3 Take Aways: Traffic and Conversion Summit notes 2014

I was very fortunate to attend the 2014 Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego. Whilst there was a lot of valuable information delivered over the days of the summit, I’ve taken the time to summarise my key take outs from the weekend.

1. Advertising is changing…welcome Native Advertising to the arena…

The way that consumers are interacting today with Advertising has changed. With regards to online advertising we have this issue of “banner blindness,” where consumers are ignoring online banners resulting in a continued downtrend in the effectiveness of this once profitable advertising medium.
Advertising blindness also exist in mainstream media such as television, radio, print. People are skipping through and glazing over ads. This is a problem for businesses and marketers.

The shift that we are seeing now is that in order to get our messages across to consumers we need to adopt a “native advertising” approach.

What this means the advertisement needs to match the visual design of the experience within, and look and feel like natural content. The ad needs to behave consistently with the native user experience and function just like natural content.

In Facebook we have Page Post Ads, and Promoted Post, where you can take a post from your Fanpage and advertise it to have it appear in a user’s newsfeed. We need that Newsfeed ads receive higher click through rates and engagement than Facebook Ads on the right hand side. For this very reason – that they match the form and function of the Facebook experience.

Recommended Content and Paid inclusions (advertorials) are other forms of Native Advertising.

Actionable item:

1. Create content – be it an infographic, video, blog article that people can consume (Go to nativeadvertising.com/#/leaderboard for top native ads that are working in the market)
2. Drive Traffic to this content
3. Disguise your opt in page/landing page in your blog post
4. Make sure that you make your opt in box stand out. Optimize this and test it!

Caveat: Your content must be valuable and not spammy! Creating high quality, high value content helps create credibility and trust to increase the likelihood that a customer will buy from you.

2. Conversion Funnel Optimization

Having a sequence that you put your prospect through helps you increase the revenue you can generate from your customer. There are 5 pillars to the funnel.

1. Lead Magnet
   
   Your Lead Magnet is a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market. It provides immediate gratification that can be consumed in less than 5 minutes and begins to take your prospect down the continuum of belief.If has high actual value, and needs to provide a “ah ha!” moment for the prospect, with information that they would not have considered or known that will help them move closer to a desired result.

   Examples:
   Check list, free download, trials, videos, reports, apps.

2. Trip Wire
   Trip wires are low barriers to entry or impulse buy items, that are easy to understand and explain. They seamlessly lead to the core sale and are of high perceived value but is incomplete.Examples: $7 Webinar or hangout
3. Core Offer
   
   This is your flagship product. Businesses tend to get this part right. It’s about building the funnel around what you have to offer so you can optimize your revenue.
4. Profit Maximizers
   Typically Profit maximizers are offers that help your customer get to their desired outcome faster through speed and automation. These take shape in the form of upsells, cross sells, done for you packages, bundles and kits, coaching and consulting.
5. Return path
   
   Constant strategic communication and moving the customer into other products and services.Examples: Continuity programs.

Actionable item:
For each piece of content you produce, think of how you can architect the conversion funnel.

By attaching a funnel to each piece of content you set up assets that automate your leads and sales. It’s about testing and seeing which ones work.

3. Generating Leads Through Youtube Advertising

There were many traffic hacks taught over the weekend, but the one that I felt integrated well with the idea of native advertising and Conversion Funnel was the Youtube Hacks by Jake Larsen of VideoPower.org

Jake spoke about how do we as small businesses, compete against companies who are spending billions of dollars on advertising. The fact is we can’t outspend them, we need to outsmart them.
Small businesses have the opportunity to put ads on Youtube.

• In-search Ads are Ads on the top of Youtube search
• In Display are ads on the Right Hand side, these are your suggested Videos
• In-stream Ads appear as the viewer is watching a Youtube Video.

Instream Ads work so well as you Pay per view. The Cost per view, is where Cost Per click was 10 years ago. On average a view can be anywhere around 2 cents to 23 cents, depending on the audience.

You are only charged for the view after the viewer reaches 30 seconds or the full ad. 29 seconds or less and they click skip or move from the ad – the ad is free to you. Free targeted traffic.

Action steps to generating leads through Youtube Advertsing

1. Create a video that grabs the viewer’s attention in the first 5 seconds
2. Identify and call out the viewer, and show value
3. Build your video around the click, give people and tell people to opt in
4. Get them to click before 30 seconds
5. Make sure your video is attached to a funnel.

4. Ah ha moments.

Think of content as lead magnets.

Lead Magnets are the first touch point in your customer’s journey with you. Test and refine your funnel at every step and build a set of assets that will help generate more leads and sales for you.

Fail quickly and cheaply.

Kevin Harrington of As Seen On Tv spoke about the steps to making money in infomericals. He also talked about how 3 out of 4 of his ideas fail but he manages this by controlling the environment and cost in which he puts them through the test.

This was a lesson in resilience and speed of implementation.

First things first.

As business owners we are constantly inundated with new techniques and methods of marketing. Whilst all of these ideas may have merits the problem that we (and I ) face is that we end up starting 5 different ideas and never finishing 1.

We start new projects whilst other projects haven’t been followed through to completion and this is a major hindrance to our success.

This is certainly not new, but it is relevant in light of all of the information that exist in the marketplace. The challenge is to pick 1 idea, follow it through – hell or high water before moving onto the next idea.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the key take outs. If you’re interested in implementing any of the areas covered in the blog post, from Native Advertising to Funnel Optimization and Youtube Advertising and need help…contact me and let’s see how we can work together!

Sara

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