Great share Erik!
I find working at night is very interesting because there isn't anyone who will disturb you. Consider working at 4am in the morning!
Thanks for your feedback, Lorraine!! Glad to be a part of the night-working club!! :-D
Just checked out your post ... Thanks for sharing this one! Has it pulled in a lot of visits + income over time?
Evergreen content just makes sooo much sense ... Great to know you are also on the same wavelength there! #Winning
Speak to you soon,
Sam =)
Great answers so far!
It's good every now and then and conceptually think about content, too. Sometimes it's fun to compare great content to great art, like a song.
INSTRUMENTATION: Are the people who put this together talented? Can they compose quality because they have years of practice? Do multiple "instruments" (writers, designers, programmers) know how to work together to make something beautiful? Are they willing to run through it multiple times to get it right?
LYRICS: What are you saying? Is it really speaking to and connecting with people? What is your chorus, or the primary message of your content, and will you have people singing it once they're done reading? Great content has a message that resonates, and it's clear from reading what point you're trying to drive home.
MELODY: Is the content catchy? Does it have attention-grabbing graphics, pithy headlines, and new data? It doesn't matter if the lyrics are great -- if you can't enjoy the music, you won't listen to the lyrics. The information used and the media used to illustrate that content is crucial to whether it'll actually be read and remembered.
GENRE: How does it compare to other content its "genre" or industry? What does it offer that other b(r)ands -- ha, see what I did there -- don't? Why will people sing YOUR song over others? Does it defy convention? Does it innovate on the foundational principles?
I can go on and on with this analogy, but I'll spare you all. :) Just note that dissecting what makes other great content work (inside and outside of your typical medium) can be beneficial.
This is a huge question, but I'll give you the 1 heuristic that I use to evaluate all marketing
#1. Does it pay its own rent?
Everything else details.
I am both a CRO consultant and CEO of an established ecomm company. And yet, we don't do a ton of CRO.
The biggest challenge of CRO in an established ecom setting (100s-1000s of products, not <20 products) is that the conversion funnels are way more complicated than the average SaaS product. As your ecomm operation expands, you likely take orders on phone, via multiple payment processors, etc. etc. The plus side is it's a better experience for the customers and helps you close more business (ostensibly). The downside is that it makes tracking and the production of statistically significant data a nightmare. Likewise, out of the box products do a very crappy job of tracking the value of conversions instead of the quantity of conversions, which in ecom is equally important or moreso.
So, in short, the biggest CRO challenge is fully inclusive & statistically valid setup of tests and rendering of all necessary data. There are many more moving pieces, which means CRO costs more time and money.
Another great post from my man Hans ;)
How much time do you have?
I'm going to give you the Justin Cliff Notes version since this can be a very broad topic; I am going to focus on digital outbound marketing.
Measuring: Every campaign usually begins with an experiment and a hypothesis. For example, an online t-shirt company that is starting a paid social advertising campaign is trying a new acquisition channel and wants to increase their t-shirt sales by 10% at 33% of the cost of the lifetime value of a customer. The key performance indicator and measurement of the effectiveness of this campaign is the cost of each conversion. I can easily get conversions through paid advertising, but the real measure of efficiency is making sure that I am getting a positive return on my investment.
There are dozens of SaaS platforms out there that help track paid and non-paid conversion, but you can generally get all the data you need from the ads platform or Google Analytics.
Goals: My goals are determined by the length of the sales funnel. In my experience, low-priced products like consumer goods have shorter sales funnels and require fewer steps to make a sale (bottom-funnel goals): ad click > view product > add to cart > checkout. In that scenario, the goal of the marketing campaign is to drive sales. Mid-to-high priced products like B2B services and luxury goods may require additional steps such as demos or lead nurturing to make a sale (top-funnel goals). Whenever I start a new campaign, I generally start at the top of the funnel and work my way down to ensure that what I am doing is the most efficient, which I measure using KPIs for that specific funnel step.
Success: By default, my main indicator of success is Cost/Goal. Cost can be monetary, time, or energy. The goal could be a sale, lead generation, or just brand awareness. The important thing to keep in mind is establishing what the main conversion is prior to starting the campaign or you will look for anything to justify the investment and results (i.e. "Yeah...we lost $5000, but we have 200 likes now!").
I'm expecting a variety of great responses to this question - I hope what I've provided helps.
Also want to comment the site load speed (10 seconds) is pretty bad. I actually had to try twice for it to work.
You'll want to do what you can to fix this. Here's a link to see how to improve speed:
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/edov7o/www.visiplevc.com
At http://Dripit.io we are helping some of our clients understand content marketing performance in the customer journey.
They are spending a decent amount of money but don't see conversions straight away. So we are helping out by telling exactly at which stage in sales funnel content has an impact. By adding costs to each blog post we can tell actual Roi on each individual article.
This is how we measure content marketing performance for our clients!
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