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KickoffLabs Blog:

Your Marketing Questions… Answered by the Pros [Pt 2]


By Josh Ledgard

Nov 17th, 2014


Our chat series is a chance for us to share the knowledge we’ve acquired running KickoffLabs and watching what works for our customers and their successful campaigns.

These are all questions that have been submitted to us via our chat page and gives us a chance to be more interactive with our amazing audience.

Be sure to watch the video for a behind the scenes look at new KickoffLabs features!


Q1 – Differences between US focused landing pages and international? Are there any marketing differences that you are aware of?

For example; we tried to create landing pages for Russia, but received no conversions…

We get people all the time that ask “can you create landing pages in multiple languages”. YES, KickoffLabs lets you create landing pages in multiple languages, but that’s kind of the easy part.

There are however some things we recommend when you do that.

Let’s say you’ve got an ebook download and you have 2 landing pages in different languages;

  • Publish the pages to a separate domain each.
  • Market the pages to separate audiences.
  • Cross-link between the pages. Include a small link at the top so if somebody prefers the other language version, they can quickly switch.
  • The follow up email should be a separate campaign so you can address them specifically in their native language.

All that seems to make sense, but it’s amazing how many people miss those basic things first.

What if you already covered the basics?

There can be a lot of reasons why your landing page is not converting. We don’t think it’s specifically the language of the page. The biggest reason people typically don’t get conversions is not bringing the right traffic and understanding the subtle difference in the audience in that market.

There might be some communities where you are marketing your English landing pages, that work really well for getting people in. But if you don’t find those similar communities in other languages, then maybe the market doesn’t exist.

Culture shock

Of course, there are subtle cultural difference to take into account as well. Some cultures dislike filling out forms more than others. I mean take a look at this landing page from KFC in Japan…

KFC_-_www_kfc_co_jp_campaign_colonelsday_thanks3_index_html

Stuff is happening all over the page and there is no sign up form (only Facebook & Twitter share buttons), and yet it’s one of their highest performing campaigns.

“Different countries and cultures require different types of landing pages to convert.”

Get more specific

If you are getting a decent amount of traffic and you do believe the traffic is coming from the right keywords, on the right pages (and you have someone available that speaks the landing page language)… put up a chat widget!

Go to Olark or some other live website chat provider and install it onto the landing page.

When somebody visits the site, ask them in their native language “why aren’t you signing up to the page?”. Maybe there is some bad grammar, spelling, you’ll get all sorts of good feedback.

The simple fact is, if you don’t have someone that understands the country and culture you are targeting (and have an understanding of recent events), it’s going to be tough getting people to join.


Q2 – Best advice for creating a page just designed to capture corp network staff interest rather than conversions?

Just starting up with enterprise security solution & first product isn’t ready yet.

For people that have a really niche audience like this; solving a B2B (Business-to-Business) problem, you have to think about what kind of free education can you give away.

Capture interest

The first step is finding your audience. For the B2B space, we generally recommend a good mix of LinkedIn, communities where people talk about business or IT, cold-calling, and general networking.

Drive prospects to a basic landing page for your product that explains what it is and tries to get initial interest. Use this landing page for general advertising and marketing campaigns.

Market specifically to people in larger companies working in Mid to Junior level departments. They are the potential users of your solution and gatekeepers to the decision making senior level executives.

Close sales with free content

In the corporate space offering free training has an immense amount of value. If you’re willing to offer a little more sweat equity, you’re going to capture a lot of email addresses.

Let’s say you already have a product page, your pitch shouldn’t be to get them to sign up yet… you should be focused on getting people to sign up for a free educational webinar.

Do as we’ve done and set up a landing page that offers people the chance to fill in questions ahead of time. That’ll guarantee you have questions and can prepare in advance.

KickoffLabs_Live_Marketing_Chats_-_grow_kickofflabs_com_live

On the sharing side you can really exploit things by encouraging people to invite their team. You might get 3 or 4 people from the same department come to your webinar.

“Capture buyers interest by offering a free educational event.”

During the end of the webinar and in the follow up emails, is the opportune time to talk about your product being in pre-release and point people to the general signup landing page.


Q3 – What incentive can I provide for a free unlaunched mobile game?

Why would someone be interested in unlocking a character or something if they didn’t know the game yet? I could insert screenshots or a video of gameplay, but is that enough?

We’re seeing a lot more of this in the video game development space; where if somebody pre-orders a game, they get a code with their pre-order box, and can use that code to unlock a character.

This takes a lot of effort.

Unlocking a character is certainly something that works for pre-purchased games. But the reason they’re giving that much value is because people have actually put down money and not just signed up to be notified of a free unlaunched game.

Leverage something special and exclusive

If you’ve got an unreleased game, you’ve got the advantage of screenshots and video gameplay. You don’t need as much of an incentive when you are not asking someone to purchase.

“For free, don’t work on over-engineering the opt in bribe.”

Offer a simple incentive like: “Enter your email address and unlock our trailer for the game”. Especially in the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) space, there’s a lot of value in offering things that people perceive as cool and would want to tell their friends about.


Q4 – Do you have any special advice for website courses?

It’s the start of a beautiful friendship… Courses are a great way to offer the biggest bang for the buck, before people sign up.

Have a look at our “Landing Pages 107”, a free email course on landing page fundamentals that  teaching about the uses of landing pages, launching companies, calls-to-action, promotion, & more…

Landing_Pages_107_-_Join_this_free_email_course_to_learn_landing_page_fundamentals__-_www_landingpages107_com

And while we have a dedicated landing page for the course, we promote it on just about our entire site using an exit popup widget.

kickofflabs_exit_intent_popup_widget

“It’s 100% FREE is the value & Get the First Lesson Now is the instant gratification.”

As soon as somebody signs up, they get the link to the first video. They are also sent through our marketing conversion funnel and begin receiving the email course through a drip campaign.

We use the awesome Drip email marketing automation tool to trigger the sequence.

Prime attention

People get an immediate follow up email, which happens to have the highest open rate (about 45-55%) of any email in the drip campaign.

This goes to show that you have to make the first email experience really strong. Include BIG calls-to-action and tell people what it is you want them to do. Use this as a chance to throw in some branding of your own and send people back to other parts of your website.

The next 3 to 4 emails are also critical. Once you’re at about email 5 you’ll lose some people.

Timing is everything

We used to deliver our course over 30 days but found that open rates improved delivering the value closer together. People want the course for a reason, so just give them all the emails in a shorter amount of time upfront. We now deliver 1 email a day for 10 days.

Secondary attention

About halfway through the email drip sequence, we’ll lose another 40% of our audience and the open rates will drop to 20-30% for those last five emails.

You can really see the drive where it’ll spike at the first email, people will be engaged, then some people will unsubscribe. But the people who are hooked will keep reading your content!


Q5 – What are best practices for building and hosting a simple launch page with a form to indicate interest in either beta, job, or co-founder position?

People often find that they have so many business needs to startup, they try and cram 3 or 4 calls-to-action on the page…

… You need to pick which 1 is most important to you and have your main landing page dedicated just to that.

Always put your customers first

The most important page should be gathering signups for the beta. Focus the primary aspect on pitching the product and encouraging people to sign up. These are potentially the customers who are going to pay you, without them your business is non-existent.

No landing page yet? This is something you can easily do with KickoffLabs, it’s one of our bread-and-butter areas :)

Nail the pitch

Anybody who wants to work for you or with you, has got to be really interested in that problem. If you can clearly communicate the problem to your audience, you’ll do a better of communicating it to your potential team members.

“It always ends up better to pitch the problem, talk about your solution, and get interest from customers. If you do a great job at that, the rest will work itself out.”

Offer jobs to like-minded people

For job offers, we recommend a landing page that’s a secondary page off of the same domain.

Have a link below on the main page that says “Want to work with us? Go here”. If they are interested enough, they’ll click through to a second page which has more specifics about what you’re looking for and the job. You can then capture their information on that second page.

The best pitch for a co-founder

To be brutally honest, we haven’t heard of too many cases where people have found their co-founder by advertising it on their landing page or website. Most success stories have actually been more about networking. But you never know… you just might get lucky.

We’re not saying it CANNOT work, but rather believe the focus needs to be on pitching the business to potential customers.

The best pitch ever is “Hey, I’ve got 5,000 people signed up for this product. I just need to build it”! To a co-founder that means the hard part is done, you’ve already built an audience and have customers lined up.

Want to learn more on finding the right business co-founder? Have a look at Paul Graham’s, from Y Combinator, Startup FAQs here.


Q6 – What is the biggest bang for the buck in launching social media campaigns on a bootstrapped budget?

The quickest way is to set up campaign and landing pages yourself, using either KickoffLabs or another tool.

Hack and optimize for paid advertising

  • Retargeting. Track people that don’t sign up for your campaign right away with a tool like PerfectAudience or AdRoll. You can follow them around the internet and it’s a great way to market to people later. We see a huge return on a very small amount of money being spent on retargeting.
  • Social Ads. These tend to perform well because you can target a very strong niche. You can get specific in terms of the groups that people are a member of, their preferences, etc… it’s a great way to spend money on ads.
  • Google Ads. They work, it’s just that there are so many people buying these ads, it drives prices up and thus can get pretty expensive.
  • Native Ads. If your audience lives somewhere online, GO FIND THEM and advertise directly within that community. Buying ads direct from a community tends to be much cheaper than going through a display network, and also you can be a lot more targeted.

Assemble your current crowd

Include your current leads into the promotion. Make them feel special by offering a reward just for participating.

Even if you have a small # of current subscribers, you can’t ignore those people. These are potential ambassadors for your brand and you have to make every effort to turn them into that.

All contests are not created equal

You can get all the benefits of a great social contest without having to spend a lot of money. Contests don’t have to be expensive… they just have to be cool & worth sharing.

Don’t run a contest and just give away something like an iPad. The point is to give away something that is related to your specific audience. You’ll get more engagement from a higher quality audience by filtering out the people that just want to win an iPad.

Become a successful social contest master by learning about the Keys to Killer Online Contests.

Get a Viral Boost

We see, even outside of contests, 35% more leads for people that have the option enabled. And that’s without any added incentive, just making it easy to share after somebody signs up.

So if you want to make that $100 turn into $135 dollars worth of advertisements, make sure your campaigns have the sharing (and ideally some reward as part of the sharing).

BTW, each and every KickoffLabs page has this viral sharing option built-in

viral-boost

Not only that but you get the added bonus of generating personal referral links for each and every one of your signups!

Get into other people’s business

We’ve seen this with some Ecommerce sites lately, where they will partner up with 3 or 4 other Ecommerce sites. The goal with this is to educate each others audience about your potential products.

Even if your audience is smaller, grouping together a bunch of smaller audiences is going to amplify everybody’s impact.

Think about ways to:

  • co-promote with banner ads, in email newsletters, on product forums, on niche blogs…
  • co-present webinars, pdfs, educational guides, free content…
  • co-giveaway with social contests, prizes, coupons, discounts…

Find a way to grab an audience that’s not yours, but related to yours, and let them know about what you have.

Put in the work

Of course time is money, but sweat equity (putting in the work effort) will help you identify your audience online.

Take 10 of your current customers and just profile them. Go to their LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles, Facebook profiles, etc. Go to where they hang out online, find those communities and start engaging with those people online.

You can ask questions there, you can promote to them there, you can buy ads in those communities. Gain an understanding of your audience and go to the places where they hang out to drive them to your site.

Watch the video to see how KickoffLabs makes creating marketing campaigns super easy!


Send us your questions

We host a weekly chat series where we either tackle your most pressing marketing questions or give your landing page a well deserved tune-up, all free of charge! That’s one of our many ways of adding a ton of value to the word “FREE”.

Visit kickofflabs.com and save your spot for the next event!

Click here and register for the next event!{.btn.btn-primary.btn-lg}

We’d really like to see you there!

Josh Ledgard

Co-Founder of KickoffLabs

 

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