Convert Your Content Marketing to Revenue: 7 Pieces of the Puzzle

via Content Marketing Institute http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/12/convert-content-marketing-revenue-puzzle-pieces/

By BRUCE MCDUFFEE published DECEMBER 5, 2013

According to the B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends survey published by CMI, 93 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing, and only 9 percent consider their efforts as “very effective.” Although we are not sure what the term “very effective” means to those who responded, it is safe to assume that revenue generation influences whether or not the effort is effective at some level.

In the B2B world of marketing, if our content and associated content marketing efforts are not generating revenue, then we should fix it — or stop the effort altogether — so budget and resources can be diverted to those tactics that are generating revenue.

The framework I present below is highly effective — and measurable. In fact, I have employed it at a global electronics manufacturing company, resulting in growth rates of 20 percent to 30 percent.

In general, I view converting content marketing to revenue as seven pieces of a puzzle, rather than a linear series of steps. Although the overall process is best viewed in a linear fashion, it does not necessarily need to be executed linearly. If you put each piece of the puzzle together with the whole in mind, you will generate revenue with your content. For every piece of content you intend to create, you should visualize how it will churn through each of these seven steps, and out the revenue end.

One caveat: Basic content marketing 101 presumes you are creating content that is relevant and useful to your target audience, so they can do their jobs better as a result of the content your organization is providing. This seven-piece framework works based on this premise. However, if, for example, you produce a bunch of product-focused promotional content that masquerades as education, the process just won’t work.

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1. The fundamentals

As mentioned above, this process won’t work without effective content marketing, an effective content marketing process, or the proper content tools for distribution and measurement. Thus, the first fundamental task is to create effective content. It’s not all that easy, as we can see, based on the “9 percent very effective” CMI survey result. Organizations that excel at content marketing that generates revenue have worked hard to put the infrastructure of an effective process in place, including gaining executive buy-in, developing a content-centric culture in their sales and marketing departments, and putting adequate resources in place to support a documented content marketing strategy.

The second fundamental component for success is to have a proper marketing plan in place before proceeding with content marketing. Every step in this process requires that you have a clear understanding of your business goals and your target audience, and this is best accomplished by developing thorough buyer personas to help you understand and address the needs of your audience through the content you create. If you need additional guidance on this, plenty of information is available on how to create effective content, as well as how to build a company culture that supports content (a great place to start is by looking on the CMI website).

The third critical fundamental piece is a proper tool set. You will need to have the following components in place for this process to work efficiently and effectively:

1. A website
2. A marketing automation platform (MAP)
3. A customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated with your MAP
4. Alignment with sales around lead management, definitions, and who will be doing what (and when).

From this point on, I’ll assume you have a good content creation machine in place, a written marketing plan, and a robust tool set in place. Now you are ready to move on to the next piece.

2. Distribute and make it findable

Content will not significantly drive revenue by just sitting on your website. I suspect many of those companies that deem their content marketing efforts less than very effective are creating good content, but are only parking it on their website and hoping for improved SEO. Don’t get me wrong, good content parked on the website will improve SEO, but it is not enough by itself to measurably affect revenue.

Content distribution must be integral to your marketing strategy and tactics. The content you create must be used extensively — through both outbound and inbound tactics. Your outbound ads must promote the content, just as your inbound tactics (like pay-per-click [PPC]) would.

For content to be effective — and to drive revenue — you must stop promoting your products and, instead, focus those resources on promoting your content! Promoting content is a far better way to engage with your target audience than telling them about your product or service. Sorry, but it’s true: Your audience likely perceives your product or service as a commodity, but will perceive your content as value. The sooner you embrace that idea, the sooner you can start generating 20 percent and 30 percent increases in growth rates.

Offer your content via all outbound channels where your target audience congregates: emails, print ads, email ads, digital ads, direct mail, social media, etc. Inbound SEM ads should also promote the content. This idea of promoting content in place of product is sometimes hard for the organization to understand, and as a content marketer, you are likely to get strong push-back on this point. So this is where the preparation of your organization comes into play. You must have strong executive support and a content marketing-friendly culture — or at least a strong understanding in place — from the outset. Otherwise, your product managers and sales people will freak out and possibly hinder your content marketing strategy. They may even force you back to a product-based strategy — and back to those dismal growth numbers of 1 to 5 percent.

3. The conversion point (aka, a landing page)

It is imperative that all outbound and inbound activities drive to a custom landing page. Do not send them to a regular web page, and even more importantly, do not send them to your home page! Once they take the action step (click on or type your URL), they should be directed to a custom designed landing page optimized around the offer of the content. If you send them to one of your regular web pages, you lose, especially if you send them to a product page. The more relevant you can make the landing page, the better chance you will have at earning their engagement.

You’ll have to make some decisions about how they acquire the content once they are on the landing page. Will you gate it or offer it with just a click? The harder it is to get the content, the higher your abandonment rate may be. Conversely, the easier it is, the more broad your reach. I love to give away content for free without any strings attached because it gets wider exposure and still builds awareness and credibility among your target audience. The three components of your landing page should be:

1. The offer of your content asset: This should be perceived as the main function of the landing page.
2. A description of your business, and your value proposition: You want to offer content they find valuable, as you want the visitor to connect the goodwill generated by the asset to your brand’s overall offering (awareness + credibility). Present the offering as a side panel, not as the main focal point of the landing page.
3. Easy access to more information on your company: The goal here is for visitors to think to themselves, “Who is giving me this valuable information? I want to know more.”  Always give a visitor the option to “raise their hands” and make a direct connection.

Remember, your outbound ads and PPC ads should both drive to the landing page. Do not fill the landing page with product-based information. The last thing you want is for your visitors to feel like they fell victim to a bait and switch tactic, tricking them by directing them to a product page when they were expecting valuable information.

4. The call to action step

Although the call to action (CTA) is integrated into Piece No. 3, it is important enough to merit its own section here. This is where the quality of your content matters. If you have created something that is of interest to your target audience, they will be more willing to take an action to learn more. You have to tell them what you want them to do! In the digital realm, it usually involves a click. Again, you have to directly ask them to “Click here to get the paper” or “Register here,” for example. Don’t leave it up to readers to figure out what they’re supposed to do once they see your content. If it isn’t really easy, you might lose them. If you don’t make clear what you are offering and how to get it, you’ll lose a great deal of potential effectiveness.

5. Qualification

At this point, a person from your target audience has clicked or responded to the CTA in your ad, arrived at your custom landing page, has been delighted to easily obtain a useful and helpful piece of content, has put your brand top of their mind, associated value with your brand, and associated your company with a particular benefit. Additionally, they may have explored your website, shared the content via their social media channels, forwarded the email, or even requested a contact action from your sales team. At this point, it is important to decide what happens next. Is the visitor a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that should be sent over to the sales team for direct action? Should they be sent to a nurturing program? Would it be best to hold off on contacting them until they see your next great piece of content? Each of these choices are valid actions, and will depend on your particular business practices.

Regardless, though, you must consciously decide what you want to happen next. Your work as a modern marketer is not over at the point of click or the download. Assuming you are fishing in the pond where your target audience resides, I suggest two options as your first line of action:

• Pass them to sales as a MQL
• Or, send them into a nurturing program.

This is where your marketing automation platform becomes a critical component of the content to conversion process. Throughout the nurturing process, your contacts will be receiving more great useful information (content) and getting to know your company — and your associated offering — through regular website visits. As they visit and interact with your content, you should be measuring that activity — ideally with some type of lead-scoring program.

Success of the qualification step depends on close alignment with your sales team. You should have an agreement in place specifying the point at which any of these contacts should be considered ready for a call. Your decision may also be to just let the contacts decide for themselves when to proactively reach out to your sales team — and this is fine, as well.

6. Pass the contact information to the sales pipeline

If your content is educational and you’ve complied with all the best practices of offers, PPC, landing pages, etc., you’ll be flooding the top of the funnel (and the sales team) with qualified leads, as well as filling the nurturing funnel with tons of future buyers. I would like to re-emphasize the importance of collaborating with sales on each campaign. They need to understand what’s happening — and why it’s happening — as the leads start flowing into their inboxes.

Those contacts that do not qualify should be sent to a content-based nurturing program. While in the nurturing program (where you offer them even more great contentyou’ve created) they are engaging more deeply with your company and its value proposition. As they engage, you are increasing awareness and credibility in their minds. When the day comes around and they finally are ready to buy what you offer, your firm gets the call because of this awareness and the credibility you have achieved.

7. The purchase

The final step is, of course, the purchase (and, hopefully, many future purchases). After the contact is passed along to the sales funnel, content can be used to move them along in their decision process toward a positive outcome for your firm. Sales people should be trained how to use your “later funnel stage” content to help close more deals. Late stage content is where you talk about your products, case studies, application notes, etc.

Keep these seven pieces of the puzzle in mind for each and every piece of content you create. You should never create content without having a plan for conversion clearly specified in advance. Effective content marketing is heavily interwoven with the marketing strategy and tactics, as well as with your organization’s sales process. Cultivating your target audience members so they become life-long customers is all about engagement. You want them to place your brand and associated offering top of mind and with a great deal of credibility. If you are able to achieve this position in their minds, when they are ready to purchase, your firm will get the call. Competitors who are not using this type of framework may get a call, but they will have minimal credibility and only be used for a price comparison. This seven-piece framework will help ensure that your business will be the winner of market share — and accelerated revenue growth rates.

For more details on a content marketing framework for driving conversion, read CMI’s eGuide, 7 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy.

Cover image via Bigstock

Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success

via Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-ladder-step-by-step-success/

The most common mistakes digital practitioners and leaders make is to either do things in the wrong order, or to try and do too much at one time.

Progress in digital marketing and analytics in either scenario becomes painful (the organization / systems / thinking is simply not in the optimal position). People become frustrated (you hire smart people, they run off to build you the Taj Mahal, meanwhile you don't have a functioning toilet). Business results suffer.

There is something in humans that makes us want to do the hard things, to shoot for the most complex right away, to want to be challenged to infinity. In many cases, it is a tendency we have to learn to restrain.

More often than not, magnificent success results from executing a business plan that is rooted in a strong understanding of the landscape of possibilities, and a deep self-awareness of business capabilities. These business plans will contain a structured approach, do this, then do this2, then make sure we are really good at this3, then this 4 and so on and so forth.

In other words: Evolution. It works.

Said another way, digital revolutions more often than not fail. One day your leadership realizes you stink at digital (all of it or just Facebook or search and display or mobile or whatever). They find the closest industry leader (L'Oreal, Booking, Zyrtec, Innocent Drinks, CSC Consulting). They say: "Do whatever we need to in order to get there in 90 days. Go!!"

If you hear that, run. Else you'll be standing in a place where a flaming crater will appear in the near future.

I'll be the first to admit that selling evolution is hard. Revolutions just sound so darn sexy! Still, reality is reality.

In this post I want to arm you with the evolution you should undertake in your companies when it comes to marketing and analytics. Additionally, I'll make the hard tough difficult painful choices on your behalf and order things to deliver the highest possible impact, so you'll know exactly what to do and what you will get from it all.

In other words: Two inspiring ladders of awesomeness for you! One for digital marketing and one for digital analytics.

Your ladder might look a little different, but I hope the process I follow will help you make the hard choices most relevant for your company and the evolutionary position it finds itself in.

Ready?

Digital Marketing: Ladder of Awesomeness/Sustainable Success.

My current title is Digital Marketing Evangelist so you can just imagine how absolutely excited I am about all the digital possibilities. Owning audiences, instead of just renting them. Earning time, instead of just buying it on TV. Creating persistent relationships, instead of just transient ones. Not letting budgets limit our creativity. And so much more. I'm like a kid in a candy store. I want to do everything right away. I want to go from single cell life to fully formed homo sepians in seven days.

I've also discovered that that is the easiest path to failure. : )

So, based on my spectacular successes and painful failures around the world, I've developed a ladder of sustainable success. Here is what it looks like:

Let's look at each step on the ladder in some detail.

The very first thing you want to do is create an acceptable website. One that reflects the customer expectations of 2013. A good example, for e-commerce and non-ecommerce sites, is http://www.csc.com/. Look at the colors. Look at the icons. Look at the way the text is laid out, how video is incorporated, the structure of the site and everything else. Your first job is to beat them at everything. During this stage you should also invest a lot in Search Engine Optimization. You will have great content, in a good experience, and focus on getting free traffic.

[To learn more about the Do in stage one please review my See-Think-Do-Coddle framework for content, marketing and measurement.]

Second, create the world's greatest mobile experience. Yes. Don't do paid search. Don't run to buy display ads. Definitely do not start Tweeting or embarrassing your brand on Facebook (we'll do that in a bit). Focus on the mobile experience. Because of this lovely graph from Business Insider and it's representation platforms people use to visit top destinations….

Scary, right? Exciting, right? Focus on mobile like crazy, tablets in particular. Beat CSC's experience. BeatMotrin. Beat Beneful. Don't be like IBM's tablet experience (old, substantially brand negative). Or Ford (it is amazing that in 2013, for such an expensive product, it looks so…. 2005).

Now that you have build a decent foundation and are getting a decent amount of free traffic you know what is working and what is not, you are ready to move to step three. Start investing in your email marketing strategyfor extending relationships, and your paid search strategy for brand terms. Email allows you to start building aowned audience that you can (if you don't stink) start relying on (rather than constantly having to rent them from TV or Google). People typing a million variations phrases with your brand terms are looking for you, make sure you show up and capture the traffic you deserve.

Step four is focusing on expanding your reach to new relevant audiences. The cool part about display advertising is that we can build our brands cost effectively, introduce our products to a new audience, and create demand based on a number of intent signals (this last part is often missing from offline media). Based on what people read, what sites they've visited, their demographic and psychographic signals and so much more. Don't go all crazy with display ads, just focus on your brand, products and services. Learn, get better, try some more.

The site is now working well across platforms, we are starting to get a lot of free and some paid traffic, we are optimizing for conversions and task completion rate, time to move to step five in the ladder and focus on creating micro-outcomes on our website. Here is what it looks like for the Venetian hotel and casino in Macao:

In orange is the macro-outcome (number of casino room reservations), in purple are the micro-outcomes. All clustered into See-Think-Do. Less than two percent of people on your website will complete the macro-outcome (conversion). Having a robust cluster of micro-outcomes allows you to deliver something of value to the other 98% and establish a relationship with them (and get some economic value in exchange!). The smartest companies in the world are very good at this, step five. It does require working with your CMO, VPs, Directors, IT, Offline Sales, UX, IT, and more people than you could ever imagine. It is worth it.

Time to start kicking things up a notch in step six. Start investing in creating the world's most beautiful, functional, brand-enhancing, customer joy inducing website! You have content, you have traffic, you have micro-outcomes, you are making loads of money. Invest in the site experience now to differentiate yourself from the competition, and create irrational loyalty. Beat Bonobos (I. Love. Them!). Beat L'Oreal (except for their irritating 40 question survey in a single long window, they are nearly flawless). Beat Palms casino (try booking, try the menu, try anything, pretty awesome all around).

You are a big company and you can do two big things at one time. Now is also the right time to start investing in Facebook and YouTube. These two social platforms (eschew others at this point) allow you to learn how to earn attention in two different form factors. In both cases you'll learn quickly that pimping is the best way to fail. Expressed by me on behalf of all humans on earth: The world's greatest social media strategy: 1. Entertain Me 2. Inform Me. 3. Provide Utility. Nothing else works. Learn that in step six.

[Bonus: Facebook Marketing: Best Metrics, ROI, Business Value ]

Now that your earned, owned and paid media strategies are in full swing, and you are the proud owner of the world's greatest desktop and mobile website, let's focus on enhancing your ability to get a massive audience.(Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod)

Step seven is to to build out an incredible category/industry/ecosystem targeting Search and Display strategy. This will result in you getting magnificent at brand marketing, at the See and Think stages. The result will be an even larger owned audience, less getting into dog-eat-dog Do stage fights. You'll have complete spectrum of coverage, being there from understanding customer intent at the earliest stages and converting that into demand for what you have to offer.

From step five on you were likely already delivering some multi-channel value for your company. Some of your micro-outcomes were likely already connected to your offline existence (maps, phone calls, offer redemptions, etc.). Now in step eight, we really kick things up multiple notches when it comes to creating a truly fantastic multi-channel (or the flavor of the month, omni-channel) execution engine.

The picture above is from my first book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, from page 235. It is a part of multi-channel analytics chapter.

There is a lot of difficult work to be done (systems, processes, integrations, optimizations) in order to ensure that your digital existence is driving nonline value. Now is the time to undertake that work. Not in step three. Definitely not in step one. Now. Step eight (after you've gotten the first seven things done).

The last step before nirvana, step nine, is to focus on getting better at loyalty marketing. (Cartoon by Tom Fishburne)

My definition of loyalty marketing, from the Coddle-stage, is to create unique content and to execute targeted marketing for those people/business entities, who have purchased from you two times or more. I have a higher standard for who our customer is. Not the person/business entity who's purchased from us once (they might not have had a choice), but the entity that's purchased from us twice at least (because the second time they made a choice to do business with us). Have a completely separate and focused set of people and work to deliver joy and delight to these entities. It is the only recipe for long term sustainable success.

Now you know the nine steps to nirvana. And you know exactly the order in which you should consider prioritizing your efforts. If you do step five before two, you can. But your success will be much more limited.

Understand the choices that resulted in what you are supposed to do in each step, then customize this, using the choices above, to create your own step ladder to deliver amazing digital marketing success to your company.

The cool thing about the web is that you don't have to do all of the above based on faith, you have a BFF in data! Let's go there.

Digital Analytics: Ladder of Awesomeness/Sustainable Success.

If you open your copy of Google/Adobe Analytics or CoreMetrics or Webtrekk you'll notice that every single report has a gigantic number of metrics in it. And…. they have many reports!

So on day one, as soon as we get access to the digital analytics tool, we go all crazy. Not only do we puke out a lot of data to every breathing human up and down the chain of command, we treat every bit of data with equal importance. The first part is frustrating, the second part is deadly.

Regardless of if you are a B2B or B2C or A2Z company, regardless of if you are big or small, regardless of how great you think you are, I believe you can benefit from taking one step at a time when it comes to ensuring that data analysis drives business value. It might seem sacrilegious to suggest that you should worry about Visits first and not Profitability, but that is exactly what I'm going suggest because when we overshoot our capabilities, we fail to hit even our local maxima (forget about ever hitting the global maxima !).

My assumption is that everyone on this blog is smart enough to balance for focus and ensuring the company stays a viable entity as it climbs each step in the ladder of success. Hence none of you will mis-understand that recommending a focus on CPA in stage four means you run the company to the ground because you ignore business fundamentals!

[A tiny hidden agenda I have in this post is to share how to make hard choices. You can imagine how difficult it is to say focus on page depth, don't focus on conversion rate, or don't worry about any content metric, focus on clicks. It seems crazy. But a big part of being successful is being able to understand business reality and have the skill to make these hard choices. I hope you'll pick up a couple of tips about making those choices.]

Ready to read something outrageously controversial? ; )

Focus on Visits and Click-thru Rates first. Don't do anything else. Nothing. Just Visits and CTRs. Focus your analysis on looking at dimensions that help you understand where your precious visitors are coming from, if you are doing any kind of inbound marketing (in the digital marketing ladder I recommend SEO in stage one) then what is getting more clicks and what is not. Optimize for Visits and CTRs will help you focus your precious energy on certain geographies, certain referring sources, certain keywords, certain digital activities and optimize to get higher clicks. A very good thing in stage one.

Now that people are showing up, we are ready to see what content they are consuming and how well/badly our welcome pages are doing. Focus on Bounce Rates ("I came, I puked, I left!") to help you optimize your landing pages and the sources driving traffic to those pages. Calls to action, text, graphics, offers, bids, ad text, targeting and more. Your job is to get in front of the right person, get them to the right page, and entice them to stay.

In stage two also focus on Pages per Visit, or Page Depth, (don't use time on site, it is problematic) as in the sample table above. This will help you optimize both for mobile and desktop experiences.

It is time to make some money in stage three. (See what I mean by making tough choices? Obsessing about making money first will cause your company to make the wrong choices initially. Just make sure you are not losing money, then obsess about it only in stage three.) For B2B companies Macro Outcome Rate is related to lead generation, for B2C it is often the e-commerce Conversion Rate. Additionally in stage three focus on Page Value, with it you are not only optimizing for content consumption (stage two) you are also optimizing for which content most creates revenue. Then zero in on that content and people/teams inside the company that create that content.

Your business is now humming on all three of the initial key things you need to do for acquisition, behaviorand outcome. In stage four become an insane fanatic about extracting the highest possible value you can from every dollar you are spending on marketing and advertising. Focus on optimizing your Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

This will not only reduce cost, if you do it right, it will force your company to invest more in activities that improve shareholder value and kill the shiny objects that our management teams chase due to advice from "marketing gurus." This effort is so important that I want you to focus on it singularly (unlike all other stages).

Stage five, as in the case of our digital marketing ladder of success, calls for stepping up our level of sophistication. Focus on cart and checkout abandonment rate (don't combine the two). Go buy a simple A/B testing tool (Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely), go crazy optimizing every little thing to take money from the people who want to give it to you! It is also time to become more sophisticated about identifying the value of your marketing spend, focus on the Assisted Conversions metric (you'll find it in the Multi-Channel Funnels report). Make decisions based on last click conversions delivered AND the assisted conversions. Don't worry about attribution modeling yet. Just focus on the last column in that report, then optimize your campaign targeting, content and success measures.

We've nailed down what we are doing on our owned platforms, time to focus on our rented platforms. You are working very hard by this stage on Facebook, YouTube etc, stay away from awful metrics like Views, Likes, etc. So, in stage six, obsess about Conversation Rate and Amplification, two of my four best social media metrics ever.

The above metrics will force your company to use social for what social is really good at. Force them to execute my recommendation for greatest social media strategy: 1. Entertain Me 2. Inform Me. 3. Provide Utility.

Stage seven where you start to focus on the metric that differentiates losers from winners: Economic Value. We focus on all 100% of our visitors (not just the one or two percent that will convert), we will focus on all of the See-Think-Do-Coddle audience consideration stages. The surest way to do that is if we identify the micro-outcomes and the economic value each outcome adds to our business. This is so amazing because it will force your company to focus on what makes money now, what will make money 90 days from now and 9 months from now!

None of the above was really hard. Stage eight is hard! We are going to obsess about Profitability. Not just the fake "ROI" number in many digital analytics tool, but true profitability. At the very minimum, for a dimension you care about like campaign… Profitability = Revenue generated – campaign cost – cost of goods sold. You can add other costs if you have access to them.

Profitability is one of the main reasons I'm so excited about cost data upload into Google Analytics. Now you can measure what the actual amount of money each campaign/activity delivers to your business. You can do it for Bing, email, AOL ads, social, even SEO! You can finally see that the Conversion rate for Yahoo! ads is 10%, the Average Order Value is $200, compare it to Google ads conversion rate of 4% and Average Order Value of $100, and notice that the Profit per Order from Yahoo! is -$15 and for Google it is $163. #omg

Stage eight also includes improving the sophistication of analyzing the offline impact of our online activities.Multi-channel measurement and optimization. It is a long hard slog, but by the time you get to stage eight, you are ready, your company is ready, you are going to get so rich!

The last stage, stage nine, is also the most strategic and deadly awesome: Optimizing for customer lifetime value.

Asking you to wait until stage nine for LTV is like saying don't believe in Jesus until time x. It seems silly. It seems insane. The sad reality is that it takes a lot (from a data, people, process perspective) to be ready to optimize for LTV. But by this stage you've put all your ducks in the proper order, you've done your multi-channel optimization (and more critically data integrations required between your online and offline sources), you have moved away from considering cookies to be customers to changing your entire Google Analytics existence to focus on people (across devices, channels, online and offline). Now you are ready for LTV. And you are going to do it without frustration and with a huge fast impact on your business. [For more guidance see the LTV post and download the lifetime value model.]

Bish. Bam. Boom! You are there. You've achieved nirvana! : )

Closing Thoughts.

It is hard to have the discipline to systematically get good at one thing at a time. But evolution works spectacularly well. That is what we need.

It seems crazy that you are a large company with tons of people and money. Gosh, you have 25 people just in your digital analytics team and a two million dollar a year adobe analytics contract. Still, for all those people prioritize one stage at a time (while other things can happen, they just won't be a corporate priority), and move your company forward one stage at a time.

It is hard to get nine women to make a baby in one month.

I wish you all the best in climbing the digital ladder of amazing success.

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you agree with the step-by-step approach? Would you change any stage in the digital marketing ladder? Perhaps do Email before SEO, or Social as stage one? How about the analytics ladder? Would you make different choices in the order of the metrics? Is there a metric I'm over-valuing or completely missing from the ladder? If you've been successful getting your company to be good at many things all at one time, what's your secret?

Please share your perspectives, critique, life lessons, and insights via comments below.

Thank you.

4 Tips for a Great First-Use Experience

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By Warren Croce

Published: May 6, 2013

“It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service.”

It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service. No matter how amazing your product’s capabilities are, if using it feels like a struggle the first time users try your product, you’ll have a hard time wooing them back.

What Is First Use?

Some people interpret first use very literally—meaning the experience starts the first time a person uses a system. While that’s certainly true, there’s more to it. In my view, first use starts with a user’s initial introduction to a product or service, continues as the user learns about what the product offers and signs up for an account or downloads the product, and concludes with the user’s actually using it for the first time. Your brand and how you want people to perceive it is also part of first use. For example, walking into an Apple Store is part of a first-use experience. If it weren’t, Apple could sell products off the back of a truck and save a bunch of money.

Why Is First Use Important?

“Your customers must be able to get up and running quickly and easily.”

The success of any product depends upon many things, but these three factors play pivotal roles:

1. Potential customers must understand what you are selling and why it’s worth their time and money.
2. Your customers must be able to get up and running quickly and easily.
3. You must deliver sustained value if your business is going to last.

I know this is basic stuff, but these factors build upon each other: Miss #1 and you can’t get to #2—never mind having the good fortune to be in a position to deliver #3. That’s why I like to think of first use as the first time a potential customer encounters your business.

Consider these four tips when crafting your first-use experience:

1. Be very clear about what it is that you are selling and why people would want it.
2. Make it drop-dead easy to sign up—or better yet, make signup an integral part of first use.
3. Incorporate step-by-step guidance, videos, and tips into the user interface.
4. Do usability testing.

Tip 1: Be very clear about what it is that you are selling and why people would want it.

“If, after looking at your Web site or marketing collateral for 5 to 10 seconds, a potential customer can’t repeat back to you what it is that you offer, there’s a problem.”

If, after looking at your Web site or marketing collateral for 5 to 10 seconds, a potential customer can’t repeat back to you what it is that you offer, there’s a problem. I often use Five Second Test to try out various homepage designs. It’s easy to run a study: You upload some screenshots and add a couple of questions that you want to ask users. Each user has five seconds to review your page and answer the questions. Then you get a nice little report at the end. It’s cheap, and it’s low overhead. You could do it today.

If you are still struggling with your design after a number of iterations, you might want to do the exercise shown in Figure 1, from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Figure 1—“Template for a Product Vision”

My product or service is:

For [target customer]

Who [statement of need or opportunity]

The [product name] is a [product category]

That [key benefit, compelling reason to buy]

Unlike [primary competitive alternative]

Our Product [statement of primary differentiation]

Forget jargon-laden mission statements. Take just a few seconds to state these parameters clearly and concisely, and you’ll be in good shape.

Tip 2: Make it drop-dead easy to sign up—or better yet, make signup an integral part of first use.

“The most engaging sign-up experiences are those during which users are actually getting something done, as opposed to doing busy work—that is, filling out a form.”

The most engaging sign-up experiences are those during which users are actually getting something done, as opposed to doing busy work—that is, filling out a form. There are many great examples, but here are a couple that stand out for me: Mindmeister lets users try a live demo and actually create something, then sign up afterward. Letting people use your product first is an effective strategy because, once users have invested their time, they can see your product’s value, and you’ve pretty much got them hooked. The same goes for Gliffy, where users start by creating a diagram. Only when they click Save does the site request their sign-up information.

There are some good resources that provide guidelines you can follow when creating your sign-up form. I recommend your reading Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. It’s a quick and easy read, and you’ll get practical advice for improving your sign-up form.

One guideline that I’d like to stress: please don’t ask for any information you don’t really need. The goal is to close the deal, not gather demographic information. You can ask for that later if you really must.

Another piece of advice I’d like to offer relates to the layout of your sign-up form: If there are only a few fields—which means you have a nice, concise form, way to go!—place labels above the fields instead of at their left. This is cleaner visually, and users can easily scan the form. Placing labels within fields is becoming more prevalent and may work okay if a sign-up form is very short and the label/value pairs are familiar—as for name, email address, and password. However, because a field’s label disappears once a user clicks the field and the field is in focus, I advise against taking this approach for longer forms.

Finally, your email confirmation message should do the following:

1. Reassure users that they’ve been successful.
2. Give users a place to go if they have questions.
3. Give users a clear call to action—Get started now! or some such.

Tip 3: Incorporate step-by-step guidance, videos, and tips into the user interface.

“One technique for getting users started is to bring them into a workflow right after they’ve completed signup.”

Okay, so you’ve hooked your fish. What you don’t want to do at this point is dump users into your product and leave them feeling like Alice in Wonderland. One technique for getting users started is to bring them into a workflow right after they’ve completed signup. Mint.com provides a good example of this approach, as shown in Figure 2. The Let’s get startedpage is the first thing users see after clicking Sign Up. There’s nothing left to the imagination here. Users won’t be falling into any rabbit holes. They can follow the three steps in this wizard to add an account. Plain and simple. What I like about this design in particular is that, if a user closes this window, the same three steps are behind it on the Welcome screen, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2—Mint.com’s Let’s get started wizard

Figure 3—Mint.com’s Three easy steps on the welcome page

Another approach is to provide a getting-started video of some sort. Asana displays the video shown in Figure 4 immediately after a user has successfully signed up. Most important, they let users know that watching the video is going to take only 2 minutes out of their life—and it will probably save them a bunch of time in the long run.

Figure 4—Asana’s Learn how in 2 minutes video

Lastly, providing tips to help users get oriented with a user interface is a nice, warm, and fuzzy technique that I like to employ. Docracy does a nice job of incorporating tips into their design, as shown in Figure 5. The tips work well visually, and users can either continue moving on to the next tip or click the close box to stop viewing them.

Figure 5—Tips on Docracy

The main questions to address when designing tips are: How long do the tips stick around? Once a user dismisses them, are they gone forever? Is there some way to bring them back? Do they stop appearing after a certain number of visits? There are all things to consider.

Tip 4: Do usability testing.

“Because your product is new to participants in usability studies, they are precisely the right people to give you first-use feedback.”

I could write a whole article just on usability testing, so I’ll focus on just a few basics and explain why doing usability testing helps first use.

When I conducted my first usability study in 1999, it involved two-way mirrors and lots of machinery. Participants had to take time out of their day to come to our lab for a study. Of course, there are advantages to having participants sitting next to you, and I sometimes still do face-to-face studies, but overall, lab studies are not a lightweight approach. These days, we usually want to move quickly: test, iterate a design, and test again.

For usability testing, the main considerations are

1. in person or remote
2. moderated or unmoderated

Over the years, I have become a big fan of remote usability testing. There are now powerful, but inexpensive online tools that make the job easier. (I’ll talk about those in a minute.)

Regarding whether to moderate test sessions, here’s my advice: If you need data about why users are doing something and you want to get into their head, do a moderated study. You’ll be able to inquire about what they’re doing and why.

On the other hand, if the kind of data you need is more like Did users find the link within x seconds? doing an unmoderated study will probably be sufficient. You still have the opportunity for inquiry through questionnaires. There’s just no back-and-forth dialogue.

There is quite a range of tools out there, but here are my favorites:

• For remote, moderated usability testing—I use WebEx or GoToMeeting. Their main benefit is that you have a way to share your screen and can give the participant control of it. The moderator and participant can converse while the participant performs the tasks on the shared screen. Works like a charm.
• For remote, unmoderated usability testing—I have used UserZoom, which is a very robust tool, but at the expensive end of the pricing spectrum; and TryMyUI, which is at the cheaper end. I used TryMyUI recently to test a service that I launched, calledPortfolioSpring. Within a half hour, I had a study set up. Within two hours, I had feedback from six participants that was invaluable to me.

I recommend starting small with a tool like TryMyUI, then moving up to more robust tools as your needs change. One thing to keep in mind regarding some of the cheaper tools: participants probably won’t belong to your targeted user group. So, if your goal is to get feedback only from hipsters, aged 25 to 32, who are living in Brooklyn and working in a non-profit, you’ll probably have to upgrade to a more full-featured system.

So, why is usability testing important to designing first-use experiences? In general, doing usability testing gets you and your team out of your own heads for a while. You may or may not like what you learn, but you’ll get to see your design from someone else’s perspective—someone who doesn’t live your product day to day, who can offer a fresh point of view, and can tell you whether what you’re selling makes sense. Because your product is new to participants in usability studies, they are precisely the right people to give you first-use feedback.

In Summary

What I love about designing for first use is that it’s a focused design problem. Solving this problem is all about clearly communicating your product’s value, getting people to buy into it, and making them feel comfortable when they enter your world. I hope these tips have been helpful. They are just a few of the things you should consider when designing for first use, but can help you greatly in getting your team laser focused on creating a great experience.

Topic: Usability | User Experience (UX)