Brennan Dunn – Personalizing Your Marketing: Why You Should Be Niching In Real-Time – MicroConf 2017 Attendee Talk

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  • I geek out on all things automation and personalization
  • I think what we’re talking about now is something that is going to be really common in marketing in the next few years
  • I personalize my web site to be different depending on what each user has done
    • Most profitable code I’ve ever written
  • People come to our web site. They’re typically different to one another
      • Agency owners
        • Freelancers
        • People who haven’t started freelancing yet
    • They’re asking “How can your product help ME?”
    • That’s a problem. If they can’t see how your product helps, they leave
  • Had this problem when running Planscope (a SaaS)
    • Agencies saying “if this helps freelancers, it can’t help us.”
    • I knew I could help freelancers AND agencies, but by having a generic marketing site that tries to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no-one
  • Possible solution: “I’ll niche!”
    • This works. Makes for MUCH stronger marketing. Problem is, you turn away everyone else.
    • If I say I help freelance web designers learn how to price, I turn away agencies, and non-designers
  • Possible solution: Industry-specific, or problem-specific, landing pages
    • All these duplicate landing pages that target different industries
    • But when someone goes back to your homepage, they’re back to generic copy
    • Those industry-specific sites are siloed
  • What if instead of niching our product, we can niche our marketing?
  • Change our marketing ON THE FLY to suit each person as they’re looking at it
  • Apps do it:
    • Amazon.com - home page shows things they know I’m interested in
    • Netflix - shows my recommendations
    • Facebook - shows my friends, not someone else’s friends!
    • Common thread - they’re all APPS. You log in to them.
  • Why can’t we do the same for our web sites; our blogs; our marketing sites?
  • When we use tools like Drip, ConvertKit, MailChimp, InfusionSoft, what if we could use these tools to power personalization on our web sites?
    • So when someone opts in, or clicks a link in an email we send, we can treat that as an authentication event. That’s them “logging in”
    • Drip holds tags and custom fields. I can store a lot of stuff about them. Who they are; what they’ve bought; how big they are; and push all that stuff to my web site / blog
  • Example:
    • I have articles on my blog on proposals; pricing; and so on
      • If an anonymous user is mostly reading content about proposals… my marketing all changes to invite them to opt in to learn more about writing proposals
    • Industry specific pages - if they’re on the “Higher Education” segment page, bring that knowledge back to your homepage
      • Show testimonials from other Higher Education bodies
    • My main product (Double Your Freelancing Rate)
      • If you’re a developer, you see a headline about the product helping developers.
      • Designers: designers.
      • Niching on demand.
  • Before I personalized that page, a designer on my list was worth $24.63. Now, $41.82. Almost double.
  • Can now see customer revenue separated out by segment
  • Can see that developers are worth twice as much as designers
    • So I should get more developers on my list
    • AND I should work to make designers more valuable
  • “The way you sold me this course… it’s like you read my mind.”
    • Two weeks ago I asked what you were looking for. You told me. Now I can use that to make my content / sales pages more relevant.
  • How can you begin to personalize your web site?
    • If someone’s on your list, and now they’re on your site, don’t show them a newsletter opt-in! Show them the next step of your funnel (e.g. a small product).
    • Do things one step at a time
    • It’ll move the needle in a big way
  • @brennandunn
  • rightmessage.io

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