Improve Lead Generation, Conversions, and Retention With Gated Content – | EP. #79

On this 79th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host, and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff speaks on gated content marketing and how it can be leveraged in a new way to propel lead generation, maximize conversions, and build on client retention. Find out how the “old” ways of doing gated content are being transformed to convert in today’s market using traditional principles.

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Improve Lead Generation, Conversions, and Retention With Gated Content

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Andrew Maff

As a marketing expert with over 15 years of experience in e-commerce, Andrew Maffettone (Maff) has not only owned and managed multiple marketing companies in the e-commerce space but has also worked in-house at multiple online selling companies, driving brands to new heights.

With his knowledge of marketing and business strategy, love for staying ahead of the curve, and ability to execute effective marketing solutions, he created BlueTuskr, a team of specialized experts dedicated to the growth and success of e-commerce sellers.

Transcript: 

00:00

If you can flag reviews and hope Google will take them down. But by hosting a third-party review on your website that you don't have control over, it's actually giving people a little bit more social proof, and it's giving them more security about the purchase that they're helping. Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel from MaxPro. Hi, I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're the Love and Pebble. Hi 

00:26

this is Lopa Van Der Merch from RASA you're listening to, and you're listening, and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.

00:38

Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello, I'm

00:58

your host, Andrew Maff Stone. And today I'm going to be talking about the many many things that you can use as gated content. So yesterday, obviously, I went over a lot of things on how to create content and how to basically take a video and make it last for weeks on end. And then obviously, if you're growing this content, the next goal should be to start to build that lead list or your sales, and the most important thing, the second most important KPI is emails, you'll hear me say that a lot. So what I wanted to do is kind of go over a list of gated content that I've done over the years, mainly because there are so many times where even I'll sit down and I'll go, man, I've done all this gated content, but I can't think about what to do for so and so. And it is just daunting. So I always forget stuff. I've definitely worked with people before where they're like, I can't think of what to set up for gated content. And so I'm gonna go over some things that are very common, I'm gonna go over some things that are a little bit different. And I will try to go through the level of difficulty of actually getting them done as well, too. So the first one I wanted to mention was doing a calculator or a quiz. So this is more interactive gated content, right? So it kind of requires someone to interact with set data content in order to get their email. Then we've all done the calculators we have done the quizzes, like honestly, then you've probably come across the Disney Princess one on Facebook, where they asked me what Disney Princess you are. So I know I'm an Ariel. So they've done those have done amazing. It depends on who your clientele is. So the calculators work really well. If you're working with E-commerce sellers who don't know what the lifetime value of, their customers is, and you just create a cow calculator that they give you an email, and then they fill it out. And obviously, it works that way. Quizzes are always fun. It's interesting because you kind of want to go through their of like if you're depending on obviously, who you're targeting. If you're trying to find anyone with a website, and you do a quiz of you know, find out if your website is user-friendly or not. And they just answer a bunch of questions, obviously, give us your email, and we'll send you the results. There's your data content. The second thing I wanted to mention, so this is one I did a long time ago, and it's one of the most successful I've ever had. And it was very easy to do. What I did is I created a just basically a Google spreadsheet. So it was life so that everyone could as they accessed it, I was constantly updating it for them. And what I did was basically a live calendar. At this time I was helping an agency, they were targeting e-commerce sellers. And so what I did is I created a calendar of every e-commerce conference that was coming up, along with every webinar that I got, you know, sent for whatever email because those happen all the time. And I would sift through and make sure they weren't crap and make sure that they actually belonged on there. I had a VA helping me out who just be like, hey, so and so's date was just announced to them and add it to the calendar, that kind of thing. It was a great piece of of gated content, I got a ton of emails out of it, and the conversion rate was amazing. And mainly because the thing that everyone liked about it was this isn't something that I'm going to download and then it's going get old. It's something that I'm going to download and it's going to constantly be updated. And if I'm like hey, I need to go to a conference in July, or hey, I'm gonna be in XL place in November. Let me see if there's something going on. It was a great piece. I loved it, and I've definitely started to try to leverage it more often. The next one, similar to the live things will live lists. One that actually got me a couple of weeks ago was a live social media Image Size list. I'm always forgetting what the sizes are my designers remember them. I don't remember them ever. So when I saw like, Oh, this one's a Google Doc, and it's constantly being updated. So if Instagram does something that again, I can obviously see what I thought was a great idea. But a live document done through Google is very easy to do. It's very simple and people love them because they don't have to like go back and redownload it or updated 2020 And that kind of thing. So a great way to actually pull some more emails. What else does that have? There's some. There are some that are boring newsletters. Obviously, if you're doing a newsletter, you know, sign up, and subscribe for our newsletter. The problem isn't newsletters like that, unless you have an amazing newsletter that people are talking about, and they came to your site, looking for your newsletter, it's very hard to get someone to do that. Depending on your industry, for some e-commerce sellers, it's a lot easier. But if you're a SaaS company, or if you are, you know, selling some kind of service, it's a little bit more difficult because newsletters can be so spammy and kind of daunting. The only way I've seen those work the most is typically at minimum, a weekly newsletter. At most daily. I've seen the daily ones work very, very well to keep them short. Keep it sweet, I mean, your morning bro, you click you have daily carnage you have obviously morning brews, marketing, brew, retail brew, and other brews. There are a ton of great daily newsletters that work very well, that can obviously help with gated content. If you have the ability to create a daily newsletter, it's not as easy as it sounds, I would say is probably one of the more difficult things on here. Another one I had was chatbots. So chatbots are interesting. I will definitely get into those ones of these episodes, they can be more difficult to set up depending on your expertise in it, obviously. But once they're set up, they're interesting, Facebook's got a lot of rules with it. It's still such a relatively newer technology that, you know, sometimes you can do this, and sometimes you can't and Facebook will tell you like oh, you can't do that. And it becomes a pain. Yes. But essentially, I had another one a while ago where we set one up, it was a nice chap, and I've walked through a great couple of different flows. Obviously, if they became a lead, that was even better. But one of the things that we did with that was the Chatbot would then broadcast daily, some kind of big news, we were using it kind of as a news outlet, and Facebook was a little cranky with us constantly sending out messages every day. So became a little bit more of a pain. And you could really say the same thing with SMS. So texting people, at a certain point, does become a little daunting to over to overshare. And it can become spammy. But if it's executed correctly, they work great. Ones, I hate ebooks, white papers, digital books, that kind of crap. I have downloaded more ebooks and white papers in my life than I care to share. And I've probably read a 10th of them. A lot of times like, oh, that sounds like a good read, but I'll never read it. They also if they're done correctly, specifically ebooks or white papers need to be relatively lengthy, and they need to have some nice design to them. So even if you're actually going through and you're spending the time writing and you're spending the time designing it, it can be a bigger workload. But I've actually found that as time goes on ebooks, and white papers have been so overplayed that not many people want to download them anymore. If anything, they're more to me, they're they work better if you just create an ebook and just send it out. So you got an email from a different piece of data content. And then several weeks later, you just go, Hey, we wrote this ebook, we thought you'd like it. For a piece of gated content, I'm finding them more and more to be a little bit more difficult. But that one is what it is. One-page PDFs, so sometimes like infographics, things like that can do really well. I think the best part about those is that it's just a one-pager, it's simple. Download it, read it, and you get the information you want. Maybe it's something that someone wants to print and hang in their office or something depending on what it is. But I find that the shorter form content when it comes to something like a PDF, where as opposed to an e-book, or white paper is much, much better for someone to consume. So it's kind of don't waste someone's time provide as much value as you possibly can. And that kind of stuff will get downloaded a lot better than I've found with white papers and ebooks.

09:11

Another one that I've started to do more recently, so social groups, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Hey, join our group, it's an exclusive group, blah, blah, everyone kind of has one at this point. And they can get a little overwhelming as well because you've ended up in so many different groups. And you're just like, I don't know what group this is anymore. There are too many people, or there are too many groups. Well, this one's different. Essentially what I've started to do, as opposed to just doing a different platform. So what I tried to do now is a Slack community. It's there's only a handful of them right now. And I'm actually pretty shocked at how good it's doing so far. I didn't expect it to do that. Well because I even though Slack has God knows how many millions of users. I wasn't sure of myself. You know, not everyone has Slack, some people at Microsoft Teams or something like that. But what I essentially did was I created this Slack community where you can't get in unless you apply it goes through an application process. And then you do allow someone in and then once they're in, there are further levels to it. So if you're not familiar with Slack, there are channels, and you can actually make some of those channels private. So we'll actually bring a community into one place, but then small segments of those people will actually create a private channel. And those people will just keep their conversations there. So we've done it before, with several different industries. And it's worked very well, it is probably one of the easier things to do on here, simply because you're really just creating a Slack channel. Sorry, creating a Slack workspace, and creating some kind of landing page for it. Creating however, you're doing the gated content to get them to set a landing page. And then you're really just putting everyone into a Slack workspace. Yes, you need to keep a conversation going, Yes, you need to set up the channels, and things like that. But outside of that, it's actually pretty easy to do. And then you have like the coaching guys, since the last one that I was able to think up for this episode. So the short one on one sessions, stuff like that, obviously, you can do other things like oh, buy my book, and all you have to do is pay for shipping to me that still kind of bulky. But the one-on-one sessions I've seen work very well before to where it's you know what it works from what I've seen much better with someone who is teaching. So if it's someone who's you know, it's a marketing agency teaching other marketers or something like that, but they'll do sign up and I'll do a 25-minute, you know, a quick session with you. And we'll walk through your Facebook ads, and we'll walk through email campaigns or anything like that. It can also work really well with SAS companies, it's a great way for them for lead generation to kind of put them into a sales funnel. But I've seen those work really well too. And that is my list. So today, of course, I'm trying to feature a tool every week. And so this week, I'm going to feature Outgrow outgrow is really great with the gated calculators and quizzes and things like that, that I mentioned in the beginning, there's super easy to use if you've ever tried to make a quiz yourself through type form. Or if you've ever tried to create a calculator yourself through Google Sheets, it is a nightmare. Unfortunately, years ago, we didn't try to do that and it was not worth it. But Outgrow has some great stuff, you just embed it into your website, or you can send them to a landing page, things like that. But outgrowing is definitely something that I would suggest looking into. If you're looking for new data content ideas, those are my favorite. Now, I know a lot of e-commerce sellers are a little bit more adamant about focusing on product reviews or site reviews on their actual websites and don't really care about Google reviews. So if you don't know and timeout I'm kind of referring to it when you search your own business name. And usually up on the right-hand side, you'll see your listing for Google, and it will have your reviews there. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of those because I see a lot of people kind of steer away from them. Now with E-commerce, there are two different types of reviews. So you're gonna have those, and you're gonna have the ones that live on your site. But there's also a weird third one that kind of ties into the Google one. And that is the Google customer reviews. So this is something that you can actually submit for your store to go through. And what will happen is, after checkout these sellers or I'm sorry, these purchasers are going to get a review request from Google. It's not from you, they basically randomly select people to leave a review based on the product that they purchased or how the site was and things like that. And it's a Google Trusted review. So maybe sometimes you'll see it on e-commerce sites, usually at the bottom left or in the bottom right, wherever you decide to put it. There's a little hover-looking thing that is a Google Trusted review. And those are reviews that came through Google's platform about your website. So it's a little bit more social proof for other people to see that there's a third party out there that is allowing other reviews. But between those types of reviews, there are several benefits to all of them. The biggest one is obviously on the SEO side. So Google has made it very clear that it indexes every piece of content on your website, that includes comments that also include blog comments, but it includes reviews or questions that people are leaving. So the more reviews and the more questions that you're getting are actually going to improve the SEO side. Now, looking at my notes here to make sure I don't miss anything. There's also a user experience benefit behind it as well as the additional reviews and additional stars. So as the stars start to fill up, so if you're connecting your reviews to Google Shopping, or if you're ideally gaining those Google reviews, through the Google My Business, then you're actually gaining more and more credibility, you're actually gaining a little bit of an extra real estate in each area that's going to showcase your business that much more. Now, the real benefit here besides the SEO side and the visual side is the social proof side, people always want to make sure that they're not going to be the first ones to try something. That's why when you first launch a business, or you first launch a product, especially on Amazon, it's nearly impossible to get it going, it takes a very long time, and you have to spend a lot of money, but it kind of has the snowball effect. And that's really because obviously, over time, your pages will improve. But also your reviews will improve and your social proof will improve, which will cause it to snowball. So whether you're using software like a yacht Po, who will be the one that I decided to mention today, they tie in very well with Google Shopping as well as the, like the search. So if you search your brand name on Google, and you actually go to one of the organic searches, and you see the little star snippet underneath your meta title, that is something that can be connected through Yabo, and things like that, of course, they're going to set up those automated reviews. But those Google reviews are something that's completely different. Because the way the Google reviews are helping is they're not you controlling the reviews, you can respond to reviews, you can flag reviews and hope Google will take them down. But by hosting a third-party review on your website that you don't have control over, it's actually giving people a little bit more social proof. And it's giving them more security about the purchase that they're helping. And Google does have some numbers out there about the improvement of a conversion rate for having it I don't know off the top of my head, but I would encourage you to go look it up. If I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes too.

16:35

I'm probably gonna get a little heated, because this one, this one, because we have so I'm talking about the like super, hyper, ultra mega targeted keyword search query funneling that agencies brag about. So obviously, as an agency, I will say that we do this. And I will say that we don't have a fancy term for it, we just call it our shopping campaign strategy. But I've heard some ridiculous names for this, which honestly, is the correct way to run Google Shopping ads. So you don't really need to give it a fancy name. But I digress. So here's how it's done. Right. So you're going to start with a high-priority campaign and a medium-priority campaign, then you're going to take a product line that is very similar to itself. So you're not going to question the search terms that are showing up. So again, I film a bunch of these at once, so my dog has just been laying there the whole time. So we're gonna do dog toys. So I have a golden retriever, specific dog toys that I'm running, right? So I'm going to have a high priority and a medium priority campaign with all my specific golden retriever dog toys. So that when an ad shows or I'm sorry when a search term shows up, I'll know these are all my golden retriever dog toys, if they're not searching, something like that, it's not a keyword I want. So you have your high priority, medium priority, high priorities, gotta have a decent budget doesn't have to be massive, but you're gonna get a lot of broad stuff, you need a lot of crap in there, this is where you're doing your discovery, you're searching your medium priority, you're gonna have a little bit more success, you're gonna have those bids a little bit higher, and you're gonna want to give some room on that budget. So basically, what's going to happen is, let's say we're doing branded keywords. So Andrews dog toys probably aren't good, because it's kind of a bad brand name. But let's, let's say it's BlueTuskr. Right, so we BlueTuskr Your golden retriever dog toys. So someone searches blue Tasker dog toy, and it's going to show up in my high priority, I'm going to negate that keyword, which will cause it to drop down into the medium priority. So now it's going to show up in the medium priority. So next time someone searches BlueTuskr dog toys, it's going to show up in the medium priority, I have that bid up higher now. So I'm going to start to own that keyword. As those start to do well, you're going to constantly just negate things out of the high priority, this is why your high priority, you're going to want to keep that budget relatively low. And you're going to keep those bids relatively low because it can definitely get out of hand. And once you get it to running really, really well. You're going to want to keep that CPC as low as possible and the highest priority because you're basically going to take all the good stuff and move it down into the medium priority. So now by then all of your branded keywords are in the medium priority. If all of your top-performing keywords are in the medium priority, then you're going to replicate the same concept. So if it starts to do well, in the medium priority, let's say you have some really better performing branded keywords and you have some really better performing just more general keywords and they do really well. You're gonna negate those and you're going to drop those into a low priority. So usually what I'll do is I'll create a high and a medium priority and let it bake, get my data, and if you've ever done this before, and then after I've gotten my data, I'm ready for it. Then I will create my low priority. That one big budget big bids own these keywords. So this is basically that funnel concept that these agencies brag about. So we've basically gotten this keyword down as low priority, you've jacked it up. And now you'll see over time, in that low-priority campaign, that's the only keyword that's in there, it's the only thing you're bidding on. So that's how they specifically bid on these ones, individual keywords. And as you just start to shove more and more keywords down into the funnel, it works down there. So obviously, the only other side of this is you need to make sure that you're always adjusting your daytime, state audience device, all that stuff, you need to make sure that you're adjusting those bids. I like to do that on close to a monthly basis, it kind of depends on the size of the account. If I'm getting a ton of data, often, and we're spending a good amount of money, I'll usually do it every couple of weeks, but usually slightly newer ones, where they're spending like maybe 10k or less ish, a month. I'll do it just once a month. That's all I wanted to talk about today. And then I'm going to feed your Google Merchant Center, just because I know it's kind of a tool. To me, it still counts as a tool, a lot of shopping ads. People say that, Oh, they don't work. Well, for me, that's not true. They work well, for all e-commerce sellers, you just have to really narrow down the keyword that you're going after. But the one thing I've learned is that a lot of people will just shove their stuff into Merchant Center and let it go straight to ads. And they don't optimize it at all. So you need to go into Merchant Center and set up reviews, set up promotions, if you can, if you offer free shipping, make sure that that's mentioned, but make sure that you optimize everything you can in Merchant Center.

21:38

So Google search ads to drive more leads and shoppers. So obviously, I cater more to e-commerce. So leads in this case could be driving them to some kind of gated content. So maybe you didn't ebook which yes, you can for E-commerce, which I'll get to in another time. But so we're gonna go right into this. First thing, I always buy branded search terms absolutely bid on them, I don't care if none of your competitors are bidding on you, you always don't want to be surprised to find out that a competitor all of a suddenly started bidding on you, you're going to pay arguably nothing per click, you're going to get a ridiculous conversion rate, the amount of money you're going to spend to pay for someone else to click on your own brand name is totally worth it, it's fine. So run a campaign for your own branded keywords. So always test right even your branded stuff. So even when you do different ad groups, you have different keywords, you have a different copy that you're using different descriptions, different titles, all that fun stuff, different landing page, test all that stuff. So in what is called drafts and experiments, set that up, always run a B test, set it up so that once one is determined, let it run, I probably set up a test on a usually about a weekly basis. Maybe every other week, I'll test something out. And I'll just go screw it, I'm testing this one and then one will win. And then I'll test that one again. And it's just, it's constant improvement. So create ad groups with relevant keywords in the copy being used. So if you have a bunch of different things that you're going after, you got to think of the variations of that keyword and then make ad groups for that so that you can have a specific copy for that. So as usual, my dogs here, so Golden Retriever puppy toys, versus golden retriever squeak toys, I might want to have an ad group for more general puppy toys, and then an ad group for more general squeak-related toys and make sure that I use the word squeak in there. So breaking ad groups into I have my notes here. So bear with me break breaking out of groups into discovery keywords with Brian Okay, so So we created those ad groups, right, so let's do golden retriever squeak toys. And what I'm going to do is those keywords that are kind of broader, I'm going to keep that in their own separate ad group and have a broad and phrase I like to keep the broad and phrase together. It's who I am. Once I see that one of those specific search terms keeps showing up and is doing well. I will negate it in that broad and phrase match ad group, bring it into an exact match, run it there, and Jack that bit up. If it starts to do really well. I'll make my own campaign put that ad group into that campaign of like success ad groups and Jack that budget up so that I have room to run. Because the broad and phrase you'll usually want to limit just in case you get a bunch of crap in there. Use everything you have available every friggin thing in there I go in there sometimes I go Why didn't you use this there are ad extensions. So you know call outs and call extensions and any other option you can have all the E-commerce sellers you now have the option to put like your price into the search. There's like a little box that comes under the description with some of your products and I think it shows like three or four and it can actually swipe and you can actually put your price in there now So the responsive and dynamic ads, the dynamic ones work similarly to shopping. So you kind of wish shopping, you give them a product. And then keywords just kind of show up and you indicate them. In dynamic ads for search terms, that same thing, you give them a URL, and it shows for what it thinks you need to show for and then you start to negate them. So it's the same process, test it, there's been a lot of times I've had great success with those. And there have been times where I haven't the responsive ones are great, I always have success with those which is basically you write like 15 different titles and 15 different descriptions. And Google just kind of picks whichever one it thinks is going to work the best based on whatever you're targeting, then. So Oh, okay. So specifically for e-commerce sellers, use your shopping data that you have your shop your shopping ads, so you'll run your shopping ads, right, you're always going to narrow it down to whichever keywords are doing the best. Once you figure out those keywords that are probably in your low-priority campaign, take those keywords, put them into a search group, a search ad, and create a search ad with that so that you're owning the first spot on the shopping ads, but then you're also owning the first shot as per spot for the search ads. If you're only the first spot for shopping ads, a lot of people like why do I need to also do it for search ads, not everyone uses those. Some people aren't as visual as you would think you'll actually see. And I've had this happen a lot where the search ads will actually end up doing better than the shopping ads. If you do that, and you just want to own as much real estate as you can then bidding. I prefer to use CPC enhanced, so where they fluctuate the bid based on what they think is going to work well. I'm not a fan of conversion, targeting or Target CPA, or anything like that. I don't like any of those. I don't have enough control, I check my search and my shopping ads on a daily basis and go through and clean out any keywords that I don't want. So when I'm that controlled of what I'm doing, I don't need Google's help with the conversion thing. And I also find that I've not really had much success with it doesn't mean you won't, you can obviously try it. But I've had more success with CPC than the last. So the last thing I wanted to mention was search ads work for everyone I've heard so many times people will tell me like, oh, search ads don't work for us. We only work well with shopping ads or something like that you're setting you're not testing enough, you're not setting the right landing page, and you're not thinking about where that person is when they're shopping. So my suggestion would be you definitely need to continue driving search ads until you can figure it out. So obviously, I want a feature tool. Today I'm going to feed your Uber suggestions. So shout out to Neil Patel for that I love Uber Suggest is amazing. Because you can just plug in your competitor's URL and get all the keywords that they rank for all their top pages, all that kind of stuff. Nine times out of 10 I'll just take that URL, drop it in Uber suggestions and go give me all those keywords and I'll just go run a bit against them but that is all I have for today. So rate reviews, subscribe, and all that fun stuff. I'll see you tomorrow.

28:09

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show.  So head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.