More afternoon sessions from SearchLove London 2012 including highly technical user tactics from Mat Clayton at MixCloud, and a head-to-head with Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.
The whole day was topped off by the very classy networking party at Foundation bar in Covent Garden where myself and Lisa Myers had a portrait painted by an amazing caricaturist.
Session 6: Marketing Hacks
Mat Clayton, MixCloud
Sharing lessons learned from starting MixCloud
There are 3 user states
- Active – new users, active users
- Inactive – stale users that could be Resurrected – (they are normally because we did something to cause that)
- DEAD – users that have deleted accounts
Most of the sites Mat looks at are more concerned with retention not new use acquisition so how do you resurrect inactive customers?
User Tactics
New Users / Quick Hacks
As a business, you want the upward curve. the grand plan is exponential growth
Tactics that have been employed
- Got the Technology correspondent from the BBC drunk – next day on front page – long term this does not work – your bulk of users who can’t influence in that way
- Beating Algorithms – link to front page not directly to the article
- Twitter #trending Topics – linkbait for the algorithm
- Facebook – talk to the social media teams about using Facebook to gain new users
- Pageleaver.com – the simplest thing works – big photo, no link – big link in the copy – no more than 1 post per day
Ad Strategy 2.0
- Mixcloud have no cash to spend on marketing – they just don’t do it
- An ecosystem developed around the platform – so they decided to make it in to a revenue stream by allowing users to purchase ads through the platform to buy ads to the platform
- New users make up 5% of your new traffic – if you can’t get the 90% of existing to convert the traffic goes down
- This happens as there is a core user base that logs in to the core user base they are hooked addicted never going to leave = growth curve
- The key to spotting when this is happening is look at the DAU rates (daily active users) and divide by MAU (monthly User Rates) – if you can spot it early enough you canmake suee your product survives – the hither the DAU/MAU – the healthy the service
What percentage of users are worth retaining?
Internal metrics called mutual followings beyond a third t is not worth pushing – obviously this takes a lot of time and expertise – requires maths concentration and time – understanding retention – this is the first thing people overlook.
- People you may know ties directly with retention – highly calculated
- People (as with conferences) wander round the edge til they are comfortable then you connect when they are comfortable – on a social network you can just leave
- Get offline to online
- Find out what your users are after
- It takes time to prove retention
Email Tips
- Suggest Follows (you’ve been following X for X time, there are 4 other friends we know you haven’t followed yet etc)
- Send via Gmail – they deal with deliverability problems – working well to get through spam detectors (but expensive)
- Use: https://github.com/skydb/sky – see which users have uploaded a piece of content but have not tweeted it yet – it works so we have to get them to finish off the workflow by tweeting
These strategies have seen conversion rates in double figures 40-50% rates
Retargetting
How can you bring your users back? What else can you do with this piece of technology can you enhance peoples experience for example – Could you drop a cookie then personalise the experience?
If you go to wired we know you like tech so we need to personalise the site to suit you – think beyond advertising – gets the bounce rate down
Notifications
- Facebook logins come via Facebook – BUT you have to get it right – below 17% CTR bad performance –
- Send for about 27 days not 28 – send only to active users, life cycle marketing user
- App request – turns out numbers work well – prevent death of existing users, by moving them up on the map
Transition to Mobile
- Spotify example it is simple – converts better to allow directly sign up
- Smart app ads – ios 6 overtook ios 5 in under 6 days
If you know how to use the Facebook API you also know
- What phone people own
- Which phones their friends own
- If those friends own an iPad
- Which users will be upsold to eg – ‘did you know the IOS is available?’ trigger to conversion
Appstores
- Same for retention
- Build a bookmarklet
- Make sure you have your Chrome app visible among competitors
- If your users have used the app – tell them to go rate it – making people that are enjoying it to go rate it – High retention rate – word of mouth – eg Mat’s phone company sent a text to remind to put the clocks back
Company Culture
When you hire someone you never tell them what to do – why poison their talent?
Mat Shared with us some examples of work live online, but as it contained sensitive data we cannot share it with you here
Session8: Head to Head – Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Will Critchlow & Rand Fishkin
The traditional head to head with Rand and Will this time actually wearing red and blue boxing gowns and coming on to the tune of Rocky!
In the BLUE corner: Will Critchlow:
Inbound marketing on a shoestring? Why would you want to is Will’s initial take on the topic – spending money is good! If you have no cash, your link building budget is limited. Sure you can win with some tactics if you get the right thing at the right time, but this is not scalable, and you can’t consistently win big on a low budget.
Types of successful marketing on a budget?
“If you can’t afford marketing, you probably aren’t charging enough”
- Spend other people’s money
- Forget about ROI
- Spend Time
- Invest in relationships
- Use your faith
- Use your assets
- Use your balls!
- Kickstarter & Crowdsourced funding
- Give away free things – (often not free but you can take orders with print on demand for example T-shirts so you only spend what you use) – using your customers money
- Use other people (see below)
Using other people
Other examples:
SEOMoz – users generate the content
There were so many examples including a message from Obama to say that Rand had been #spending like a Republican’ – I will post the decks later once they are live!
In the RED corner: Rand Fishkin:
True love can provide you with all of your marketing needs
- True love lasts
- It cannot be bought
Why can’t our marketing be more like our love?
- Redistribution costs
- Cost of Customer Acquisition
Rand discusses 20 things they have learned at SEOMoz about true love:
- Empathy + Creativity = Great content
- Innovation doesn’t always trump improvement
- Branding may be more valuable than links & traffic
- Even amateur graphics perform shockingly well
- Being transparent with success works, but failing works even better
- Ranking #1 isnt’ all it’s cracked up to be
- Cannibalizing your own stuff sucks
- Sometimes it’s better to do SEO on someone elses site
- Google has a spooky nose for quality
- Include only the good stuff not the kitchen sink
The after party
Held at the foundation bar in Covent Garden, I just had to include this for the simple fact that during the evening myself and Lisa Myers had a caricature drawn by the artist chosen by SearchLove to entertain the masses.
While we were chatting I said – do you have a website (always on the sell!) – the reply being “yes but not a very good one, do you do websites?”
I had to tell the lovely Steve that the entire after party was made up of Search Engine Optimisation companies which included visiblity and web development and that he should be asking everyone he drew for a link.
So with the above in mind – you never know who your influencer might be, or where you may get your next lead, but knowing your audience might well get Steve a lot of links by the end of the week – and in exchange for the excellent portrait of myself and Lisa – here is your first one from SearchLove 😀 – http://gamesagogo.co.uk/
