In Marketing, As In Life, Relationships Take Time To Grow

How to get people’s attention and convince them to stick around was the focus of the third annual Growth Marketing Conference.

How to get people’s attention and convince them to stick around was the focus of the third annual Growth Marketing Conference, held last week in San Jose, Calif. More than 750 marketers from 31 countries attended the event, produced by Startup Socials and for which CMO.com was a media partner.

During the keynote, Neil Patel, traffic generation expert and co-founder of website optimizing tool Crazy Egg, compared marketing to dating, in that spending time getting to know someone makes them more likely to accept your proposal than springing it on them right away. He offered several suggestions on how to establish ongoing relationships with site visitors, such as using techniques to collect as many emails as you can, incorporating references to the recipient’s geographic location in your emails, and asking your visitors to help you spread your message (and offering them something in exchange for doing so).

Patel’s keynote was followed by a fast-moving series of sessions. Recurring topics included how to create effective content marketing and the role of A/B testing.

In an early expert panel on “How to Create Products for Explosive Growth,” for example, Marissa Chacko, a product manager at Foursquare, urged marketers to test wide variations. “Try and test both extremes,” she advised.

Josephine Foucher, a product manager at Hotwire, sounded a similar note: While some think extensive A/B testing inhibits creativity, she said that when you know some variations will fail and are prepared to abandon them, you can be much bolder in what you try.

Lars Lofgren, director of growth at I Will Teach You To Be Rich and former director of growth at Kissmetrics, picked up the thread in his session “Tripling Your Conversion Rates With A/B Testing.” Lofgren’s advice was not to use these tests to pick winners but rather to avoid losers. He offered these eight rules for effective testing:

1. The control stands, and the burden of proof is on the variant.
2. Expose at least 2,000 people to the test within 30 days.
3. Wait at least a week before checking your data.
4. Only launch variants that are successful at a 99% statistical significance.
5. If the test results in less than 10% improvement, ditch it—don’t waste time on smaller wins.
6. If it’s not a clear winner after a month, ditch it.
7. Get the next test ready while you wait—always be working on the next test.
8. If you have another goal besides simply testing two variants, say so before starting.

Content Is King

Several sessions were devoted to content marketing. In a panel on acquiring engaged B2B leads, Hana Abaza, head of strategy at content experience platform Uberflip, made the point that “the question shouldn’t be ‘how much more traffic can we get,’ but ‘how can we get the desired result with the least content possible?’” She also advised that seeing results from content marketing requires patience; for example, it could easily take six months to see results from a blog post.

Sonja Jacob, senior product marketing manager at company data provider Mattermark, also counseled patience in determining the right approach to content marketing. “It takes time to figure out the content marketing fit to product and company,” she said. “The reason content fails at a lot of companies is that they’re just not ready for it.”

In another session, Dennis Yu, CTO of BlitzMetrics, outlined how best to get results from video content shared on Facebook. “What would you say to visitors if you were sitting down one-to-one?” he asked. “That’s how to think about Facebook.”

He suggested taking your “crappy, 30-page lead-gen white paper,” chopping it into nuggets, and turning each one into a short instructional video. He also suggested finding the leaders in your category and interviewing them for a video; by appearing next to them, you’ll look like a leader as well.

In a talk on “How to Use Content for Growth,” Sujan Patel, co-founder of growth marketing agency Web Profits, laid out 11 content marketing tactics, several of which involved giving your content away in the right circumstances. For example, he suggested sending your best content to new customers to nurture the relationship, as well as repurposing it into webinars, microsites, and ebooks. Your sales and customer support teams could also send leads and customers targeted, helpful blog posts. As a way of generating content, Patel suggested surveying customers about their problems and creating an e-book about solutions. He also echoed Jacob and Abaza in saying that seeing results takes time.

Other sessions filled out the day on topics such as growing your personal brand, strategies for marketing across both apps and the Web, aligning marketing and sales, and the science of attention. The day closed with a thoughtful address by Rand Fishkin (top photo), founder of SEO firm Moz, on “12 Years Building Moz: What I’d Change, Keep the Same & Don’t Yet Know,” which included tributes to his wife and some ruefulness expressed about the amount of time spent at work over the years. Fishkin left attendees, who by this time were groaning with new to-do lists and tactics to implement, with a suggestion that they ask themselves the same three questions about their choices in marketing—and in life.

Photo Credit: Growth Marketing Conference