitual app downloader. I'm like, oh, that's a new one. I'm going to download that and, you know, maybe I'll open it, maybe I won't, but I will download it. So, you know, when a new social media platform or a new app comes out as a marketer and as a company owner, we kind of have to make this critical decision. You know, do I jump on the bandwagon early when there's not a big audience? Which means, you know, good or it will, it's good if it succeeds, you know, if the platform keeps going. Like if you were in the beginning on the ground floor with Facebook, you probably have a good audience right now, especially if you're doing good work, good intentions, good content. Or if you don't jump on the bandwagon, you know, you risk missing that opportunity. And then the danger is if you do spend a lot of time and money on these platforms that come up almost overnight, you run the risk if they aren't successful you know, wasting all that time and money for a platform that's either going to be bought out by something else or just pitter off. So, it's hard, long story short, it's hard to be in marketing right now. It's hard to be in content. The other side of things is companies are getting smarter about what they're serving their consumers. So, Google, Facebook, they're very good at serving up what they think their audience needs. And so, if you don't fit that, you're probably not going to get as much exposure as you used to because they've got algorithms and you know what not to make sure that bad content gets pushed down, good content gets raised up. So, it's high pressure to put on even better content than you were before. And the kicker is our audience really, is really much smarter too. And they're very good at spotting an ad or spotting a sales pitch a mile away, you know. And they're good at filtering it out, you know. So, it's not even on their awareness sometimes. So, I think more than ever we really need to respect our audiences and we can't get away with just throwing anything up on our websites and expecting an ROI. So, let's talk a little bit about how we reach a larger audience. So, if we go back to the conversion rate idea, you know, if you increase the amount of traffic going in through your funnel, then of course you're going to get more ROI because you'll get more people through. I get asked all the time, you know, that's a great concept, Don. You know, how do I do that? And I usually like to flip it and say it's not about getting all kinds of traffic to your website. You know, it's about getting the right traffic. So, I did a site for a company that sold dental turbines. And for those of you who don't know, it's like the little tiny mechanics behind doing like a dental street tool work that power it. And as you can imagine, the audience size for them is like this big. It's like not only do you have to be interested in dental stuff, you have to be a mechanic, you have to be interested in fixing your own stuff, like super small. And if, you know, I was getting, you know, the world to this site, it probably wouldn't matter, you know, because they probably were interested in dental turbines. But I'll tell you, the people that were, the people that were searching for those specific things, they would convert so fast. Because, you know, where else are you going to get a dental turbine than, you know, this website? And the nice thing I like about flipping this question to how do I get the right audience is it brings up a lot of other interesting questions to consider. Like, who is my ideal customer? Am I serving them now or is that somebody else? What do they want? You know, am I even talking to them right now? So I usually tell people first step before we even really get too deep is to talk about your personas so that way we know who we're talking to. So this is a diagram. I don't know if you guys can see that way in the back because it looks a little tiny. So I'll talk through it. So once you know who your audience is, and I usually say when you're picking out your audience, first talk to your like best customers ever and figure out, you know, why they're so great, how they found you, what questions they had. Because that's like low hanging fruit. You know, if you love them, you want more of them. You should go talk to them and they usually really appreciate it. So start by asking them, you know, what questions did you have in the buying cycle? You know, who are you comparing me against? And once you've got this whole list of questions, go through and answer the questions. You know, answer them. And by doing it in a formal way, it not only helps your content, but it helps like your sales team to get on the same page with what you're doing. Three, audit your website, see what's missing in your content. Another word for that is a gap analysis. So it's like you take the questions that you have, your current content, and then you figure out what's missing so that you know, okay, I need to be talking about these things. That's number four, map and identify. And then, you know, last but not least is to start creating it. And I know that can feel really overwhelming in the beginning, especially if you've got a lot of products and you've got a lot of personas, and it can feel like I almost have to go back in my cave for the next year and write copy to be able to answer all these questions. So if you're in that situation, I definitely recommend prioritizing those questions, seeing where there's some overlap, and knocking those out one at a time. And then last but not least, so once you go through and you talk to these different customers, hit the ground and do some research. So I found that just by doing some research and some testing, A-B testing, sometimes you can identify whole different persona groups that you didn't know your company was already talking to and was already working, or even whole other groups that you're not even tapping yet. So building your audience part two, once you know who your audience is, you know how do you build them. I recommend first and foremost be where your audience is looking for you. So if they are, of course, doing a Google search and they're searching for your company, if you're not on the first page, it's a missed opportunity because you're not where they're looking for you. And then the rest is kind of low-hanging for it. Like we all know we should at least have an account on Facebook, we should at least have an account on Twitter, have a presence and cultivate that area. Create content that's interesting and worth reading because if it's worth reading, it's worth reading. If it's worth reading, it's probably worth sharing. And then use advertising to elevate your message. So today we can't rely on just doing owned media. We can't rely on just waiting and hoping for earned media, those reviews, those retweets. And we can't rely exclusively on paid media because if you do just one, you're not going to get the ROI anymore. Well, maybe you will, but it will be tiny, smaller. So you have to integrate them all. So I like to think about this as building pathways into your site. So if your website, and that's the U in the middle, it's your website, is the point at which somebody is going to convert, you have to think of all of these interesting ways to bring them back into your site. So that might mean doing blog posts. It might mean doing gated material like e-books or something like that. Obviously, Facebook, Twitter, the social media areas and email campaigns. And finding ways to pass people and content between all of these different sources and using advertising to get more exposure. So that might mean doing a Facebook ad or elevating a particular message on Facebook, doing the same thing for Twitter, doing the same thing for pay-per-click, especially pay-per-click if you aren't anywhere on search engine organic listings, pay-per-click is an easy way to get some traffic in. And that's important because search engine optimization, if you guys have given that a whirl yet, you know it takes a long time and a lot of effort. So pay-per-click is a nice way to get in there fast. So next, I'm going to talk about balancing fun with conversion focused content. And I get this question pretty frequently, especially when we're talking about social media. You know, people think that social media should be the place of fun memes and things that are easily shareable, but not necessarily hard conversion focused content. And I, you know, I kind of agree and disagree all at the same time. So I believe no one wakes up in the morning and says, I can't wait to see some advertisements unless you're in advertising, like me, I like that. And it's a hard net to crack because clients and CEOs, when they go to their Facebook or Twitter, or even their blog, they're looking for that hard sell, especially if they're, you know, new to the game or they're, you know, old school advertisers, because that's the expectation that's been set. Your personas, however, they probably want a softer pitch depending on where they are in their life cycle. And, you know, they don't want to be bombarded with sales, sales pitches, because that can feel a little bit like snake oil sometimes. So I believe in the 80-20 rule for just about everything. You know, 80% providing really valuable, interesting content. 20% can be more fun. Fun, but still relevant. So I like to do an exercise where I take the company and I write down everything that they're interested in. You know, of course they're interested in their services that they offer. Of course they're interested in being a leader in that area. And there's also usually some interesting stuff happening with branding. And I list it all out. And then I do the same thing for their audience. You know, what are they interested in? And usually it can't all fit in like a little circle like this, but, you know, bear with me for the purpose of slides. And really the sweet spot is that middle part. And so if you can find where your audience is interested in, hopefully your services fall into the sweet spot and layer that on with that nice branding area that gives you a lot to work with. And it lets you make those fun posts still a part of your brand and not just throwaways. So I have a quote that I wanted to share with you. All things being equal, people will do business with people that they like and trust. And all things being unequal, they still do business with the people they like and trust. And if you haven't read the little red book of selling, it's a great read. So this is the magic about the work that we're doing with content marketing. Because it's a way for you to start building those relationships at the very beginning, from the very first touch points. If we go back to that graphic I had with tying the social media and everything pointing back to your website, no matter what touch point they start at, if you're offering them valuable information that personifies your company, so you sound like a human being and you're really looking out for them, you're building a relationship with them. And that's the kind of thing that people find really valuable. I mean that's why Gary Vaynerchuk says, if somebody reaches out to you on Twitter, reach back, do your best to touch everyone individually because it creates that lasting impression, because it creates that relationship. And so that's kind of my basis on most content marketing, is that you need to be in your audience's corner, giving them good information, and doing so in a way that's friendly and open and on-brand. So I kind of went through Facebook and a couple areas to give some examples of different flavors. So this one is 10 things every teacher should do this summer, and it was a Facebook ad. So they are taking paid media and elevating their own media because it points back to their website. And it's on-brand because the company that put this out is WeAreTeachers.com and their whole deal is providing resources to teachers. So it's like this is perfect win-win. It's interesting, it's going to compel people to click through, and it's on-brand for them. It's like a slam dunk. I took a few of the blog posts that our marketing director, Adam Wade, who's in the back recently wrote. And if you... I guess the titles are a little tiny, so I'll read them. Five tips for email database segmentation, new e-book, marketing animation in Drupal, and then media current and ever-gauge transforming Drupal sites from static to engaging. You can tell when you read his blogs, they're very targeted to a particular persona, and they're very valuable. It's not fluff post ever. I don't think Adam's ever done a fluff post in his life. They're all valuable and you want to read them. And when they are valuable like that, it makes it easy for people to convert because the more knowledge you share, the more people trust you and the better you're going to look because you're not hiding anything. You're educating your customer to make the right choice, which is hopefully to buy your services. And it doesn't mean that there's not a place for things like this, you know? It's super fun, and it can really be on-brand, depending on your brand. And you can tie it into a value if you wanted to. So some Drupal tools that make my life easier. Some of these should look pretty familiar, but there's a lot of the SEO-based ones, like Global Redirect is a great module. Google Analytics, obviously, right? Everybody uses that. Metatag, Path Redirect, Path Auto, Redirect, Search for or for XML site map. And then I want to talk a little bit more about some of the marketing automation tools. Man, I know when I've hit a good slide because everybody takes a photo of it. Don't leave that up for a second. So most of these are about catching errors, making sure that you're tracking stuff, and then giving you a lot more control when it comes to search engine optimization. I'm going to scoot forward, okay? I see a couple of people, like, writing really fast. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the marketing automation tools. So Media Current currently maintains modules for Eloqua, Partot, SilverPop, Marketo, HubSpot, Evergauge, yeah, that was it. Hold on, back up. And the cool thing about what we've done is that when we came into marketing automation, we realized that a lot of these modules were either really at a date or they weren't even in Drupal 7. So we shined them up, gave them some new dressing, they're now stable in Drupal 7, and we're at a point now where we can start thinking about how do we make even cooler things out of them. So marketing automation and why I think this is such a unique thing for the Drupal community and that I think we can all really jump on gives us a lot more information about our customers, which really helps us as marketers when we're trying to figure out what to say and when to say it and what's working. And then we can take that data and present it to our CEO or to our clients and say, see, it's good. So if someone came on to your site and downloaded your content, let's say you had an e-book that they downloaded, if you were integrated with a marketing automation module, you could take the information that that lead gave you, like their name, their title, the company, the form, whatever that you had up front to gate that material. That would transfer it over to something like a sales force or a sugar CRM, so you don't have to manually move that over anymore. You get all this information you can track. You can then set up some rules to automatically follow up with email, text messaging, all of those kinds of good things and hopefully bring them back in to get even more specific content. So you're taking them from kind of interested and getting more information about them as they get a little bit more specific. And then hopefully you send them back and they download more content. And they can keep going through this cycle until you get to the point in which they convert, which is really exciting. So the nice thing about this is that as you are giving them really good information, which is good for them, plus for them, great for your information, you're collecting and tracking information about their likes and their needs, which means when you pass it over to your sales rep, they've got all of these things they can talk about. And that leads pretty much warm because not only does the sales side of your company know about the lead, the lead knows about your company because they've been getting all of this great information from you in developing this digital relationship. So metrics we all should be taking a look at when it comes time to prove ROI. Most companies and CEOs will say, this is the formula that I want to see. My ROI equals the number of leads, the value on those leads, minus how much I paid to get them. And that's really tough because there's not an exact formula for how much a Facebook like or a Twitter follow or a view on Google from a Google search into your site really means because it's different for each company. And especially if you're starting out, it's hard to know what your track record is for how many Facebook likes do you need before you get someone to convert. It's hard. And it's pretty hard to attribute what piece of content contributed to that conversion. So if you met someone at Drupalcon, you handed them your business card and they followed you on Facebook and Twitter. And then they followed that to your website. It's hard to pin down the point, the social channel or the owned channel that caused that conversion, which is why this formula doesn't really work. It doesn't work for me. You've got to dig a lot deeper. So things that I recommend marketers keep an eye on, they don't necessarily report out because if you get two in the weeds with CEOs and high-level executives, they kind of tune it out. So you want to boil it down to the information that they want to see. But things that's going to be valuable for you to make sure you're proving an ROI. Bounce rates, time on site, exit landing pages, so making sure the technology is working. And there's not anything weird going on that you need to take a look at. So if you wake up one morning and you went from a 50% bounce rate to a 90% bounce rate, something up. Website traffic sources. So what channels are sending you the most traffic? And of that, which ones are converting? Campaign-specific data. So if you're running a gated piece of content, taking a look at who's downloading it, where it's going, are people opening your emails? Reporting on that data to make sure that the content that you're creating regularly is working. It's doing what you intend it to do. Medium-specific content. And I look at this through the lens of is it working from a quality standpoint? So if you're tracking these areas on a month to month and you notice a radical shift or even a decline in how things are doing for each medium, you should take a look to see if something's changed for you. You know, is the quality of my content good enough? Is there a new competitor on the landscape? So these are the kind of things that you kind of have to keep an eye on and constantly shift, because it's not like you can do a content strategy at the beginning of the year and expect it to be exactly the same by the end. And then these are the things that high-level executives want to hear about. So when it comes to conversions, how many, and these are the primary ones that I talked about a little bit earlier, so how many people requested a demo or filled out my contact form or bought something, something like that? How many people downloaded my content and gave me their information so that I could follow up with them? And then how many people moved to a back channel that you can continue to nurture and hopefully talk them into being a lead and being a primary conversion next month? I'd like to report on pages with greater than one hit from search because I view every single page that's getting a ranking and getting traffic in as that opportunity for you to convert them. And so if you're doing all of this work on your website with content, adding blogs, adding resources, this should be like one of those easy slam dunk wins, you know, assuming you're not doing anything like wild and crazy like Black Hat SEO or something. That should naturally grow and be a nice feather in your cap. Medium specific data, and so that's numbers and rankings. Even though I said it's really hard to quantify what a Facebook like means, people love it when they get more likes. So include it because it makes people happy and when, you know, your bosses are happy, you are really happy, so go ahead and include it. Top performing keywords and referrals. I like this because it's a good indicator on, you know, one of my talking about the things that people are interested in learning about is my SEO working. Am I doing a good job in my social media and link building campaigns that I'm getting traffic in? So it's a, it's kind of a nice way to say like if you're in the trenches, see all the good work that I'm doing. And then the last one is reviews. So I like to do a summary on any kind of new reviews that come on. So if you are a B2C or B2B company and you see new reviews, whether they're good or bad, put them in your reports and talk about what you did to either elevate them. So if it was a great report, how did you share that? Or if it was a bad report, how did you save the day and respond back to them? And last but not least, just don't give up. I mean, content marketing is really unique because it takes a long time for a company to reach full potential on their ROI and it forces you guys into being educators on the field all the time. So if you're not seeing success immediately or if you've got somebody who, you know, they launch their website and they wake up and they check Google and they expect themselves to be first, you know, don't give up. You know, counsel them, talk it through, say, you know, it can take several months, it's okay. And if you notice that you're still not seeing incremental improvement, it's totally okay to change your strategy and to really embrace that because your market's gonna change. Your business is gonna change. The industry is gonna change. You know, who knows what the next big thing is and talk to your customers because if they are brand evangelists and they see something going on, they'll be nice and tell you and give you some good advice. So we really just scratched the surface with a lot of these things. Content strategy is one of those things that there's whole conferences devoted to it. So I wanted to give you all the invitation to come to our booth. If you, like, walk into the doors and you go a little bit to the right, we're in the first row, you know, so you go a little bit to the right and then we're on your left. So stop by, say hi to me. Say hi to Adam, who's our marketing director. And if you let him scan your badge today or if you go as a business card or stop by our booth, we can enter you in to win a drawing for Marketing Automation for Dummies, which is a really great book. And of course we'd like to get into the specifics about what's going on for you and the challenges that you're facing. So I intentionally ended a little bit early to be able to open things up for questions if there are any. Hey. Can I ask here? Is that okay? Yeah. So are you going to be sending us a copy of these slides or can we get a copy of it? I know the video is being posted on the site and then we're going to toss this up on the Media Current Slide Share. So you can either keep a steady eye on our slide share on our site or if you give me your email or remind me via Twitter, I'll send you a link. Yeah, I have another general question, actually. I don't know a digital agency and we work on a couple of things. One is Drupal and the other one is Magento. Okay, so I'm thinking should we really have two different sites so that we focus on e-commerce on one end and Drupal on the other end or is it better to just have one site and you hit e-commerce and Drupal on the same? What do you think? Any comments? Well, I'm at DrupalCon. So I've never done like a Drupal as my content generating section and Magento as my e-commerce platform. I've done that in my dark life before Drupal. And the issues I ran to is that it was just hard to pass information back and forth, especially if you want to track things and it's not impossible, you just have to jump through some extra hoops to be able to track like what keyword term someone came in from, for example, to be able to land on your site and then to be able to convert the same kind of thing with how they got there. So I think Drupal's e-commerce functionality is pretty awesome and so that's my initial reaction. I'm probably pretty biased though. So no that lends. Sure, thank you. The commerce guys are around. If you want to, I can introduce you and you can chat them up and see what's... I'll go check them all. Okay, cool, yeah. I noticed that marketing automation tools are quite expensive for small business. Do you have any recommendation? Do you think that small business needs a marketing automation tool and if you have any recommendation for it? I think there are ways to get a lot of the same information without a marketing automation tool. It's just very manual. And so it's certainly possible to check the information and then manually set up like a Drup campaign or something like that. It's just a pain. Yeah. I don't think I'm at liberty to say one is cheaper than the other or something like that because our process at Media Current is we're very transparent and we introduce everyone to, the people that we do business with with marketing automation and then let the customers decide and then we help with integration and not the reselling or anything like that. Okay, great. Do you place a content relationship management on the marketing process? I... And Adam Wade is a really good person to ask about this too because he's our marketing automation guru. I like the CRM integration, of course at the beginning when they download something and to be able to take that information and put it in. But there's constant information passing back and forth anytime that there's an activity on the site. So it's like... So if your website is the middle, I would probably put the CRM as this nice little bubble around the middle in that graphic. Yeah. Questions? I work for B2B Business and with long sales cycles and we have a lot of content. We have kind of traditional gated content but we also have some kind of specialized content that we use to put landing pages up for but the sales team always wants to weigh around it for the customers they already know. You know, and so one of the challenges I'm curious, A, have you ever encountered something like this and how do you respond or how would you respond because our concern is that those links are going to get shared and we're not going to be able to track some of the other conversions that could be happening because we've accommodated them so maybe we shouldn't have. So I'm open to any advice you have and then a second question that's kind of unrelated is about holding things in your marketing automation tool before you pass it off to sales. Do you recommend doing a lot of that until they reach a current stage so that it stays in your automation before it gets to sugar or sales force? I definitely, you know, immediately current and Adam can get in the specifics for our case but we answering your second question first because it's the easiest one. You know, we definitely score each lead and so as they download more content their score goes up and at which point they, you know, it's like ding ding ding you hit the right number then we pass it over to sales to be able to follow up with, do the lead stuff. I'm not sure, so for your first question you are saying that you, sales wants to create information just for current customers and you don't want prospective customers to see it? Everyone to see it. Why? That's so interesting. I feel like they could get so much information from knowing that that current customer is interested in whatever that new topic is because that's, you know, potential upsell for them. Like why wouldn't they want that? You know, because if they fill out the form you can put them on, you know, a campaign so they get more information like that. I would advise talking through why they're hesitating to be able to do that. I mean I guess if they wanted to really make it a personal thing they could just send them the content, but it's that's really weird for me. You know, because I am assuming that most of your forms are easy enough to fill out that it's probably like the fields are already saved in like their Chrome browser or the Firefox browser or whatever and they can just click submit. Adam, you have an opinion? Do you think that would solve their issue? Let's talk a little bit more after this because I want to know if you're integrating with marketing automation and if it's like you're putting your form on that platform or if you're like, if you go to our site and you go to like a download page it's all in Drupal it just talks to marketing automation. Yeah, I will double check with Adam but I'm pretty sure you can get around the form and if that's okay, that's in, you know, short enough clicks for your sales team. To comment on that, query strings and cookies are the answer. My question is about reporting and with SERP and keywords and stuff. Do you have any tools and or services that you guys use? Oh, yeah. I've never found a good keyword ranking site. It lists stuff and it just never seems to be accurate. Yeah, I agree and so I use a lot of them and cross check them because there is a lot of variants. So I use Google Analytics all the time. Of course. I also use Moz .com and they've got a really nice interface for like checking back links and they do a cool grading system to say like these are the most valuable links and you can also track keywords against competitors and where they're ranking, which is pretty cool. I also use SEM rush rush.com rush.com and they give you a pretty good list of all the keywords that you're ranking for currently. It's hard to do that. If you don't have something like SEM rush it's like trial and error to figure out what you're ranking for and I've caught a few things that I know I'm ranking for that SEM rush won't include in their list but I cut on some slack, you know. Yeah. What I do love about SEM rush is when I'm doing competitive analysis. So I can put in my URL my competitor's URL and it will give me a dump of the keywords that I'm just ranking for the keywords that they're just ranking for that I'm not and our shared keywords, which is pretty cool. It also gives you a lot of good bids on what advertising might look like for you what things are converting for keywords and stuff. So those are my favorite tools and you'll notice some differences as you scoop between them. One day I have a dream of one tool to rule them all but we'll we'll see and I've also used kiss metrics a little bit too. Not as much but they're easy to digest. First I wanted to say thanks for a great presentation. I think it was a great sanity check for many of us. Thank you. Now what I wanted to get into how do you think you would modify some of the advice you gave for the public sector where a conversion actually has very different meaning, we're not selling a thing we're trying to change a behavior build a constituency. Man I would this is a question with the lens that I don't know what behaviors are trying to change. Basically I'm with the public transit provider for Ohio County Cleveland Ohio and really our conversions consist of getting more people to use our services and the competition that we face is them not using our services. So how do you work with an audience like that how do you change that behavior? I feel like the hardest thing for your sector is that there's probably not people actively looking for that Not nearly as we like. Yeah, so it's you have to come up with these creative ways to get your information in front of them. Like have you played the app dumb ways to die? No. I'm an app person so download dumb ways to die it's a great free game but it's it was a way to teach people about public safety with the train overseas. So it's um Sort of a ditch like that. Yeah, like I think finding that that middle part where people are interested in it but it still relates to what you're trying to talk about is a good way to get people in the door. When it comes to converting on your site I almost feel like for you it's going to be more about the back channel conversions you know how many people do you get to sign up and stay engaged with you and you can do some like market tests with them so it's like if you want to see how effective this piece of education is if you can come up with a fun way to test the waters could be something you could report on. Okay. Great. Thank you. That's tough. That's tough place to be in. Yeah, a lot of normal stuff doesn't work there either. I'm going to continue that letter. I work in higher ed. Hey, right on. All of my users have already committed to paying a $60,000 a year. Yeah. And I'm not trying to get any more money from them. But I am trying to make a business case for providing them with good content. So kind of the flip side do you have any recommendations for how I can convince convince my higher ups that we need to spend money on not making any money? Yeah. Yeah, I do. So I'm also from higher ed. My time before SATCOM was teaching at UCF in Florida. So I feel like the pitch you need to make to them and this is a pitch that I made not only do we need to keep our current students because it's easy for them to transfer every new semester is an opportunity for you to either gain more students or lose them. Maybe they drop out. Maybe they go someplace else or maybe they just do dumb things and it's sucks for everybody. So I think that's a good place. And I think you can really harp on the fact that content marketing and content strategy can cut down on things like call center times. So if you've got really good information maybe your financial aid people don't get slammed at the beginning of the semester maybe your admissions people don't get slammed and then I think the other side of it that's not a direct ROI but I think is one of those long term things is that the content marketing that you're putting out right now sets this cultural standard for how your university is seen and how students relate to the university and so I don't know about you guys but I know when I was in digital media teaching digital media at UCF it was a big deal for us to graduate students that would go out into the world and do good things because then that would reflect nicely on our department and so I think setting that up might be might be something they'd bite on. Thank you for your time and maybe you can share with us some numbers about the KPIC you show us maybe the bounce rates that we need to work on, the conversion rates and the lead quality I don't know maybe some numbers. It's going to very be pretty profoundly depending on your industry and your history and what the site does you know so like a news site probably has a higher bounce rate than the media current site because a lot of times for news sites you'll notice trends where people will go to a particular link maybe they saw it on Twitter or Facebook they'll read the article and then they'll leave so so it varies, I mean I would say if you have a bounce rate kind of across the board under 40% you're probably doing pretty good, you know there's always room for improvement to move it down but it's like you're not on fire you know and I'd look at where people are leaving so if people are bouncing from your homepage that's a lot different than if they're bouncing from like an individual article so yeah conversion rates conversion rates is also, I've seen it all over the board dental turbine website had like killer conversions like way above 50% yeah yeah I mean they were because if you were searching for dental turbines you probably wanted to buy one and it was the only place you could buy it so it was kind of like do it or you don't get a turbine you know but the average sites I don't know what kind of numbers do you like I see and it varies big time but I see 25% a lot sometimes 30 but it depends on what you're doing because a lot of times there'll be different seasons so like with higher ed you get a huge conversion rate around admissions time and then as soon as that's over like say September you know it's nothing so it's hard to know without knowing what your industry is, what your history is to give you an example that you can really lean on we work with a lot of industries we are from Peru so we work with a lot of industries and our numbers are for 3% to 5% so I'm thinking if we implement this kind of automation we can go like 50% it depends on what you're doing you know but at the end it's the same formula it's relevant content yeah but you gotta take into account your market you know so if people are I don't know why we're getting all this static if people just aren't constantly buying your stuff and that's like it's kind of like the thing like you only buy like one kitchen timer and your lifetime kind of a thing you know it's like each place is totally different and has different rates so instead of you know what the conversion rate for all websites should be I'd look at what are the conversion rates in my industry like and what's my conversion rate for is like what's happening in the real world too to give you some ideas because it's like you could drive a truck through how big the differences are the last one let's think about universities you have conversion rates in universities um I'm trying to think of because that varies pretty big time too especially depending on what their marketing is like because I know a lot of universities are pretty paper focused and they're moving to digital um I don't have a number off the top of my head to toss out to you but maybe we can talk later and get some analytics and see what I've seen cool thank you sorry I feel like I didn't really answer any of your questions I told you I'm like oh it's tough I gotta do some research the bounce rate is cool thank you guys so much