Produce Great Content, Every Time: A Useful 11-Point Framework

How many articles have you read about creating great content? Quite a few, hopefully…

Creating valuable to your readers content is one of the key components of effective content marketing.

But here’s the problem:

How do you combine the lessons from all those articles?

They all teach you something valuable, but consolidating all those useful techniques and tactics isn’t always easy. For example, you might read an article about simple but effective copywriting techniques.

You get excited, and then you focus on practicing those in the next few articles you publish. But writing a few articles isn’t enough to establish a habit.

Even if you truly understand how to apply the things you learned, you might not remember to do them in the future. That is, unless, you have a way that forces you to remember them. A list of them.

Every time you write an article, you should make sure that you apply as many of the items on the list as possible.

You should make your own list.

However, I thought I’d create this post to get you a solid start. I’ve put together a list of 11 points that your content should meet if you want it to be effective.

It doesn’t matter if your content is text, audio, or video—most of these points will still apply.

It also doesn’t matter what the content will be used for.

Great content is necessary not only for your blog and any guest posts you make but also for other channels such as social media.

Finally, before we get started, I know that checklists aren’t really fun, but they’re effective and efficient.

Create the list once (or take mine), and it will raise the quality of your content for years to come.

Since 70% of marketers create more content each year, small improvements based on a checklist in a single article can result in a big difference overall. 

1. The headline hooks my target reader

Think about where you spread your content after you publish it.

Social media is probably one of the first stops.

You also probably email your list.

Then forums, groups, and other communities.

All of those have one major thing in common:

Success depends on your headline.

Your headline isn’t the only factor, but it’s usually one of the main things that causes people to click or not click through to your post:

We already know that most social shares come from people who don’t even read past the headline.

Even if you have a great article, it won’t matter if no one sees it in the first place.

It starts with the headline. Obviously, it doesn’t end with the headline. If your content sucks, no one’s going to share it after they click through.

Back to the headline…

Writing a great headline isn’t easy. It takes knowledge and practice. I’ve written many posts about how you can write great headlines for different situations:

• The Formula for a Perfect Headline
• The Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Powerful Headlines
• Headline Writing 101

But remember what we’re doing here.

This isn’t the time to come up with a headline—you should have done that already.

This is a point in a checklist. It’s asking you to evaluate a headline, which is much easier.

I can tell you if a painting is good or not (for the most part), but I sure as heck can’t paint a great one myself. Judging is almost always easier than doing.

Here, you want to consider two main factors…

Factor #1 is always relevance: The first question you should ask yourself when judging a headline is: “Is this relevant from my audience’s point of view?”

Basically, this means that your headline should contain keywords related to your niche.

And not just any keywords, but one’s that your actual target audience will recognize and probably care about.

Obviously, I write a lot about marketing on Quick Sprout. If you look at my headlines, you’ll see a lot of the following words:

• traffic
• leads
• content
• sales
• SEO
• autoresponder

These are common keywords contained in keyword phrases that I might target with my content.

But they are also widely used terms that almost all of my readers recognize.

So, when they see one of my headlines, they see at least one of the concepts they are interested in, which gets them to read the entire headline.

A common mistake: It’s easy to forget the perspective of your readers. Just because you might know an advanced term for something doesn’t mean your readers will. If they see a headline but are not sure if it relates to their interests, most will pass on it.

Factor #2 is curiosity: Once they see a keyword that is related to their interests, most readers will take a look at the whole headline.

Afterwards, they decide if it’s worth reading or not.

Basically, it comes down to this question: “Does it look interesting?”

If the reader is curious enough, they have no choice but to click through. That’s when you know you have a good headline.

Here’s an exercise you can do…

Go to a major news site or blog in your niche. In my case, for the sake of an example, I went to Search Engine Land, a major SEO news site.

Ideally, you want to find a list of their current most popular content or at least their most recent content somewhere on the homepage.

Next, you’ll replace one of the titles with the title of your content.

To do this, right-click on one of the titles while in Chrome, and choose “inspect element.” This will create a little pop-up.

In the left side of the pop-up, double click the title text (among the HTML code), and type in your headline instead:

When you’re done, press enter and close the pop-up.

The change that you made (to the highlighted part in the picture above) will now show up on your screen:

Now, do your best to get in the mindset of the reader you’re trying to attract.

Ask yourself in which order you would click on these titles (if at all).

If you choose your own article last, you have a big problem.

If you choose it first, you likely have a great title.

Obviously, it’s hard to be unbiased. If possible, get a second opinion from a friend or any of your fans who’d be willing to help you in this way.

2. Introductions have one main purpose…

Can you guess it? The purpose of an introduction?

This is actually from copywriting.

To get to the purpose of your introduction, let’s start with your headline.

A headline has one goal: to get someone to read the first sentence.

The first sentence is to get them to read the second sentence, and so on.

The introduction, as a whole, has one main purpose:

To get your reader to read the rest of the article (specifically the first subheading/section).

So, how do you do this?

Again, there are many ways, but here we’re just judging what you already have.

The key factor is whether your introduction is easy to read.

Readers should be able to feel like they are flying through it, understanding it, and moving down the page. It helps them feel like they are making progress.

Imagine reading a dense introduction that takes you five minutes to understand. Then, you look at the rest of the article and see that it’s 2,000 words long.

Chances are you won’t read the rest.

That’s why you want yours to be simple: to give the reader some momentum and to help them commit to reading the rest of the article.

You can look at the introductions written by any of your favorite bloggers to see this in action.

For example, here’s one from Brian Dean:

I can read those seven lines in about 10 seconds and move down to the first section.

Brian writes in short sentences and paragraphs and uses simple words. You should do the same.

Open your article again and time how long it takes you to read and understand the introduction (from your target reader’s point of view).

It shouldn’t be longer than 1-2 seconds per line. If it is, that means your introduction contains too much complex information and/or is formatted poorly.

3. Content is optimized for “skimmers”

Your most loyal readers read your every post.

They examine every sentence and every word because they love what you produce.

This makes up about a whopping 1-5% of your readers.

Be thankful for them; they are amazing.

But what about the other 95-99%?

They’re still important, but they either don’t have time or interest to read every post and every part of that post.

The average reader of a post only reads 20-28% of it.

In other words, they skim it.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all have a limited amount of time in a day to learn, and everyone needs to prioritize their own time.

I’d rather have someone skim my posts than not read them at all.

Element #1 – Clear and intriguing subheadlines: There’re a few things that skimmers look for as they skim a post.

Think about why they’re skimming in the first place. It’s to save time.

They’re not sure if reading the entire post is worth their time. If you’re producing longer content, like I obviously do, then this is even more of an issue.

A typical reader, as you can probably imagine, looks to see whether any of your sections contain useful to them information.

It makes sense.

Say, I published a post “8 Content Marketing Tactics to Do X.”

If someone already knows quite a bit about content marketing, not all of those eight tactics will be new to them.

So, what do they look at?

Subheadlines.

First, ask yourself, “Are my subheadlines easy to find while skimming?”

Just skim your post, and see which parts jump out at you. If your formatting is good, your subheadings will stand out:

At the same time, remember that the first point in this entire checklist was about your main title.

Similarly, you should ask yourself whether each subheadline is clear (as far as the topic goes) but also whether it creates enough curiosity for the readers to want to read the section it introduces.

That’s why I don’t use simple 1-3 word subheadlines very often, unless it’s for a specific reason.

(Advanced) Element #2 – Format backgrounds to indicate new sections: If you’re willing to invest a bit of extra time and resources, you can make your content even better for skimmers (and all readers).

If you’ve ever read one of my Quick Sprout advanced guides (in the sidebar), you’d notice that each section has a different background color.

Instead of having to scan for a subheadline, which can be missed, skimmers can easily find a new section based on the background color.

You will have to learn some basic CSS to do this. However, after you apply it once, you can use it over and over again without spending much time on it.

(Advanced) Element #3 – Custom CSS boxes for important parts: Another advanced formatting element you can take advantage of is a box around any particularly important or impressive content. Like this:

Imagine scrolling down a page and seeing a bright green box jump out at you.

You’ll probably pay some attention to it.

If there’s something new or insightful in that box, you might go back up and read from the start of that section.

I’d recommend putting expert quotes or impressive results (e.g., “ranked #1 in 5 weeks using X technique”) in them.

Again, you’ll need to learn some CSS. I walk you through a simple procedure in this post about advanced formatting.

4. Content is balanced between text and non-text

There are very few people who can read a long post that consists of nothing but text.

Unless you’re an amazingly entertaining writer, no one’s going to read your post if you don’t include good formatting principles.

We’ve talked about a few of them, but by far the most important is to include non-text elements such as images, lists, and quotes.

Can you go overboard with this?

Of course. In most cases, you need plain text to get your main points across. The images and other non-text elements simply support those points.

One analysis concluded that the ideal ratio is at least one picture for every 350 words. I wouldn’t go below that.

It depends on the topic and your niche, but you probably wouldn’t want to go above one image for every 100 words in almost any case. So stick to somewhere in-between.

You can group lists, quotes, and anything else that breaks up the text for the reader in this ratio.

If your post in question meets this criteria, check this item off the list.

5. It’s better than anything else out there (by far)

I mentioned that there are a few principles of content marketing that can’t be ignored if you want to see great results.

One of them is that your content needs to add something to the giant piles of content already out there.

It needs to be better in at least one way, by a significant amount, than all the other most popular pieces of content on the topic you are writing about.

If possible, improve it in multiple areas. That makes it even more obvious that it is something special that should be paid attention to.

To check this, follow this 2-step process.

Step #1 – Research the competition: Before you started writing your post, you probably identified one or two main keyword phrases that describe what you’re writing about.

If not, do it now.

Search each of those phrases in Google, and take a look at the top 5-10 results:

Click on each to see what they are.

Make notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each. A great post will fix any weaknesses found in those posts and build on their strengths.

For example, my top result above was this post:

Right away, I notice that it has a link to a podcast, which breaks down the post. This is a strength and a very nice feature.

I’m not so sure that it’s a huge benefit for this particular post (lists are typically better in text), but it still gives the reader the option.

But what I see from the rest of the post is that it’s almost all text.

On top of that, all the explanations are very short, with few examples or suggestions on how to fix any weak parts of a post.

I’d categorize that as a weak part. I can improve the post by simply adding detailed examples as well as resources to help my readers.

Step #2 – Answer these four questions: Once you understand what the competition has to offer, simply compare your content to them.

Here are some good questions that you should be able to answer:

1. Is your post clearer for the typical reader (more detailed)?
2. Is your post formatted as well or better?
3. Have you addressed all competitor’s weaknesses?
4. Do you at least match all competitor’s strengths (or a high percentage of them)?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you’re good to move on.

6. Take it seriously: preview before you publish

This is an expected element of good content.

Your content should show up correctly, no matter which device or browser you’re using.

It should also have proper spelling and grammar. Granted, a few mistakes here and there are expected, but overall, your writing should be error-free.

So, this step is very easy. Just complete the following check:

• Load your post on your phone and any other mobile devices you have. Does it show up as intended?
• Load the post in all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari). Does it show up as intended?
• Copy your post into a text editor (e.g., Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.). Use the spellcheck function to find any obvious errors.
• (Optional) Hire an editor to proofread your work.

Once everything checks out, you can move on to the next point.

7. Fluff has been eliminated

Fluff is the enemy of all good content.

It refers to those parts of the content that do not add any value.

Every sentence should either add new information or serve to clarify previously stated information.

If you ever want to see a perfect example of a non-fluff post, check out any of Seth Godin’s writing.

Here’s an example of one of his typical posts:

Yes, that’s the full post.

His brevity has to do with the types of things he writes about but also with his desire not to waste any words.

Most of us have some fluff in our posts, and that’s okay. Your goal is to eliminate as much fluff as possible.

A big help – the Hemingway App: If you’re new to cutting out fluff, it’s not necessarily easy. It takes time and practice to recognize what does and doesn’t add value.

Luckily, there’s an awesome free tool called Hemingway App that will spot most “bad” instances of fluff.

It looks at common patterns of “fluffy” writing to identify poorly written and wordy sentences.

Let me show you an example.

I put a small part of one of my guides into the tool, and this is what I saw:

You can see that many sentences are a bit hard to read, and they could be written more concisely.

This is what it looked like when I fixed those errors:

Right away, you can see that the readability level went down from grade 8 to 7. This means my content is now easier to read.

You can also see that the number of words went down from 189 to 171, which is about 90% of the original length.

In other terms, 10% of the original text was fluff. Apply that to a long post, and that’s hundreds of words you can do without.

Making those edits isn’t easy at first, but here’s a great resource on editing tactics to get you started.

If you’ve gone through your content and removed as much fluff as possible, check this off the list.

8. Great content flows…

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you just get sucked into an article?

You start reading, and before you know it, you’re at the end.

As the content creator, you should always aim to create this experience for your readers.

For that, your article needs to be cohesive.

It needs to flow from one section to another.

One mistake many content marketers make is trying to create a post that is as epic as possible and then including irrelevant (although interesting) parts.

If the reader has to stop reading and ask, “How does this fit with what I just read?”, you’ve ruined their immersion.

Here’s the basic way to check if your writing flows well.

Start by looking at all the subheadings of your article.

As an example, let’s use my Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy.

The subheadings of the article are:

• Step 1: Dive inside your readers’ minds
• Step 2: Choose your most effective channels, and double down
• Step 3: Build a content bank of VALUE
• Step 4: Get followers or get ignored
• and so on…

The following is the test you can use for each pair of subheadings. Can you fill out this sentence?

I need to know [subheading 1 topic] in order to understand [subheading 2 topic].

And you go through each subheading like that, in pairs.

For example, do your readers need to know how to understand what’s in their readers’ minds (subheading 1) in order to understand how to pick their most effective channels (subheading 2)?

Yes, they do.

If they don’t understand their audience’s demographics and psychographics (from that first section), they might start on the wrong channel.

Next up, do they need to pick a channel in order to build a content bank?

Again, yes they do.

Each channel needs a different type of content.

Get it?

For your content, create a list of all your subheadings. Then, go through that process for each section.

If they all naturally flow from one to the next, you’re good to go.

9. Have you answered all of your readers’ questions?

Before you write a post, you should know which of your readers’ problems you’re trying to solve.

Then, you should brainstorm a list of questions they might have about it.

For example, if you were writing a post about installing a simple WordPress site for a small business, readers might have the following questions:

• How do I buy a domain name?
• Is WordPress the best option?
• What’s the simplest hosting option?
• What are the best themes for businesses?
• How do I optimize it for SEO?

You can also come up with this list after you write your post. You might uncover a few hidden questions while writing.

You don’t need to have a Q&A section in your content, but you should address all the questions somewhere.

It could be a section dedicated to it.

It could be a link to more information on a related topic (such as SEO optimization in our example).

Or it could be a brief explanation mixed into another section.

Go down your list, and once you’re sure that everything has been answered, check this item off the list.

10. Have you provided the best resources?

Unless you’re creating an ultimate, 10,000+word guide on a narrow topic, you can’t cover everything there is to know about that topic.

But you can link to additional resources.

You’ll notice that I link often in my posts whenever I mention something that I think a reader might be interested in.

For example, when I cite a research study or analysis, I link to the results.

If the reader wants more information about it, they can follow the link to get it. Considering only a small portion of readers will want to know more, a simple link is better than a detailed explanation in my article.

Another type of useful link is to related topics.

For example, if I’m writing about some aspect of SEO, I might be able to link to my posts (or someone else’s) about conversion rate optimization or content marketing:

While not all readers will be interested in those related topics, a healthy portion will be.

The point here is to always give readers the resources to learn more about any particular part of your content.

Go through your content, and pretend like you’re a typical reader (as well as you can).

Read every sentence, and ask yourself if there is anything related to that sentence you might like to read more about. If there is, and you haven’t included that resource, add one.

Once you feel like you’ve provided a great user experience with links, check this off the list.

11. What should the reader get out of this? Is it clear?

I think that just about every piece of content should have a conclusion at the end (maybe not necessarily with that title).

You can look at any of my posts for an example.

In this final section, you should sum up the main things that a reader should have gotten from the post and suggest where they should go from here.

For example, at the end of this post on writing a good welcome email, the author tells the reader how to use the information in the article:

In this case, he tells the reader to start with just one tactic and then combine it with one or two more to get even better results.

I do the same in many of my conclusions.

If you feel that you’ve summed up your content well, check this final item off the list.

Conclusion

Creating great content isn’t easy.

Creating it every single time is even more difficult.

But if you take care to include all the key elements of great content every time you write, you’ll be consistent.

The 11 points I talked about in great detail here form the basis of a list of requirements that all your content should meet.

From here, make your own list, including as many of those 11 points as you’d like (maybe all of them). Then, if you think I missed any, add those to your list too.

Get in the habit of going through this list after creating each piece of content.

Do you think I missed anything? Let me and everyone else know in a comment below.

How To Tap Into the Social Media Power of Employees for Content Amplification

Social media has evolved significantly in the past six years. At the beginning, businesses focused solely on just having a presence on social media. Then, brands beginning honing in on social listening and figuring out the “science” of a good social media campaign.

Marketers then realized that social media was a great tool not only to engage their audience, but a prime opportunity to amplify their content and draw even more people in to consume, engage with and share that content. Recent studies have found that social networking accounts for 30% of all time spent online.

Last week at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, David Honig and David Thomas (otherwise known as Dave Squared) focused on another very important element of social media that most businesses are not taking full advantage of, the power of employees. While employee’s are often the most loyal supporters of the brand, they may be intimidated or scared to promote content on behalf of the company. Below are some ways that employers can encourage and help employees amplify brand content using social media.

Create Clear Instructions

Fear many times is a result of not having all of the information about a particular topic. The last thing you want to do is create or enable fear when it comes to encouraging employees to amplify brand content on social media.

No matter what you say, if you have a workforce it will be important to remind employees that you want them to share and that it is valuable. And you have to show them how to do it.

If you put a series of guidelines that tells people what to say and how to do it, you take away that fear factor.

Understand The Workforce

Employee’s personal and professional lives are intertwined more now than ever before and are constantly connected to devices which creates a remarkable opportunity. There are estimates that nearly 75% of the global workforce will be made up of Millennial’s by 2025.

These employees’s were raised with cell phones and the Internet which requires an approach beyond email to reach them.

Turn Employee’s Into Storytellers

What do you think would happen if employees become the storytellers for your brand? Research says that around 15% of consumers actually trust a brand while 85% trust their peers. With the average employee having around 1,500 connections on social networks, think of the possibilities.

Brands have the opportunity to empower employees as storytellers by informing them, engaging them with the content and inspiring them to create and share.

These stories aren’t just about selling your brand; it’s about what the company believes in. It’s about sending the right content at the right time to the right employee.

Identify Early Adopters

As with any new program, it’s important to have beta testers before rolling out a program to the entire population. This will provide a chance to find out what they are doing currently, gauge their level of interest in supporting the brand online and getting them involved in the process.

Finding an executive champion can also help spread your initiative like wildfire. When there is support shown from the top, it will be easier to get other employees on board.

Add Gamification

We live in a gaming world. From gaming systems to mobile applications, they’re everywhere. If you add gamification to your employee social program, you can create some healthy competition and even offer incentives to encourage participation.

Make Consuming & Sharing Easy

The number of tools that we have at our fingertips today can help create efficiencies and offer new opportunities in all aspects of business. Social media is no different. Employee’s can be trained to use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to share brand content on social media. Better yet, tools like Dynamic Signal offer a mobile application and admins can push notifications to employee’s that allow them to read and share brand content with the click of a button.

Everyone Benefits When Employees Get Involved

Data supports the importance of sharing content with employees. There is an opportunity to make employees better at what they do, by providing them with relevant content on a consistent basis. Building an employee advocacy program benefits both employees and the company in many ways including:

Employee Benefits:

• Better connection with the brand
• Feeling more “in the know” with company news
• They may become viewed as a thought leader
• An opportunity to establish their personal brand
• Easy ways to grow their online audience

Company Benefits:

• Increase brand awareness
• Deepen customer loyalty
• Strengthen company culture
• Drive leads and sales

For a successful program, it’s important that your employees don’t feel like you’re exploiting them to promote your marketing message. This fear can be alleviated by introducing the information clearly and transparently with the whole team. Of course, you always want to encourage employees to share what is relevant for their audience.

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Email Capture Optimized: How one small change led to a 364% increase in leads

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If you ask anything of a customer you must make it worth it for them to give it to you. This applies to every step in the sales process, right from the very beginning.

This is the conclusion that MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments, came to after studying more than 20,000 sales paths over 15 years. Of those sales paths, the latest MarketingExperiments Web clinic reviewed nine that focused on email capture. Here’s what we discovered: small changes that help customers perceive that it’s worth their time, effort and risk to provide you their information increased email capture from 21% to more than 600%. Watch it here.

Here’s one of the tests.

Background: The partner has an email capture process that offers downloadable reports in exchange for information. They wanted to capture and qualify emails.

Goal: Increase number of form submissions.

Primary research question: Which process will get the most submissions?

Approach: Adapt the registration process to reduce friction (friction is anything that makes the customer work harder to get through the sales process)

The Control was loaded with friction. It forced visitors to take four steps to access the reports.

The Treatment reduced those steps, but changed nothing else.

The result was that 364% more visitors submitted their email address to download reports.

Why was there nearly a four-fold increase in email capture?

The Treatment did not cost the visitor too much time to go through the process. They perceived that it was worth taking two steps to get access to the reports. However, the Control was perceived as too costly — visitors thought it wasn’t worth their time and effort to go through four steps to get access to the reports.

Everything we ask of customers is a transaction; closing the deal is the culmination of a long series of transactions. At any step of the sales process, if customers think that what they’re asked to do costs more than what they’ll receive for doing it, they’ll walk away. That’s why it’s critical to apply these three principles when you ask customers for their email — or anything else for that matter.

Principle #1

Any action we want our visitor to take, even a non-monetary one like giving an email address, comes with a perceived cost. Reduce the implicit cost associated with the request.

Principle #2

Tell customers why you’re asking. Communicate a strong process-level value proposition that answers the question, “If I am your ideal customer, why should I give you my email address?”

Principle #3

Perceived cost — whether that’s money, time, risk or resources — can be positive. Here’s why: marketers can use it to control the size and quality of email lists. In essence, if you want more qualified leads, ask the prospect to do more. The more prospects want what you’re selling, the more likely they’ll do what you ask.

Now is the time to start optimizing your pages. Want our feedback? It’s not too late to submit a page for MarketingExperiments’s MECLABS live optimization webinar on October 29.

You might also like

Email Marketing: Top 5 most effective list growth tactics

Lead Generation: How to build your own list [From the MarketingSherpa blog]

Lead Generation: Content and email combine for high-quality list building [From MarketingSherpa]

MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Feburary 22-24 (MarketingSherpa is the sister company of MarketingExperiments)

Value Proposition: How a local business doubled its space in 9 months

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There are really only two types of marketing.

There’s “Let’sThrowEverythingWeHaveAtTheCustomerAndSHOUTITREALLYLOUD!” marketing. The value for the customer is not very clear with this method, but if the company buys enough TV spots, throws some huge incentives in the mix and pays high enough affiliate marketing commissions, it will move some product.

As for a sustainable business with reliable margins? Well, the marketer running these campaigns will be long gone by the time those topics come up.

And then there is …

Value-based marketing

This type of marketing is harder. Way harder. It involves discovering what customers really want, creating products and services with true value for the customer and clearly communicating those values.

You can see this battle most clearly in marketing for local businesses. I was thinking of this topic when I flipped through our local copies of Money Pages and Mint Magazine. These are essentially coupon circulars with local businesses and some national brands filling every inch of the space they bought with ink, shouting at the customer, practicing “Let’sThrowEverything …” — well, you get the idea.

Flipping through these circulars, I have no idea why I should go to one tire shop over the other or eat at one restaurant instead of the other. They’re all the same. The only question is — which will shout louder to get my attention or offer a bigger discount?

Local businesses have a huge advantage over national brands

Now here’s the irony.

You might say local business tend to practice this type of marketing because they don’t have professional marketers on staff or, if they do, the companies are too small to properly resource them.

However, local businesses have something that every marketer at a major brand covets — a seat at the table.

Whether this is because the marketing is done by a solopreneur or partner in the business, or just because the business is small enough that even a junior marketer can speak with and perhaps influence the CEO, the people running small business marketing can provide more influence than the coupon and the ad — they can help shape and create a value proposition.

This got me thinking …

 

What does a local business look like if it was built from the ground up with an effective value proposition?

At MECLABS Institute, value proposition is a core research topic. So when Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe submitted an application to speak at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 with her story about launching Bay & Bee (a locally owned eco-friendly play space here in Jacksonville, Florida), I saw it as a great opportunity to reconnect with her and learn about building a business from the ground up with a real value prop.

[Note: MarketingSherpa is the sister publishing brand to MarketingExperiments.]

Zuzia worked with me at MECLABS (here is a replay of a webinar Zuzia and I did with Facebook about strategic social media marketing), directly helping MECLABS Research Partners find their value propositions.

She knows the topic inside out, so I was curious to see how she applied it to her own business.

 

Find an unserved consumer need

“Bay & Bee was actually created due to the lack of such a place in Jacksonville,” Zuzia, Vice President, Bay & Bee, said.

At MECLABS, we teach that a key element of your value proposition is your “only factor.” This is something marketers try to tack on after a product is created. However, it is far better for marketers to influence product and service development to make sure an only factor that meets a key customer need is baked into the product.

Zuzia and her co-founder, Monica Pharr, built the company around an only factor. Here is how Monica explained it in a story about the company’s creation written to customers. Note the use of the word “only.”

“Basically, we are the only eco-friendly, non-toxic, clean and safe indoor play space for young children … We are the only ones using organic disinfecting and cleaning products, beeswax crayons; wooden, sustainable toys; have antimicrobial, sustainable cork flooring and are Montessori and Waldorf inspired.”

Don’t try to be everything to everyone

MECLABS defines a value proposition as the answer to this key question — “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

In the same story, Monica said, “We don’t communicate our value prop enough because I don’t feel like mentioning the negative aspects of [the] overstimulation, toxic plastic, etc. of our competitors, and people who appreciate our concept notice it all right away. Those who don’t care about these aspects can make the choice for themselves.”

If you look at the value proposition question above, it’s very easy to focus on the “why should I buy” part. But don’t overlook “If I am your ideal prospect.” An effective value proposition is one that does not try to serve every possible customer, but rather focuses on your ideal customer and leaves out the ones Monica refers to as “those who don’t care about these aspects.”

You would likely only win these people over with massive incentives that kill your margin and degrade the value of your products and services in the minds of the prospects you can’t serve best.

 

When you’re not the best option, tell your prospects

Once you’ve established a value proposition, the challenge is to live it through not just your marketing, but your business practices. In this way your potential customers experience it and you build trust with them.

Sometimes you should tell potential customers not to buy from you.

For example, in addition to being a play area and hosting birthday parties, Bay & Bee has both a brick-and-mortar and ecommerce store. But they don’t always carry the products potential customers are looking for.

In that case, Zuzia and Monica direct people who make inquiries on the website or through Bay & Bee’s Facebook page to other stores after making sure the desired item is at that location. “Might seem silly but, in the long run, those customers appreciate it and almost always return to our store,” Zuzia said.

Not only does that build trust with potential customers who may buy from them next time, but it builds a network that can refer customers to Bay & Bee when it is the option that can best serve customers with its value proposition. “That has become a norm by now, so other stores do the same now when they know we have something they don’t at the moment!” Zuzia said.

 

You still need the basic blocking and tackling of marketing

Having an effective value proposition doesn’t mean you can overlook the basics of marketing. But it does mean you can get far more bang for your buck … and time.

Zuzia’s budget is, “$100-$300 per week, depending on how many events we attend, what materials are being printed and sponsored posts ordered/written” which includes Google AdWords, “although we set a low budget of $1-$5/day to less competitive, more broad keywords,” Zuzia said.

“Most of the word spread is organic though,” Zuzia said. This is where that unique value proposition really comes in handy. “We have sparked conversations about classes, services and products we offer, as well as why we are different than others throughout popular blogs and sites around Jacksonville.”

For example, she has targeted closed Facebook Groups such as Jax Moms, Jax Beach Breastfeeding group and JMB Beaches/Intracoastal Moms. “We watch or join conversations, but without trying to sell. Just honest opinion, usually through our personal profiles rather than as business,” Zuzia said.

She also invites all local online influencers for exclusive deals and services exchanges, such as Jax Moms Blog, Fun 4 First Coast Kids, First Coast Babywearing, Jax Beach Breastfeeding Support and many others. “We became friends and we share each other’s events and posts on social media outlets, and have been given reins to their Instagram account on several occasions (when Bay & Bee takes over their account),” Zuzia said.

This has helped SEO as well. “Being consistent with our concept from the day the business plan was created [and] finding how Bay & Bee could differ from other local activities and indoor facilities let us achieve [a strong] online position and obtain most of our traffic organically,” Zuzia said. For example, Bay & Bee has received organic first page rankings for key terms like: play space, Jacksonville; mommy and me jacksonville fl; jax play space; Tula jacksonville fl; Tegu blocks jacksonville fl; life factory jacksonville fl; and Montessori play space jax.

Results

The results from having a unique value proposition and then effectively messaging through organic and (a little bit of) paid marketing are:

• Expanding to double the space after nine months in business
• More than 4,000 Facebook likes and more than 240 active members within a year of opening
• 5,000-10,000 visits to website per month
• Positive media and reviews, such as being named “Best Mommy & Me” in Jax in 2014 and 2015 and “Best Party Venue in Jacksonville.”

The biggest challenge, as it is for many brick-and-mortar retailers, is attribution. “Our biggest marketing challenge is not being able to measure conversion for each channel,” Zuzia said. “Membership sign-ups, party booking and most of all in-store purchases all happen after the initial visit to Bay & Bee. The goal of each campaign is to bring foot traffic.”

 

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, @DanielBurstein.

 

You might also like

Value Proposition Worksheet

Value Proposition Development online certification course [From MECLABS, MarketingExperiments' parent company]

Direct from the Source: What a value proposition is, what it isn’t and the 5 questions it must answer

Incentive: The bacon of marketing tactics

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24

5 Techniques to Get 5 Stars: How to Get More (and Better) Online Reviews

Everywhere you go, you see reviews.

Whether it’s a physical or digital product, if it’s worth talking about (in good or bad ways), it has reviews.

Some of this feedback is simply comments on blogs and forums.

But mostly, reviews exist on large e-commerce sites where companies sell their products.

The most important thing about reviews is that people care about them.

About 30% of Internet users check out reviews on Amazon before buying a product. And that’s just Amazon.

Another 13% head to Google.

Before, people would ask their friends about products. But now, they rely on online reviews.

People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in people’s purchasing decisions. 

Although there’s no way to definitively say that reviews are good for business, just about every study or anecdotal case suggests that they are.

For example, Capterra analyzed the effect of adding reviews for software products and found that conversion rates increased significantly as more reviews were added.

Furthermore, a more general analysis found that conversion rate could more than double if you had a large enough number of reviews.

Although there is a mini-plateau after 20 reviews, conversion rate begins to increase again soon after.

You don’t have to be a big e-commerce site to add reviews to your personal website store.

Adding reviews increased Figleaves.com’s conversion rates by 35% and eSpares.co.uk’s by 14.2%.

These are massive increases in conversion rates that can result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Potential buyers trust reviews for a few reasons:

• They represent a real use situation
• They are less likely to be biased (than a sales page)
• They give visitors confidence to buy, proving there won’t be any issues with the purchase

Getting reviews is hard: If you’ve been selling online, you’ve probably noticed that it is difficult to get customers to leave reviews.

People want their products, but they don’t really want to do any extra work. Writing a good review can take 5 to 15 minutes without providing much of a benefit to the reviewer.

People typically leave a review for one of three reasons:

• They hate the product
• They love the product
• They’re somewhere in-between but would like to clear up any confusion around the product for other potential buyers (essentially just doing something nice)

The first two reasons are pretty self-explanatory.

Obviously, you don’t want people leaving reviews if they hate the product. That’s how you get negative reviews and one-star reviews that actually decrease your conversion rates.

So, how do you prevent it? Simple: have a great product along with great customer service.

If you create a product that everyone loves, you’ll get tons of reviews.

In reality, most products have customers that fall into all three camps.

What you need to do is focus on the people who already love your product and the ones that like it. A solid three- or four-star review can still help your conversion rate.

And that’s what the rest of this post is all about.

I’ll go over the best ways you can maximize the number of reviews you get from your customers.

You might not like this, but it’s what you have to do…

Most business owners love to create products.

But only some business owners love to sell those products.

Selling often feels like you’re doing something wrong and imposing on the people you genuinely care about.

Asking for anything can be difficult.

But it needs to be done.

You need to start by realizing that selling doesn’t have to be underhanded. If you create a truly valuable product, sales is simply letting people know about it.

If your product is great, people will buy your product and thank you for the opportunity.

After you make the sale, however, you need to ask customers to review it.

If you don’t ask, most will never even think of doing it, even if they don’t mind.

Although it might seem like you’re imposing on them—asking for something without giving something in return—you aren’t.

Most happy customers are glad to help you spread the word of your product so that other people will also give it a shot.

So, stop thinking that you’re taking advantage of your customers and realize that you’re helping each other.

Ideally, you want to ask for reviews as soon as you can after the purchase is made and your buyer had the time to receive and test the product.

If you ask too early, customers can’t review the product because they haven’t had the chance to use it.

If you ask too late, they’ll have forgotten about it and are less likely to review it (although late is better than early).

Amazon typically sends an email reminder asking you to review a recent purchase a few days after you’ve received it:

Customers don’t hate giving reviews—if you ask right…

It’s important to carefully approach the subject of reviews with customers.

First, you want them to receive the product and be happy with it.

The more satisfied they are, the more likely they are to not only leave a review but leave a positive one.

Before asking for a review, I recommend contacting customers and asking them if they had any problems with their order.

If they have had problems, they’ll let you know, and you’ll have the chance to fix them.

If they haven’t had any problems, some will let you know, but the others just won’t reply. It’s safe to ask any of these customers for reviews.

Finally, the way in which you ask for reviews is important.

Being persuasive with your request can double or triple the number of reviews you end up getting.

Tip #1 – Be appreciative: To be frank, reviewers don’t really get much out of the process. It’s just a nice thing they can do for other people reading reviews in the future.

However, many reviewers will do reviews if they know that they are important to you.

After all, you’ve just created a great product for them.

Even though they have paid for it already, many customers will feel that they should have paid more. This leaves them feeling indebted to you.

Many customers will leave a review if you tell them how important they are to you because then they can consider the two of you “even.”

For example, RealSelf is an online medical professional directory. It publishes reviews on all types of cosmetic doctors so that you can find one you can trust.

After you have found a doctor through the service, RealSelf asks you to contribute a review to the site.

There are two parts of the email in particular that make it work so well:

1. “…would love for you to share your experience…” - They’re not just asking you to leave a review for the fun of it. They’re making it clear that they appreciate it and value it.
2. “…will also help others make informed decisions” - Since the customer was just in the tough situation of trying to make a good decision, they are likely to be empathetic to other people in the same situation. Some customers will leave a review just to help others.

Tip #2 – Make it simple: So we’ve established that most reviewers leave reviews because it’s a nice thing to do.

However, there is a limit to how much most people are willing to give to be nice.

If you make customers jump through hoops to leave a review, most aren’t going to bother.

The solution is easy: make leaving a review as easy as possible.

First, if you’re asking for a review on any third-party sites, always link directly to the review forms on the specific sites:

Alternatively, if you’re asking customers to leave a review on your site, let them start the process by clicking on a star rating within an email. All the biggest sites do this for a reason. It works.

The other benefit is that it makes it really clear that you’re looking for the customer to leave a review (they know what stars represent).

Tip #3 – Do NOT offer an incentive: Want to get every customer to leave you a review? Just offer them $100 if they do.

Incentivizing reviews is a gray area.

It has obvious moral issues. In some ways, you’re essentially bribing your customer for a good review.

Even if you don’t intend your incentive to be a bribe, most people feel compelled to provide good reviews if they’re being compensated for it (without any other potential buyers being aware of it).

A potential problem that might be even bigger is that you could be fined huge amounts if caught by the FTC (if you do any business in the United States).

Not all countries have these rules, so it’s up to you to check if there’s an equivalent organization in your country and determine if you’re morally okay with incentivizing.

If you are going to offer an incentive, you should ask your reviewers to disclose that fact in their reviews. If the review discloses the incentive, not only is there no moral argument, but it’s also not violating any laws.

Tip #4 – Be clear about what you’re looking for: If you just have one textbox that says “your review,” customers could write about anything, even irrelevant things.

However, if you break down the review into descriptive fields, your reviewers will have a much better idea of what to include:

One way to improve the above form would be to add a description into, above, or beneath the “review” box.

You can prompt the customer to talk about certain aspects of the product that you believe influence buying decisions (shipping, packaging quality, durability, etc.).

Speaking of great reviews…here’s what’s in them

You can dictate the contents of a review by prompting your customers to think about certain topics.

This is important because most people don’t know what a good review consists of. They’ll often leave reviews like “great product” even though that’s not really very useful.

Instead, you want to prompt them with any (or all) of the following:

• including their background situation
• any special features of the product or buying process
• their overall impression
• would they buy again?

When you send your review request, just tell your customers that they can include any information they’d like. However, they should consider things like…(pick from the above list).

Part #1 – A quick background: Not everyone buys a product for the same reason or knows as much about a specific type of product as others.

The best reviews include a quick statement about why a customer bought a product. If another potential buyer is in a similar situation, they will automatically become more interested (it resonates with them).

Additionally, any mention of expertise also makes the review more credible (e.g., “I have purchased x types of product”).

Here’s an example:

Part #2 (optional) – A brief description of product and buying process: Unless you’re selling your products through a well-known fulfillment service like Amazon, shipping speed and safety are still big concerns for online shoppers.

They affect almost every purchase:

You should obviously make your shipping information very clear on your sales pages.

But people also want to know how fast and secure your shipping is in real life, not just in theory.

If a potential buyer sees multiple reviews praising your shipping process, they’ll feel assured.

Part #3 – The overall result: The most important part of any purchase is how good the product is. That’s going to be the focal point of any review.

If you’ve done your job right on the product creation end, customers will have great things to say about your product:

However, you can still guide what they mention.

You could include a question in your email or on your review form like: “How did you like X feature of product Y?”

They will be more likely to take some time to think about that specific feature.

Part #4 – Would you buy again? Customers can often find at least a few good things to say about a product. Nice people leave nice reviews—it’s that simple.

However, the ultimate test of a great product is if it earns the loyalty of a customer.

When customers say that they will definitely buy from you again in the future, anyone reading the review will know that the reviewer is serious when they praise the product:

Get automatic reviews with a system

Getting reviews shouldn’t be something that you try to do periodically. It should be something that you do with every single customer.

To maximize the number of positive reviews you get, you need a foolproof system.

We already looked at Amazon’s system:

1. You buy a product
2. You get the product
3. You get a request to leave a review on Amazon a few days after

They’ve done their own internal testing and determined that this particular timing worked best for the majority of their customers.

However, your customers may be different, so always test.

Timing is important: Why are customers different when it comes to this? Most of it comes down to the type of customer you have and the product.

First, certain people expect online shipping to be faster. They want their product right away so they can start using it. This is typically true if you have a young demographic.

Secondly, some products take longer than others to test thoroughly enough to leave a good review. A frying pan only takes a few minutes to test, but a large book can take weeks to read.

If your product takes a longer time to test properly, give your customers a bit more time.

How to get consistent results: The only way to ensure that your customer gets your review request “X days” after they’ve purchased something is with an autoresponder.

After they buy something, add them to a new list just for customers:

Then, set up your autoresponder to send out an email asking if everything went well.

Finally, send your review request sometime after that first message.

I recommend trying different time delays to discover which one produces the most reviews.

The best way to get great reviews if you’re starting from scratch

Every business faces its own unique challenges when it comes to getting online reviews.

The hardest stage is right at the beginning when you have no reviews.

When you have no reviews (or very few), potential buyers are hesitant to be the first buyers. They want to see that other people have bought your product and liked it.

To make things worse, people often don’t want to leave the first review. Unless they are an expert on your product, they don’t want to leave an opinion and look stupid if they’re wrong.

Instead, they’d rather look at other reviews first, get a general consensus, and then leave a review if their own opinion matches everyone else’s. This is also why it’s important to get off to a good start with a few glowing reviews.

Do not get fake reviews: Incentivizing reviews is a gray area, but buying fake reviews is clearly over the line.

If you go on Fiverr or Google phrases like “buy 5 star review”, you’ll find a ton of people willing to write you a five-star review without even seeing your product.

Even without considering the ethics of doing this, it’s obvious that these reviews won’t be very useful.

Sure, you’ll get five-star reviews, but they’ll include no actual information that your potential buyers will care about.

In addition, most fake reviews are extremely easy to spot. And if a potential buyer sees multiple fake reviews, their warning bells will go off and cause them to buy someone else’s product instead.

So although you could buy reviews, you are better off focusing on earning them.

To do so, follow these steps.

Step #1 – Pick a site to focus on: There are tons of third-party sites that aggregate reviews on products or businesses.

For example, both Google and Yelp focus on local businesses, while Amazon obviously focuses on physical products and e-books.

To start with, pick just one review site to focus on. You can always expand to other sites once you’ve gotten some traction.

Step #2 – Offer a free sample or product: As I said, you need to earn your reviews, which means getting them from actual customers.

This is where it’s a good idea to offer a discount, sample, or even free product in exchange for a review.

Wait, what? “Didn’t you just say NOT to offer incentives?”

If you remembered that, well done. That means you’re paying attention.

Incentivizing reviews is murky territory, but only if you don’t disclose it. If you do, they are perfectly compliant with the law and just about anyone’s ethical code.

And when you need those first few reviews to get the ball rolling, a few reviews that aren’t perfect are still extremely valuable.

Additionally, just because your customer needs to disclose that you offered them something doesn’t mean the review will suck.

Here’s an example of what one might look like:

As one of the first customers to buy (product name), I was lucky enough to be offered a free sample to try.

I received the product after 3 days in perfect condition. Since then, it’s worked exactly as expected.

In particular, the (feature) is better than every other (type of product) I’ve tried.

I’ll definitely be buying more in the future.

Obviously it’s not a perfect review (since I’m dealing with a non-existent product), but if you could get started with 5-10 reviews like that, you’d be set.

The disclosure reads naturally and doesn’t really take away from the rest of the review as long as the reviewer is being honest.

Step #3 – Provide instructions: Figuring out how to leave a review is easy for you and me. However, for the non-tech-savvy person, leaving a review might be a head-scratcher.

To make sure that customers have no problems leaving a review, provide detailed instructions on how to leave a review:

Even if they shop on a well-known platform like Amazon, most people have never left a review before. You need to walk them through it.

Step #4 – Make sure their experience is amazing: This is something we’ve already noted, but I want to re-iterate it.

To earn a great review, you need to provide a great experience.

The buying experience is composed of many different parts:

• the branding
• the packaging
• the shipping process
• the product itself
• follow-up/customer service

Too many businesses make a great product but ignore the rest of the buying experience.

Then, they get three-star reviews saying the product was fine, but the shipping sucked, or they couldn’t get fast replies from the company when they needed help.

It’s not hard to make sure these other parts of the buying experience are great, but you need to spend some time and effort making sure that they are.

If you do that, the quality of the reviews will take care of itself.

One other great source of reviewers you should use

Let’s say you are starting from absolute scratch. I’m talking zero previous customers.

It’s hard to get customers to leave reviews to encourage more people to buy your product when you have no customers in the first place.

In this case, you can go for paid advertising to get your first customers. This is great if you have a budget and a little PPC expertise. However, it can get costly since not all customers will leave reviews.

Otherwise, if you have a tight budget, you’ll probably be going the content marketing route, which can take months to draw any customers.

However, there is one more opportunity that you can take advantage of to not only drive sales but also reviews.

Here’s the basic procedure.

Step #1 – Look for reviews of competitors: For this series of examples, let’s pretend that I just created the best keyword research tool ever.

Since there aren’t stores where you can sell this particular type of tool, I need to get some reviews to put on my sales page.

To start, I need to assemble a list of all my established customers.

This is pretty easy. Just Google “best (type of product)”.

Ideally, you’ll find a big expert roundup that has all your competitors in one spot. Alternatively, you’ll just have to go through the first few pages of search results and record down competing products.

In my case, I was able to easily find the 10 most popular keyword research tools right away (lucky me):

For each of these tools, I’m going to find people who have reviewed them and then approach them to get them to review my product.

To find reviews, just Google “(product name) + review”:

Then, make a list of all the reviews you can find (which can be up to 100 for each product).

Step #2 – Contact the bloggers and make a proposal: Now that you have a large list of reviews, you need to get in touch with the reviewer.

Important note: Bloggers get pitches all the time through their “contact” forms, and most of them are terrible and just get ignored. To stand out, the best strategy is to join the blogger’s email list.

When you join an email list, you obviously get emails from that blogger, which contain their email address.

Then, you can create a personalized message that will definitely get to their inbox.

If you can’t find an opt-in form on the review page itself, go to the homepage:

You’ll usually be able to find an obvious opt-in either front and center on the homepage or near the top of the sidebar:

When you get an email from them, you can send one back, requesting a review of your product.

A template like this will work:

Hi (blogger name),

I came across your review for (competing product) today and was impressed with how detailed you were.

I actually just released my own keyword research tool, called (product name). I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it yet.

Considering how great your previous reviews have been, I wanted to see if you’d be up for giving my product a try. (I’ll provide you with a free license, of course).

The reason why I believe (my product name) stands out from all the others on the market is because of feature X: (describe feature).

If you’re interested, just let me know.

Thanks for your time,

(Your name)

Again, you are incentivizing the blogger to create a review, but as long as they include a disclosure somewhere on the page, there’s no issue. Most blog readers are used to such disclosures by now and don’t consider them in their decision-making.

Once you get a review, you can then publish the appropriate parts of the review on your website and attribute them to the blogger (let them know about it).

The results of different reviews: If you get a review done by a popular blogger, you can drive some serious sales.

That being said, popular bloggers are the toughest ones to get reviews from since they get pitched so frequently.

I’m not saying don’t go after them, but be aware that you will face a lot of rejection.

Lesser known bloggers, on the other hand, will be more receptive to your approaches. If all you want are reviews (and you’re not too worried about sales), target these bloggers first.

Conclusion

If you sell anything online, remember that reviews are one of the biggest factors that affect your sales, so don’t ignore them.

First, come up with a plan of attack to determine what type of reviews you need.

Next, optimize your sales funnel to maximize the number of customers who leave you reviews—and not just any reviews, great ones.

Finally, if you’re starting from scratch, use one of the methods I’ve laid out to start generating reviews for your new product.

Have any other ideas or questions about reviews? I’d be happy to discuss them in the comments below.