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Austin Inbound Marketing Expert Walks Lean Marketers Through Her Marketing Process

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From ‘Shiny Objects’ to the ‘WIIFM Question’ — Amanda McGuckin Hager Shared Inbound Marketing Secrets at Capital Factory

I gasped out loud when Amanda McGuckin Hager clicked on her PowerPoint presentation and displayed her company’s sales funnel on the screen at the Austin Lean Startup Meeting at Capital Factory in June.

sales funnel with target
Expert shared value of inbound marketing at Austin Meetup Is your sales funnel filled with content that is attracting and engaging your target audience? If not, I can help. Contact me about my Freelance Content Marketing Writing services.

It was a thing of beauty.

The funnel included color-coded spheres that descended from larger at the top to smaller at the bottom, each labeled for its stage in the sales process. Along the right-hand side was listed the questions that had to be answered at each stage as prospects moved through the funnel.

It should come as no surprise that Amanda had created such a stellar funnel. “Sales funnels are the foundation of my life,” she said. Her 20-year career has been focused on inbound lead generation, building scalable and repeatable lead gen engines that drive revenue.

“It’s fantastic to look at a multi-million dollar pipeline and be able to say, ‘Yeah, I brought all of those leads into the company.’”

Her first job “working under the hood” of a company’s lead engine was at Solar Winds. “I strategically worked with the hiring manager for one year to get that job, because Solar Winds was viewed as a leader of inbound marketing by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I wanted to know how they created something so special, including what levers were pulled and buttons pushed in its sales funnel, and how all of the moving parts worked together.”

Today she is a Strategic Marketing Executive at PeopleAdmin. She’s worked at nearly a dozen other tech companies in Austin, including Dell and InfoChimps. She also mentors startups at Capital Factory and speaks around the country.

Inbound Marketing Overview — Attract. Engage. Convert. Repeat.

At this presentation, she described her views of and experiences with inbound marketing.

1. Attract.

“The first goal is to attract your target audience with what I call a ‘shiny object.’ In other words, something of value that people want, like white paper, piece of collateral, or how-to document.

For example, at InfoChimps, she created a document called, “How to Do a Big Data Project.” “The idea was that if they can do it themselves, then more power to them. If not, we’re here to do it for them,” she explained. “It was valuable.”

This stage also requires a significant call-to-action. “That’s the gateway that you want everyone to come to you through. It’s how they’ll connect with you first. So you have to put it in everything. In your emails, your press release boiler plates, and every piece of collateral.”

2. Engage.

Once you’ve attracted a prospect with a shiny object, you have to deliver. “If they pick up the shiny object and find it’s just a gum wrapper, they will be pretty disappointed. You really want to deliver on what you promise.”

Also, it must address the WIIFM question — What’s In It For Me? “Your shiny object must fill a real need for your target audience,” said Amanda.

The content must also pass the LCD test — the Lowest Common Denominator in terms of readability. “I typically write for the eight to tenth grade level, sometimes even fifth grade if it’s a really technical piece.

“I often pass content through an English Gradability Scale, because people don’t typically read at higher levels. Even Time magazine is written at the eight to tenth grade level.”

She shared a story about a corporate executive who wrote a press release to announce a new technology. “When I ran it through the gradability scale it was ranked at a 20th grade level, which is post doctorate. This was for reporters, most of whom don’t have post doctorate degrees. So it was sure to fail the audience.

“It’s important to appeal to the exact audience you are going after and make it easy for them to read and understand.”

3. Conversion.

“I’m not an expert on conversion,” noted Amanda, “but there is plenty of great information available on the art and science of it. And it is an art and a science. If it’s your job you should learn as much as you can.”

4. Repeat.

“Once you’ve completed these steps, you do it all again.”

To hear Amanda’s entire talk on inbound marketing, watch the video here.

Do you need a professional Content Marketing Writer to help you attract and engage prospects through your sales funnel?

If so, I’m available to be your on-call Freelance Content Marketing Writer. Let’s set up a time to talk about how I can help you meet your inbound content marketing needs.

Email Me Today — karen (dot) taylor (dot) writer (at) gmail (dot) com.

How Building a Content Strategy with Mental Models Improved Contacts and Revenue for National Instruments’ Academic Program

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Six Steps to Align Your Content Strategy With Human Behavior — and Boost Your Marketing Results

Mind Model
Could creating mental models be the answer to your Content Marketing strategy challenges? National Instruments used them and gained great results.

In 2011, National Instruments was facing a “good, bad, and ugly” Content Marketing situation, according to Lauren Moler, Web Content Producer.

The Good: NI had a new online messaging architecture.

The Bad: None of the content creators were using it.

The Ugly: Customers were not finding the information they needed.

Rather than start from scratch to develop all new content, Moler researched to find a different solution. She landed on the concept of “mental models.”

Her inspiration came from the classic book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young.

Young defines mental models this way:

“Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behavior made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.”

“The top part of the model is a visual depiction of the behavior of a particular audience, faithfully representing root motivations. The bottom part of the model shows various ways of supporting matching behaviors. Where support and behavior are aligned, you have a solution. Where a behavior is not supported, you have an opportunity to explore further.”

“Using a mental model can advance several tasks for you — both from a tactical and strategic standpoint. It can guide the design of the solution you are working on. It can help you, and your team, make good user and business decisions. And, it can act as a roadmap, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity as the makeup of your team evolves over the next decade.”

Lauren Gives Presentation in Austin — “I’ll Give You a Piece of My Mind! Building a Content Strategy with Mental Models”

Lauren got the greenlight to implement the mental modeling process in one area of NI’s business: it’s Academic Program.

The result was exceptional. Within six months of implementing the solution based on the mental models, the business unit achieved two key results:

  • 70% increase in contacts
  • 51% increase in online revenue

Mental modeling is being rolled out to other business units.

Lauren presented NI’s mental model case study at last year’s Content Marketing World conference — and again on the evening of February 25th at the Austin Content Meetup.

Here’s an overview of the six steps in NI’s mental models process.

Step 1 — Inventory Content

“Our process started with an inventory of our existing content,” explained Lauren. “We had to start somewhere so we began by logging the following content information on an Excel spreadsheet.”

  • Page title
  • URL
  • Content Summary
  • Quality Assessment According to Best Practices
  • Phase in Content Marketing Process

Step 2 — Identify Customer Profiles

“We started quick and dirty with just a list of bullet points,” said Lauren. “We included any bit of information significant enough to better understand our customers.”

Step 3 — Define User Tasks

This involved brainstorming with the team to extract ideas from all of the knowledge holders. Lauren said that involving everyone in the process was key. “At NI, we have a distributed publishing model with a lot of content creators and a consensus culture.”

To encourage participation, charts were posted at key places in the company and people were encouraged to add their insight. “We used an analog approach — post it notes!” she said. “This allowed us to get our hands on the content in a tactile way.”

Step 4 — Group Tasks into Related Tasks

“We looked for patterns within the content and grouped them into information buckets.”

Step 5 — Map Content to Tasks

NI’s mental model is a chart that plots user content needs and NI’s content along the follow six steps in the buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Purchases
  • Initial Success
  • Proficiency
  • Beyond Proficiency
Academic Realign Mental Model_Highlight
National Instruments Mental Model for its Academic unit. The upper half shows what content consumers need at each stage of the buyers’ journey and the bottom half shows what content NI has for each stage. The red boxes show where NI already has useable content.

Step 6 — Create Content Templates

To facilitate content creation in a company with thousands of content creators, Lauren used the results of mental modeling to create site maps and content templates.

Lauren says that in addition to gaining exceptional results, NI also gained several key insights from mental modeling:

  • NI had content gaps
  • NI had been de-prioritizing key marketing tasks in favor of marketing offers
  • NI wasn’t repurposing its content
  • NI had some good content

“The mental model process allowed us to see key areas where we could use our existing content, which content we could repurpose, and where we needed to create new content.”

Although NI deals with massive amounts of content, Lauren encourages companies of all sizes to use mental model to create content strategies.

“Whether you’re a company of one or 1,000, creating mental models is a great exercise to manage your content creation.

“You’ll get a handle on your content and see how it maps to your customers’ information needs. This insight is invaluable.”

Connect with Lauren Moler on Twitter: @merrymoler

How Engaging is Your Content? — Insights on How Four Austin Companies Take Customer Engagement to Heart

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Customer Engagement is Hot — Are You Wooing Your Leads, Prospects, and Customers with Content that Wow’s Them?

Cupid with an arrow
Are you sending your target audience enough love? If not, it may be time to heat up your relationship with some highly targeted, high-impact Content Marketing.

Love is in the air today. But how much love are you feeling between you and your target audience?

One of the keys to successful marketing is engaging customers with high-quality, high-impact Content Marketing — that delights, engages, and bonds them to your brand.

Here are insights on how four Austin companies are creating stronger bonds with their prospects, leads, and customers through relationship-building Content Marketing.

1. Whole Foods Market — A Whole World of Content Marketing

We all know Whole Foods as the little local natural food store that made it big — really really BIG. But did you know that Whole Foods is also a world-class Content Marketer — engaging its target audience in multiple ways — its blog, an online magazine, social media, and a recently launched TV series?

Here’s a quick rundown of Whole Foods’ many Content Marketing initiatives:

  • The Whole Story blog — chock full of food-related news and recipes.
  • The Whole Journeys Travel Blog — a series of international trips geared toward “active foodies.”
  • An online magazine called “Dark Rye” — which is packed with recipes, travel videos, and food photos, as well as full-length written features about people living life to the fullest.
  • A spin-off of the magazine into a 20-episode TV series launched this year.
  • And a lot of social media, including Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

In fact, Whole Foods is considered an uber-pinner in the Pinterest world, thanks to the inspiration and dedication of the company’s global community manager, Michael Aaron Bepko.

The company creates its boards with the aim of appealing to a broad range of Pinterest users, while tying the brand to a certain type of food culture. Whole Foods’ Pinterest page already has a following of 200,000.

2. HomeAway — Listens to Customers Aspirations, Then Delivers

Today HomeAway is a giant in the vacation rental category. But I knew HomeAway when it was just one guy plugging away out of his home office.

Many years ago, I cold-called the founder to see if he needed a freelance writer. He said that he was working with one writer already (I think she was in Maryland), and didn’t need another one at that time.

Imagine my surprise to watch how this company has grown.

HomeAway’s growth is not by accident. It takes customer engagement to heart.

Here’s an interesting except from a blog post written by the company’s Social Media Manager, Jennifer Stafford, about how the company works to meet its customers’ interests.

“One example of our testing and measurement results can be seen within our ‘Aspirational’ content category. Throughout 2013 we tested various aspirational vacation rentals such as castles, oceanfront mansions, and private islands on Facebook and Pinterest to determine which is most engaging. Testing revealed that private islands are our best performing content type in this category; our most recent post received over 17,000 points of engagement. Based on these results, the decision was made to begin featuring island properties as a separate content category, and a more frequent topic in our editorial calendar.”

3. National Instruments — Mapping the Minds of its Customer Base

This technology company takes Content Marketing and customer engagement seriously — even creating mental models to track customer behavior and buying cycles.

In fact, Content Strategist and Information Architect Lauren Moler gave a talk on the subject at the Content Marketing World 2013 conference. (Note: Lauren is a superstar in the burgeoning Content Marketing world — and is often quoted on the subject.)

According to Lauren, the NI mental model process (based on Indi Young’s book Mental Models) lays out user goals and then maps content to those tasks, identifying gaps and opportunities for reuse. Once you have a tangible model to share, you can distribute it to your organization and get your stakeholders involved in executing your content strategy. Lauren said this process helped NI increase leads and online revenue.

Special note: Lauren is sharing am NI case study at an upcoming Austin Content Meetup on February 25. Hurry if you are interested: I just checked and there are only 10 seats left.

4. Spiceworks — A Place with a Soul Became the Beating Heart of the IT World

When Forbes calls your company “the future of media,” that is a very big deal. (Although Content Marketing Supernova would fit too.)

So imagine Spiceworks’ humble roots as just another technology start-up trying to find customers during the technology bust.

Then Spiceworks did something that changed everything: The company started an online community for IT professionals where they connected IT people and products, and shared tons of content for FREE — along with free software!

The result? A community of over four million IT professionals and 1,800 technology brands in 200 countries. In a word: Wow!

Here’s a short excerpt about its success from the company’s website:

“Part of why Spiceworks became all the IT rage? It’s what “social” was meant to be: real people interacting with each others … but in a community specific to their job. IT pros get answers (even a few laughs!) from fellow IT pros. And get info from vendors on everything from tech specs to pricing. Vendors get 1:1 feedback and build relationships. And it all happens in one handy place. A place with a soul — where IT pros trust the marketers they meet. And marketers approach IT pros like people, not leads. The coolest thing? The free-flow of info in Spiceworks has inspired many small start-ups to use us as a launch pad for new products. Pretty cool, huh?”

These companies are proving that when you woo your customers with highly engaging content, you will likely hear a lot more of those six magic words: “Let’s put a ring on it!”

Note on Content Creation: Do you need more engaging content? I’m available to help you put your words to work — and create content that engages your leads, prospects, and customers at every stage of your relationship.