Ever feel like you’ve stalled in your marketing knowledge?
You’ve read all the latest blogs, listened to all the best podcast, downloaded all the right kindle books... but it seems you’ve hit a peak?
After identifying all the key concepts, you’re finding each new blog post you read less and less valuable. It seems like they’re all just recycling the same old concepts.
So how do you keep that growth up? How do you continue to push your knowledge to the next level?
One of best ways we've found is by attending industry conferences and summits. The concepts introduced at these kinds of events are the ones that fuel blog posts and marketing principles for years to come.
There’s only one problem...
More...
Events like these usually cost a pretty penny, anywhere between $800 to $5000 to attend. Not to mention the travel cost and time away from your business. Even attending just one of these (usually) weekend long marketing events can drill quite the hole in your pocket and resources.
But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
We sent half the Thrive Themes Marketing Team, and the founders, to one of the world’s biggest online marketing summits: The Traffic & Conversion Summit 2017. There were some game changing tactics and strategies shared there.
We’ve listed all of the key takeaways from the three days of intensive talks, so you can get all the benefits, with none of the jet lag inducing, hip pocket lightening downsides.
The tips are in categories, but there is a bit overlap so make sure you read them all to catch those hidden gems. There were tons of different topics, but these are the nuggets we believe will be the most impactful when growing your online business.
Let's jump straight in!
Website
You Are Not the Hero
Inspired by the Talk: 5 Surprising Components of the Well Branded Website
Speaker: Donald Miller, Founder of StoryBrand
Stories are the most captivating form of content. They have been for as long as we’ve been humans. If you are a marketer, you must understand and utilize the basics of storytelling.
However, don’t make the mistake of focusing on your story. That’s not the story people want to hear. Instead, use storytelling to relate to your ideal customer. Tell their story.
- Always make your customer the hero of the story.
- Use your products or services as 'the guide' in the story, giving them an easy to follow solution to their problem. In other words, call out how the hero can use your product or service to solve the his problem.
- Make sure you describe what success looks and feels like for the hero, so the visitor can visualize what life will be like after using your solution.
To Action This:
Look at your homepage or sales page. Are you telling a story?
If no, tell a story.
If yes, is the story about you or them? If it’s not about them, test a new version with them as the hero.
Only Give Your Visitor One Bowling Ball
Inspired by the Talk: 5 Surprising Components of the Well Branded Website
Speaker: Donald Miller, Founder of StoryBrand
When a visitor comes to your site, their brain is running on autopilot. Unless your page content is either incredibly easy to process, or shocks them out of their pattern, they're not going to take anything in.
You need something that catches the autopilot brain and tells it to engage the thinking brain. Easy to digest content does this, ensuring your content is acknowledged and considered.
Consider every new piece of information on your site a bowling ball. If you hand someone a bowling ball it’s going to be OK for them to hold. If you give them another one right on your homepage, it’s going to be more difficult for them to hold both. After about 4 bowling balls, you run the risk of your visitor dropping them all.
Adding jargon to the mix is like handing them a slippery bowling ball. There’s even less chance they’ll be able to hold on to it.
- Keep your pages simple - one page, one concept, one goal.
- Avoid jargon at all costs.
To Action This:
Check your homepage and any landing pages you may have. Do they follow one train of thought? Are they easy to digest, or do you have big paragraphs and mountains of jargon?
Choose one key goal or concept for each of these pages and cut out every piece of information that doesn't directly relate to that.
Speaking of Jargon - Run an A/A Test!
Inspired by the Talk: Google Optimize: How Google's New Split Testing Tool Will Make You Money
Speaker: Chris Mercer, Measurement Marketer and Co-Owner of Seriously Simple Marketing
What's an A/A test?
It's where you test absolutely, positively... nothing!
What on God's green Earth is the point of that? It has two main benefits. Running a test where the variables are exactly the same (hence the A/A as opposed to the A/B) gives you a chance to:
- Test the validity of software you're using for the testing, and
- Train yourself, and your clients, not to react to the fluctuations in the results before the base metrics are achieved.
The results of an A/B test mean nothing until you've reached at least 100 conversion, and have run the test for over two weeks. This is to account for random fluctuations, and differences traffic and browsing habits based on the day of the week.
To Action This:
Go on, I dare you. Set up an A/A test in Thrive Leads. All you have to do is clone your current Thrive Leads opt-in form and start an A/B test. Make sure you check back regularly so you can see just how wild these tests can be at the start.
After you've hit 100 conversions, and the test has been running for two weeks, you'll see that the results have evened out, and those initial spikes meant nothing.
BONUS TIP: If you have clients this is a fantastic way to avoid those middle of the night phone calls with pleas to stop an A/B test a whole five hours after starting. Run an A/A test and tell them these variations are what to expect with real tests too.
Content Marketing
Be Deliberate With Your Keywords
Inspired by the Talk: Upside Down Content: How We Got 62,898,992 "FREE" Organic Visitors in 2016
Speaker: Perry Belcher, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of DigitalMarketer
Check the keywords surrounding your topic before creating content. There's a huge difference between targeting the search terms 'switchblade laws' vs. 'are switchblades legal.'
- In your content, use the exact words your audience uses when searching for your topic.
To Action This:
When creating content, put the general keyword surrounding your subject in a keyword tool such as Google's Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, or LSIGraph to find the real words people use surrounding your topic.
Use Organic Keywords to Create Your CTAs
Inspired by the Talk: 25 MORE Freakishly Effective Marketing Hacks To Steal & Deploy
Speaker: Roland Frasier, Principle Partner of DigitalMarketer
The copy you use on your Call To Action will determine whether or not your visitor clicks. We discovered this little shortcut to knowing exactly what words to use on your CTA.
- Finding out what keywords your most popular posts are ranking for tells you exactly what words a visitor had in their head when they ended up on your post.
- You can use these insights to craft an Opt-in offer or CTA using those exact words to increase your chance of a conversion.
To Action This:
- Use Google Analytics to find the content that gets the most organic traffic on your site.
- Put your most popular posts and pages through keyword tools like Serpstat, SEMrush or Ahrefs to find out the exact keywords those post are organically ranking for. Each tool has a section for 'organic keywords.'
- Use those keywords to either create or update the wording for all the Opt-in offers or CTA's on those posts.
Ask and You Shall Receive
Inspired by the Talk: Wicked Smart Contest: Mind-Blowing Marketing Tactics You Can Implement Now
Speaker: Roundtable presented by Roland Frasier & Perry Belcher
Testimonials are one of the most powerful, easy to come across types of content on your site. The best part is, it's all user generated. You don't have to do the work to create them!
- Get your customers to create your most powerful content for you - by regularly asking for testimonials.
To Action This:
Use a program like Thrive Ovation to set up an automated customer testimonial system, so you'll have an endless array of testimonials to choose from when building out your websites and sales pages.
E-Commerce
Referral Programs Aren't Just for Big Business
Inspired by the Talk: Success Strategies Of The Top 50 Internet Retailers
Speaker: Roland Frasier, Principle Partner of DigitalMarketer
Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful, and underutilized, marketing techniques available today. Why does it tend to get swept under the rug? Because it's not exactly easy to implement, or all that scalable.
Or is it?
- With a mixture of the domination of social media, and some clever coding, small scale referral programs are starting to become a viable option.
- Software for small scale referral programs, such as Friendbuy and ReferralCandy, is beginning to emerge. These programs are easy to set up, and do all the tracking for you. They give visitor multiple mediums to share the referral through, such as social media channels and email.
To Action This:
If you've ever considered using a referral program for your business, now is the time to implement! There's no longer a technical barrier to setting one of these systems up.
Judge Your Book by It's Cover
Inspired by the Talk: How to Generate Followup Sales From Your Amazon Buyers (Even If You Don't Have Their Email Address)
Speaker: Lori Taylor, CEO & Founder of REV Media Marketing
We're all human, and we're definitely not perfect. It's time to accept it, and better yet... use it to our advantage. As silly as it seems, the way a product is presented governs our perception of that product's value. Much like first impressions of people can effect your judgement of their character from then on in, product packaging effects the lens through which we judge the rest of our experience with the product.
- If you make a product look good, it's perceived value goes up.
- Often fancying up the packaging to establishing a perception of quality is worth the effect on your margins. This is especially true for consumables, since a customers life time value is a great deal higher, meaning it's worth spending a bit more to get them to buy from you again.
To Action This:
Always make the extra effort to ensure your product is presented well. This may be as simple as adding a nicely designed card to the box, or by crafting an all out 'unboxing' experience, depending on what your margins allow.
The higher your customer's life time value, the more you should be spending on product presentation.
Sales & Customer Support
Let Your Customer Choose How to Interact
Inspired by the Talk: Facebook Messenger Bots: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Profit
Speaker: Ezra Firestone, Founder of Smart Marketer
There’s a lot of talk about chatbots in the online marketing and customer support space. The term 'chatbot' refers to an automated computer program that interacts with customers within the native chats of various social media platforms, such a Facebook Messenger. While this sort of tech isn't suitable for a lot of businesses, the trend can teach us some pretty important lessons.
- The main takeaway is to meet your customers where they are. Chat has become the new “default” way of communicating. Many of us probably do it more than actually talking to people. And we certainly do it more than sending emails or calling on the phone. So it makes sense to embrace that and let the customer talk to you the way they want to.
- Essentially any communication channel can also be a marketing channel. A perfect example of this was all the speakers who offered to share the slides if you texted a specific number. Like any smart marketers would, you can be sure they had the appropriate follow up sequences in place.
To Action This:
If you have the resources and the people, incorporating social media channels into your customer communications is definitely something to look into. Apps like Modern, Zotabox and ManyChat will help you do this, and some include chatbots or canned replies so you can automate certain parts of the interaction.
Turning the Buyer's Journey into a Loop
Inspired by the Talk: The NEW Customer Value Optimization
Speaker: Ryan Deiss, Co-Founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer
In the opening talk by Ryan Deiss, he turned the Buyer's Journey on it's head... in a very literal sense. The 'Customer Value Journey' is the concept of extending the Buyer's Journey to create true fans of your customers, so that those at the end of their journey help feed the beginning stage (the Awareness Stage) through word of mouth and referrals.
- After your customer has passed the Decision Stage and purchased from you, the journey isn't over. By adding an Ascension Stage where you focus on connecting and delivering added value to your customers, you can create true fans who will essentially become marketers for you.
- True Fans will become a source of new leads through word of mouth, and those leads will be of far greater quality, since they've already been exposed to real life testimonials.
To Action This:
Ask yourself "What can I do to deliver more value to my customers?" Sometimes it's as simple as a personal email thanking them for purchasing your product, and asking if there's anything they'd like to improve.
Other strategies could include creating a value based community surrounding your product, such as an 'Insider Tips and Tricks' Facebook group, or by providing unexpected bonuses like PDF's, product add-ons or discounts.
Make Buying From You the Next Logical Step
Inspired by the Talk: How to Architect an Ideal Sales Conversation
Speaker: Ryan Deiss, Co-Founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer
Some sales are easier than others. Selling your plumbing services to someone whose been battling an overflowing toilet on a Sunday evening is a lot easier than getting a sale from someone who's calling around because they're 'considering' a bathroom re-model.
While someone calling you about a blocked toilet on the weekend is luck more than anything, there are few things you can do to foster the ideal situation for a sale. There's no one size fits all method for this, but these examples from the talk will help demonstrate how you could adapt these strategies for your own business.
- If you identify where your customer is, or what they need right before they need your product or service, you can use that as a pre-curser to guide them into a sale. An example of this is the way DigitalMarketer HQ uses a free training webinar called “How to Structure and Build a Modern Digital Marketing Team,” that leads to an offer for a training and onboarding program to help business owners quickly launch an internal digital marketing team. ”Since you’re planning to build/grow an internal marketing team, would you like to use our tools to streamline and automate the training and on-boarding process?”
- Opt-in offers and low priced items that encourage bigger purchases (trip-wire sales) work to a similar extent. A good example of this is a business that sells DIY candle making supplies. They have a low price offer for a bulk package of candle wicks. Their ideal sales conversation happens when someone buys these candle wick. ”Since you just bought all these candle wicks, it’s clear you’re making candles...would you like to buy some of our candle wax and scented oils?”
To Action This:
Figure out what your ideal selling environment is. Create focused low barrier opt-in offers or low-priced products that place you in the perfect situation to sell your main product.
Use this template to figure out how your can put yourself in a situation where a sale is the logical next step:
- Since you did ABC, it’s clear you want XYZ
Email Marketing
A/B Testing = Always/Be Testing
Inspired by the Talk: Viral Email Campaigns That TRIPLE Response and Explode Branding
Speaker: Perry Belcher, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of DigitalMarketer
We got lazy at the Thrive Themes office. We stopped testing our email subject lines.
Why would we stop testing? After a certain point we just assumed we'd 'nailed it,' and that there wasn't much left to test. It was only after this talk on how to craft the most openable/clickable emails possible that we realized we should never have stopped.
The strategy involved sending an email to a percentage of a list to test the subject line, and then the body copy, and once the most successful variation was identified, it was sent to the rest of the list.
- Never miss an opportunity to get to know your audience better. Every email you send is a chance to do this.
- Use mini-campaigns on just a percentage of your list to find the best subject line and copy for each email.
To Action This:
Choose different metrics, and test at least one of them every time you send an email. Take note of the results to build up a best practice for your email list. What words do they respond to? What words brush past them? Do they respond more to emotional or mysterious subject lines?
If your list is big enough, this is what Perry suggests: send your email to 10% of your list first, A/B testing the headline. Wait 1 hour to choose a winner. Next, send it to another 10% with the winning headline in place, this time A/B testing the body copy. Wait 1 hour for the result, then send the winning variations to the entire list.
Re-engage With a Personal Touch
Inspired by the Talk: The NEW Customer Value Optimization
Speaker: Ryan Deiss, Co-Founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer
Sometimes the reason a prospect won't take you up on an offer isn't because they aren't interested, but because the timing just isn't right. Simple personalized emails are a great way to re-engage prospects.
- Just because a prospect says no to an offer doesn't always mean the lead is lost. Sometimes it's just an issue of timing.
- Using a personal touch in your emails can help open and response rates.
To Action This:
Create a timed email follow up sequence on offers where a customer has signed up to the first stages of a funnel but not followed through to the final sale.
The first stage could be anything from signing up to a free opt-in offer to purchasing a low dollar offer, anything where you know they were subsequently presented with the main offer.
Make the email look like it was sent personally from you. Keep it short and sweet, with the body asking "Are you still looking to... (solution your product or service offers)."
Original Subject Lines Are so 2010
Inspired by the Talk: Viral Email Campaigns That TRIPLE Response and Explode Branding
Speaker: Perry Belcher, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of DigitalMarketer
You don't have to somehow conjure the most clickable subject line out of thin air. The internet is full of perfect subject lines. Where?
On public forums and groups on your exact topic. Your target market is already telling you exactly what they want to see.
- Listen to conversations already being held on channels your target market participates in.
To Action This:
If you’re looking for subject lines, go to Reddit and search for your topic. The most upvoted articles will give you the “hot topics” in your market. Use these for subject line ideas.
Email is Still King
Inspired by the Talk: The E-Commerce Marketers Guide to Email Automation
Speaker: Ezra Firestone, Founder of Smart Marketer
Ezra Firestone's talk revolved around how they were using email in one of their e-commerce businesses to generate 31% of their revenue. They do this with specific email campaigns depending on where their customer is in the sales funnel.
- There’s lots of stuff you can get caught up in in your online business: PPC, content marketing, SEO, social media, etc. but email marketing is still a major leverage point.
- Focus on four main types of emails: trust builders, social proof, content and offers.
- Use the stages in your sales funnel to shape the content you send to specific prospects.
To Action This:
Spend time and resources working on your email marketing. You should be making a direct offer to someone in your community every 6 weeks.
At a minimum you should have a pre-purchase campaign and a post-purchase campaign, but if you’re more advanced you should set up:
- A sales cart abandonment campaign
- A win-back campaign to re-engage people who have engaged with you in the past
- A repeat buyer campaign for people who have purchased from you multiple times
Paid Advertising
Use the Buyer's Journey to Decide on Ad Channels
Inspired by the Talk: The YouTube Ads Framework: How to Find Your Customers, Know What They're Thinking and Get Them to Buy
Speaker: Tom Breeze, CEO of Viewability
And: 3-Step Facebook Video Ad Formula: What We've Learned from 273 Million Video Views
Speaker: Keith Krance, Founder and CEO of Dominate Web Media
There is no one-ad-fits-all solution when it comes to paid advertising. You need to target different sectors of your audience in different ways depending on where they are in their Buyer's Journey.
- Target different channels and devices with specific content, based on a user's intent when using that channel + device combination. Some examples of this are:
- Facebook + Mobile = Entertainment and browsing. Ideal content for this combo would be fun, non-salesy content to increase brand awareness.
- Facebook + Desktop = Active, intentional interaction. This is where you'd use sales retargeting and ads with CTAs.
- Google + Mobile = Answering a Burning Question. Focus more on awareness and value based authority content.
- Be very aware of the mood your lead is in when they are seeing your ads. 'I want to know something' vs. 'I want to do something' vs. 'I want to buy something' vs. 'I want to more of what I’m into'.
To Action This:
Align you promotional content with your audience's behavior on each device and channel. Have a mobile focus for awareness content, and a desktop focus for sales retargeting. Avoid sales messages in your awareness content.
Choose Your Own Adventure Ads
Inspired by the Talk: The YouTube Ads Framework: How to Find Your Customers, Know What They're Thinking and Get Them to Buy
Speaker: Tom Breeze, CEO of Viewability
Just like multiple choice opt-in forms are efficient, you can make “choose your own adventure YouTube videos” to increase engagement.
- You can take the self segmenting concept to mediums other than your your opt-in forms.
- Give your YouTube ad audience a way to tell you what they want from you.
To Action This:
Add multiple end screen annotations to your YouTube video ads that link to different videos. Explain which video is suitable for which segment of your audience. An example would be to allow your audience to choose their skill level for guitar lessons, by offering a choice between a beginner lesson or an advanced lesson.
Tell Your Pixels To Slow Down
Inspired by the Talk: 25 MORE Freakishly Effective Marketing Hacks To Steal & Deploy
Speaker: Roland Frasier, Principle Partner of DigitalMarketer
If you are using any sort of retargeting pixel on your site this trick, while quite technically advanced, can help you keep your ad spend down and your retargeting audience high quality.
- If you delay your pixels from firing until a visitor has been on your site for a specific period of time, you'll avoid bouncers and low quality traffic getting mixed up in your audience targeting. This will keep your retargeting audience relevant, and in turn your advertising costs down.
To Action This:
Again, this is a pretty advanced move, but just knowing it's an option puts you ahead of the curve. If you're serious about implementing this we'd highly recommend getting a developer to assist you.
Dial Up That Contrast
Inspired by the Talk: How to Craft the Perfect Attention Grabbing, ROI-Producing Facebook Ad
Speaker: Nicholas Kusmich, Facebook Advertising Strategist and Founder of nicholaskusmich.com
When doing Facebook Ads, your image is like your email subject line. It determines if a user is going to stop scrolling or not.
- Make sure the image is relevant, emotional and tells a story if possible.
- When choosing your image, ask yourself ‘if there was no copy allowed on this ad, would I use this image?'
- Dial up the contrast on your images. It's helps your image stand out amongst a busy feed.
Here's a quick mockup of the contrast principle in action. We got the image from Pexels, dialed up the contrast in PicMonkey then tested what it would look like in a Facebook feed using AdParlor's Ad Mockup Generator.
To Action This:
Make sure the images for your Facebook ads either tell a story or trigger an emotion, and have enough relevancy to make at least a little bit of sense without additional text. Put your images through a program like PicMonkey to dial up the contrast before posting.
Business in General
Feedback is Essential To Grow
Inspired by the Talk: Surveys Suck! How to Know What Your Customer Wants Without Asking
Speaker: Justin Rondeau, Director of Optimization at DigitalMarketer
Seems logical, but it's important to reiterate. Feedback is crucial for the success of any business. You need to understand how your customers think and feel, and what their experience is like when interacting with your website and product or service, otherwise you’re flying blind.
What most people don’t realize is that they are already getting a lot of feedback. For example, through support requests and website data.
- Learning what frustrates people, where they get stuck and why they cancel can be extremely useful feedback.
- You can get a lot of insight by simply observing how people interact with your website or product. Look at our website reviews. Many of the things we point out would be blindingly obvious if website owners actually watched someone interact with the website.
To Action This:
Use programs like TruConversion or Hotjar to run heat maps and visitor interaction videos on your website. This will allow you to gain insights on how visitors interact with your site, and where they might be getting stuck.
Create a system by which you can pull valuable information from your support channel(s). E.g. weekly meeting with the support team, to find out what common complaints are, what people are asking for etc.
What Your Customers Really Think
Inspired by: Shane Melaugh's personal experience at the Summit
This tidbit is straight from the Co-Founder himself: you guys are too nice to his face. Shane had the chance to meet a lot of you at the conference, and while he enjoyed meeting real customers in person, he had to do a lot of prodding to get useful feedback.
The conference environment and general social norms meant people fell back on surface level politeness and positivity. We assured him this was normal, but it lead him to quite a valid conclusion.
- If you want real, honest feedback from customers, you need to remove other elements that might govern their reply, such as social niceties.
- While there seems to be some unspoken integrity in meeting your customers face to face, you're not at a disadvantage if you can't actually do this in your business. You're likely to get more valid interactions when your customer isn't staring you in the face.
To Action This:
Do customer development calls, no matter what your business is, even if it isn't an online business. It removes the veil of social politeness that's likely to skew your customer's feedback.
Wow, you made it all the way to the bottom?! I'm impressed. That was no shortage of nuggets to sift through.
Did you get any value from our takeaways? What was your favorite tip, and how to you intend to apply it to your business?
Let us know in the comments below!
Wow, this is solid gold.
There are 3-4 sections that I will be looking at straightaway. The email testing 10% at a time is so simple but effective. Annoys me how I can’t think of that stuff!
Hi HT, we were exactly the same. When you read it it seems so obvious, but it helps to have someone point it out. Glad you got some useful takeaways 🙂
Hey Stephanie, thank you very much, this is an extremly valuable post! I couldn’t make it to the summit, but I valuate Ryan, Molly & Co highly.
I specially like Donald Miller (storybrand) who also has a very good podacast.
Hi Christoph,
I agree, Shane and I were at the Donald Miller talk and he did a fantastic job of explaining why and how simplicity is important on your site. Another case of it seems so obvious, but it doesn’t hit you in the face until someone explains it the way he did.
What a wealth of information! Thank you for putting this together. Although I am overwhelmed, I deeply appreciate the effort it took to create and the open sharing of the takeaways and the ideas on how to put into action. Now to make time to do some of this!
You know it’s a big one when you need a table of contents!! Thanks Kelly, glad to hear the tips are going to be actioned.
Wow!
Great review Stephanie!
I agree that attending conferences can be powerful, but they are expensive (esp. including ancillary costs and the opportunity costs if one’s time).
Also, some conferences have evolved into pitch-fests 🙁
Hi Trevor, I agree, it can be hard to find the ‘good ones.’ Thanks for reading!
THANK YOU for this post, Stephanie! There’s plenty of valuable tips here, I’ve just added it to my Pocket, I know I’ll coming back to it over and over again in the future 🙂
Great to hear Yann 🙂
Wow! This post is a keeper. Thank you, Stephanie.
Glad you got something from it Carroll!
Bookmarking this one!!
If you’re as protective of your bookmarks as I am Matt, I take that as quite the complement 😉
Thank you so much! That was fantastic!
As far as Shane’s comment on people giving feedback, I agree. I run a business teaching classes. I’ve always included free coaching calls with the classes, which nobody else in my industry does. I won’t be able to do so soon, because of the time it takes. But, it’s been immensely valuable because people give me feedback one-on-one that they never do in a class full of people. Often, it’s exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from the in person classes. I also have always asked people why they signed up, both by email before the classes, and on the first coaching call. That information is extremely valuable.
That sounds like quite a valuable differentiator for you Chad. All your competitors are probably wondering how you seem to ‘read your customer’s minds’ 🙂
This is useful and valuable, thanks. What I am missing – as a a beginner – are short examples of each scenario. Would make this much easier to understand and implement.
Mark
Hi Mark, thanks for the feedback. It’s always good to hear how we can improve the readability and comprehension of the posts. I’ll try to implement this in future.
AWESOME, FOLKS, A-W-E-S-O-M-E!!! Thank you so much!
Thanks Pavel!
Thanks. Absolutely worth reading and implementing.
Thanks for reading!
Pearls on a string. Great way to get updated.
Thanks
Thanks Finn. I’ve never heard that saying before… see now you’re teaching me something!
Hi. I do not know what you mean by ‘Do customer development calls’. Please could you explain?
Hi Sheila,
Customer development calls are when you get your customers on the phone or Skype and talk to them about their experience with your product or service, as well as about the problem your product or service solves. This gives amazing insights on how you could improve or add to your value proposition.
If you need question ideas check out the 13 Questions in this post, they can be repurposed for great customer development call questions.
Great information. I need to bookmark this page and study it!
Thanks Art, glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks Stephanie, this information is amazing. I greatly appreciate all of the work that you did to put this together!
Thanks George, I can take all the credit. Dave, Hanne and Shane all contributed with their top takeaways (I just had to translate them into human speak :p)
Fantastic synthesis Stephanie! You’ll be doing ALL the good conferences… right?! ;o)
That’s what I’m trying to convince Shane of Thom 😉
Ok good information. It would be good now to take each of these things and show us how to efficiently and effectively implement them using Thrive Themes – now this would be smart. You get content that you can use to market your products and we get knowledge on how to leverage your products that we already own.
“If you’ve ever considered using a referral program for your business, now is the time to implement! There’s no longer a technical barrier to setting one of these systems up.” if this is genuinely the case then when can we expect to see Thrive Referrals product, another opportunity for you guys.
Hi Glen, you can be assured we will be (and have been) implementing all of these takeaways within Thrive. That might actually be a great idea for a follow up blog post a few months from now, reporting on what changes we made and how they benefited the business. Thanks for the suggestions.
Excellent summary, thank you for this!
Thanks for taking the time to read it Mikael 🙂
Wow!!! Thank you so much. You are really taking adding value for your community to the next level. Every single To Action This Box is awesome.
Thanks Mignon! It’s that good old repeating post structure coming into play again!
This is an amazing post. Short bits of super inspiring tactics. Thrive is amazing… Thanks Stephanie
Glad you found it useful Sven!
Solid nuggets of gold. Excellent stuff. Thank you guys for condensing and sharing what you learned.
We had so many nuggets we didn’t know what to do with them! Glad we found an outlet that was useful to more people than just us.
Nice executive summaries – thanks. Now I’ll have to come back and read them again plus seek out more info on the web.
Hi Colin,
Agreed on the more info needed. I had to stop myself from too diving deep or I would have written a book not a post :p but it helps as a reference point to know what to research more.
I love Donald Miller he is one of the best teachers on Storytelling. Two others I like are: Lisa Bloom and Michael Margolus. So I am a big believer in Donald Miller and incorporating storytelling and also that our product/what ever we are doing is not the Hero. The Hero is our client. Still in the planning stages of my Blog yet.
Sounds like you’re off to a good start if you’ve already got those concepts down 🙂
Thank you for putting this together Stephanie.
A real value-packed piece. I’ll be putting a new website and business plan together soon so I’ve saved this article to help me along the way. The “To Action This” bits and links to tools really make these tips… well, actionable!
Thanks David, I’m glad it was actionable. We always aim for that, otherwise it’s just too much theory!!
Absolutely brilliant information! Love the bowling ball comment! I’m off to check mine…
Hi Jackie, that was my favorite too. It just makes so much sense when you hear it in that way.
Definitely a great reference guide for content markers. Bookmarking this now!
Glad you enjoyed it Ethan!
Informative Post. On the side note, How do you setup sub- category under the table of content with TCB.
Thanks Sunny, for the sub-categories you can choose to include the H3 headings in the table (or any other subheadings). Full details on how to do it are here.
I rarely comment but was compelled to say thanks. Genuinely useful information, clearly presented. Feels like the internet is growing up.
Thanks Kevin, comments like this fuel the fire 🙂
This was incredibly informative, thank you. I’m going to have to bookmark this page and re-read it. Thanks again!
Glad you enjoyed it Angelo
Mostly relevant and eventually overwhelming for the already 14h/day working entrepreneur. Thank you for putting it all together in a tidy and actionable manner. Will definitely bookmark this for more quite times. But will they ever come? And where did I save the bookmark?
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean Dano 😉 But nice to have the theory in the back of your mind.
Hi Stephanie
Not only is this an awesome post but your comment replies are the best ever seen – definitely no outsource here with generic template:).
There are as many actionable points just in your replies that make for great reading itself.
Congratulations on brilliant content and dedication.
Cheers
Alison
Hi Alison,
Thanks for the lovely comment, it’s really nice to hear 🙂
(and well done for being one to read the comments, there’s often a lot of hidden value there that most people skip over!)
Awesome post
Thanks Sivakumar!
Wow everyday is a schoolday with your blogs Stephanie, thanks so much I love everything you guys put out. There is so much noise on the web especially within the internet marketing space. Thankfully I can block it all out with you and Hanne providing epic posts like this.
– Bookmarking for sure.
‘Everyday’s a school day with your blogs Stephanie’ – I’m bookmarking this comment for sure :p Thanks for the great feedback Michael!
I really enjoyed the ‘You Are Not the Hero’ tip… I’d love to see a couple examples of websites doing this. Did they show examples of some at the event? Do you have some you can present? I’d love to see a couple examples.
Hi Cartess,
We didn’t get any examples at the event but I’ll keep an eye out for good example and maybe we can do a more in depth blog post on it at some point.
Excellent, thank you for putting this together. I wish I could take in more conferences like this! I’ve got several action items to follow up on.
We’ll try to do as many as we can like this!
Great little tip – “Dial up the contrast on your images”
Any chance you might make us a beautiful StoryBrand template? (A good example here: https://myclearbrand.com/home/). I know you’ve done some other philosophy-specific pages, like the Upside-Down Homepage, so this would be a great addition. — Thanks!
Hi Danno,
With our block templates that’s SUPER easy to do 🙂