Hi!
This is the Unbounce Community.
You can ask or answer lots of different types of questions about digital marketing in our community, but in this particular thread, I want to know…
Who are you? What’s your name, job, what are your interests? And what marketing problem are you struggling with right now?
If you’re open to sharing your problem, Unbounce employees and community members will do everything we can to help you out. There’s no judging. We’re all friends here 🙂
Nice email, Corey.
Hi, I’m Rory. I write a lot of technical and event-focused content to get the open source software community excited, educated and up to speed. I think there’s a lot of great advice from the good people at Unbounce to help me do my job as well as I can.
If I could get back to Corey’s email for a second though, I have a question: Do you see authenticity as a rising strategy in content marketing?
Let me back up a bit. Corey, your email was super earnest and didn’t come across as sales-y or too good to be true. You know the ones, messages that are over promising TONS of leads, clicks, conversions and all that. I think the authentic tone works well in email marketing, but can you see a similar approach being put in play on landing pages, in social or any other digital channels? Do you know of any brands that do this and pull it off?
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Best,
Rory
Hello!
I am Claire; I work for myself as a Content Strategist for Virtual Business Solutions. The biggest marketing problem I have is that I very recently narrowed down the focus of my business to Content Strategy, and because of this, I have no proof of a start to end accomplishment in this area, which prevents me targeting the high quality clients I want. I have pockets of proof, but not the whole deal.
I am also so busy working on stuff NOW so that I can live that I don’t have time to put things in place to secure better quality and ongoing projects.
Another issue is that due to lack of finances, I can’t use the tools I want to use to make my service better (although to be honest, having a lack of funds for this has made me have the good skills I do which I pass on to my small biz clients).
Lastly, I am obsessed about target audience persona research but find it hard to do, so if you are thinking of building some kind of tool or something for this…happiness…
So there you go 🙂 That’s my mouthful.
Hi, I’m Myles from Montreal Canada. I got your email and I enjoy the Unbounce brand. My friend began to work for Unbounce probably 2 years ago now and I looked into what you do. That’s why I’m on the list. At the time, I was a startup CEO with a seed round. Since then, I’ve had to walk away from that startup, but a learned a lot. Since I’ve joined the email list, I’ve also graduated university with a double major in IT and Finance.
So what am I up to now? I actually began to work for the company my father started in 1977. Over the years, the company has been very successful, but it is now at the end of its life cycle, and I am on board to create the next generation of products and services.
The company is an enterprise application and data company that focuses on the challenges of integrations and transformations of data. We have been dealing with Fortune 500 companies mostly, with several medium-large sized enterprises as well. Previously, product delivery was physical (think CD-ROM). Now it is usually via FTP, or even our team will go on-site (to help with the set-up and config, as well as some best-practices knowledge transfer), and I’m in charge of moving products towards a download and self-configuration model that is purchased on a subscription model.
I have also been implementing SEO strategies on our new website I put together. I look to Unbounce emails and content for ideas on best practices in building and tracking marketing funnels. I also am inspired by the content marketing strategy that Unbounce uses, as it is something I wish to implement down the road.
Anyways, that’s it for now. Have a great day!
Cheers
Myles
Why not reply to such a well written mass email! 😉
My name’s Magnus, from Norway, and I’m currently using Unbounce as an online marketer for a company called Vitamail. Also used Unbounce to create a landing page for my local american football team, resulting in a bunch of new players at practice.
I’m currently in the midst of starting up my own CRO company, where Unbounce and Campain Monitor will be the two main platforms I’ll be working with.
Finally, I’ll be heading to Vancouver in June for Call to Action 2016. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!
Sincerely,
Magnus
Hi Corey and All,
I cannot believe I actual read your email! Nowadays I just delete emails because I receive so many but this approach is interesting (until everyone starts doing it and it becomes overused).
I am a conversion sepcialist, have been running A/B tests and research for over 6 years and I love it! I love to understand how users behave.
Issues I am facing today, the balance between personalization and keeping samples healthy for A/B testing.
I look forward to your thoughts
Sarah
Appreciate the authentic email as well Corey. I clicked! I’ve been keeping my eye on unbounce for a while now. Seems like a quality solution that will save time and take away a huge amount of the guess work and test campaigns. I want to do a trial ASAP.
Cody Pitchford
iDriveMedia
Hola.
I help people take better care of their hearts - naturally.
My company, Nucardia, wants to make the dietary supplement industry more human and less… dietary.
I loved your email Corey! I’ll be hanging out so that some of that magic rubs off on me and my team.
Cheers,
Thomas Guyton
Founder / Nucardia Heart Support
Hi Corey,
I enjoyed your a-typical email, and evidently it was compelling enough to convince me to write you here in the forum. I manage the digital marketing department of a small branding & design firm in Grand Rapids Michigan called Deksia. My responsibilities consist of implementing lead generation PPC campaigns for small businesses mostly. As a digital marketer for small local business, I can tell you that their advertising dollars are scrutinized daily. Thus, it is incredibly important that my department provide a return on advertising spend month over month to our clients.
They not only want to know visitors on their website, but most of them also demand to know whether or not the phone calls resulting from the ads scheduled appointments or not! We’re hoping to take digital advertising accountability to the next level by offering call reporting and screening on almost all of our digital campaigns that promise lead generation.
We are passionate about business transparency, and I hope to make a difference in the perception that online advertising is a waste of money or just “smoke & mirrors”
Unbounce allows me to quickly create landing pages with easy drag and drop design elements (I am not a designer) while easily being able to implement code (I am also not a developer). The ability to easily track leads that are generated from my landing pages is invaluable to me and my clients. By following this forum I hope to improve upon my understanding of using landing pages and increase the number of leads I deliver to my clients via online advertising campaigns.
Cheers,
-Lauren
I’m a Co-Founder of Workshop Digital, a marketing agency in Richmond, Virginia. Long-time Unbounce user and #1 fan. Thanks for opening up the conversation, Corey!
We’re big fans of trying out new features and hacking Unbounce to do things that maybe weren’t fully intended by the dev team, but somehow find their way into their release cycle (fixed headers, parallax scroll, lightboxes, etc.)
We’re looking forward to seeing what comes next!
Hi everyone!
I am Francesca, from Brescia, Italy. I got back home just 2 month ago: previously I lived in Milan, Italy, and 4 years in London, UK.
I am a freelance Content Strategist/ Social Media Manager, but I am also a Graphic Designer, an Illustrator and a Wordpress Designer.
I am working in the field since almost 4 years now, but I am always looking for new stimuli and new marketing strategies.
Nice to virtually meet you all!
Francesca
Hi Corey,
At Moondog Marketing here in Sweden, we use Unbounce with lots of our customers’ campaigns. In fact, it’s funny you mention Hubspot in your email. We recommend Unbounce pages because we prefer a dedicated solution to the integrated pages in Hubspot’s system.
The biggest issue we have as an agency is finding the best way to sew a variety of products together for clients. They often have made their choices and don’t want to listen to other recommendations. Especially if they are very expensive.
I love the content you guys provide and we recommend your podcast to lots of people. Maybe your email should highlight the best audio content you produce and continue to educate people looking at using landing pages.
What I really miss is a dedicated list for agencies working with Unbounce. We’d like to have more advice and help on how to integrate it deeper into client contracts.
Jon
CEO, Moondog Marketing
Hi everybody.
I’m Brice, CEO of Emakina Group (ticker: ALMEK). We’re a full service digital transformation agency located in Europe. 700 people in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, … We’re specialized in stellar User Experience. We build websites, e-commerce, apps, run advertising, activation and CRM campaigns.
Our challenge is B2B : getting noticed by global brands or multinationals so they invite us to pitch for their projects or digital agency pitch. We do not have offices in London, or the US so that is a real challenge.
I have the utmost respect for Unbounce that I have been watching since their early versions and I read religiously their emails. You’re one of my favorite source of insights on conversion optimisation tools.
Thanks for reading, Brice
Nice approach Corey. Yes, I have been attending Unbounce webinars for a while. I tend to register for more than I attend because the usual webinar hours don’t fit that well with Australian hours. I have learnt a lot from your webinars.
I am in the middle of a full website rebuild at the moment. When that is up and running I may sign on. However, I sell time in holiday homes and many of my customers are not that web savvy. Most of them will only come back every 3-4 years so it is not like I get a lot of repeat business. I am just not sure how or where your landing pages would fit into my business at the moment.
Hi,
My name is Jesse and I am currently in Nairobi, Kenya where I freelance as a campaign and content strategist.
I have worked in the field almost 5 years now and I’m always on the lookout for better ways to inspire customers to use products.
That was a beautifully written email.
J
Well Corey, seems like you are off to a good start, soliciting feedback. Very genuine and up-front email and introduction that provoked me to reply.
My name is D’Ana (pronounced Dee-Anna), no one can pronounce my last name, so let’s just assume I don’t have one and go with first name only, like Adele or Ke$ha (since we share off-beat characters in our names).
I have been an Unbounce subscriber for a while and quite enjoy the writing voice and advice the team offers, which is why I stick around. Marketing and Advertising have always fascinated me, convincing people they need to buy a product/service with creative words and visuals…pretty cool.
For my day job, I manage Marketing & Sales Operations for a B2B software company that specializes in mobile phone billing services, not the sexiest of markets, but that’s the challenge I get to overcome. The rest of a day I help small and medium-sized businesses create successful integrated marketing strategies, in a bunch of different industries. Am I lucky or what?!
My biggest marketing challenge seems to be that quick successes for my clients (both day job and extracurricular) get them stuck in a rut they want to keep repeating, despite my advice to keep changing it up to do more and the numbers to back me up. One of those problems that’s not really a problem as long as the client is happy, right? I just know I can do more for them by scaling growth in every direction. So I give them what they want and keep pushing them to be great every step I can.
Some advice for your new squads, start from the beginning like you are doing, but remember it is a marathon, not a sprint and you will never be done (yay, that’s what keeps us employed). Personas will always be evolving and so will your business, so be adaptive and provide value and people will stick around.
Unbounce, Welcome to the HubSpot and Inbound Community, I can tell you’re gonna like it. I am excited to see how you will grow.
Feel free to reach out if you need to bounce any ideas around, that’s what communities are for.
Have a good one!
D’Ana 😉
LinkedIn
Twitter
Hi Everyone,
Am Don Baraka, a researcher based in Embu, Kenya. I offer A/B testing, SEO, Keyword research, social media polling and sentiment analysis in the East African Market
That was a well crafted email Corey, lots of pointers acquired to assist with our email marketing. Big up
G’day - This is the team here at Advantage Business Media and we’ve been using Unbounce for a few years now and love you guys! This intro email was great to grab our attention and actually read it, compared to the others which we just do a quick scan of or ignore. Though to be honest, you guys do a good job with sending informative emails which we normally catch our attention.
One of the things that caught our attention is the mention of Unbounce using Hubspot. We know that Unbounce is a Hubspot partner, though we were a bit bummed to find out that the Unbounce / Hubspot integration is fairly basic and that that we can not pull the analytics from our Unbounce landing pages into our Hubspot campaigns.
The challenge we have is that we love our Unbounce landing pages and capabilities, though we need Hubspots campaign, lead management and reporting capabilities. Our goal was to continue using Unbounce for our landing pages and embed a Hubspot form to take advantage of the Hubspot capabilities – We thought this was going to be a match made in heaven!!!
BUT…Hubspot only pulls in form information to their campaign dashbaords if you use their Hubspot Landing Pages!! We created a work around where we’re pulling Unbounce code to populate the Hubspot landing page, though this method leaves a lot of room for error and is a bit of a pain. We’ve nicked named it “Inception” due to the multiple layers of it.
We would love to hear some more stories about how Unbounce and others teams are using Unbounce and Hubspot so we can find out the best solution to integrate both of them!!
PS - We have been working with our Hubspot rep to allow the info from their standalone forms to register in their campaign dashboards and we would love if the Unbounce community could help upvote this ticket to make it happen!!! If we could embed a Hubspot form into our Unbounce landing pages which would track in our Hubspot campaigns, this would be the perfect mix!
Here’s the Hubspot ticket to upvote it: http://ideas.hubspot.com/forums/76407-general-hubspot-ideas/suggestions/6509409-allow-forms-to-be-as…
Hope everyone is having a great day!!
PS - Unbounce - we had a great time at the NYC Unbounce event last year and hope you guys do this again…
Cheers
Hi,Greetings from Egypt,I am ready for doing more business.
mostafakamel31@yahoo.com
Hi there,
I’m Tina A McQuaid, REALTOR ¨ / Sales Representative and Accredited GreenAgent™ for Sutton Group-Summit Realty Inc, Brokerage in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada (neighbour to Toronto.)
I’m really interested in gaining real estate leads - anyone who wants to buy or sell a house or learn about real estate in their local area.
Thanks for any assistance,
Tina tina@tinamcquaid.com
416-602-9901
Nice to meet you)) Cool email, it’s a great example for me how to build relatoinship with subscribers :)
I’m from Ukraine, working in a digital marketing company - GeniusMarketing.me.
Will be good to know more about email marketing 🙂 It is my direct specification.
My name is Jim Cochrane and I run the blog, http://getpaidbootcamp.com. I am using this site to help people find the right money-making opportunities and keep away from scams.
Best Regards,
Jim
Great to meet you, John! My wife just started doing the same thing about 6 months ago. Have you considered becoming an Unbounce Partner? Our customers need help with other services from time to time and our Customer Success department often refers them to our partnerships section.
I think the majority of people are looking for landing page design services, but there are definitely a handful seeking out ppc and web design. Anyway, it’s worth looking into! You can check it out at Unbounce.com/partner 🙂
Hey John, I can’t say we’ve dove into this strategy at Unbounce, but the increased competition in SEO and fragmentation in distribution platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.) has got me really curious about an idea…
What if a publisher were to pull back on the number of things they write, so they could really nail the few pieces they chose to write about? With those extra resources, you could create downloadables for your blog post for lead gen, a slideshare version of the same content, a video of someone explaining the content for YouTube, etc.
I guess the key with the idea is that you’d need to free up resources, because reformatting for any new platform takes serious thought and time. It took one of our Content Strategists 4 days to repurpose webinar slides into a good Slideshare deck, for example.
I’m not sure if any of this helped, but feel free to respond and ask more questions!
Damn Rory, good question.
I think all good marketing is authentic. By that, I mean that the person who created it believes in what they’re saying, not that it’s not salesy.
I’ve seen a lot of really successful, well regarded salesy marketing, but I think it does so well because the audience appreciates it. If you’re selling software to a salesperson or someone with that type of mind, it’ll likely resonate with them.
It so happens that our audience is made up of smart people in the marketing industry, so they can smell BS a mile away. We love that, because we hire the type of people who don’t spout BS :)
Sorry that didn’t directly answer your question, but I suppose I see it a bit differently than you do. I’d love to hear anyone else’s opinion on the matter. It’s a really interesting topic.
Hi Claire!
Those are some meaty challenges! I can’t claim to have the answers, but maybe a couple suggestions.
If quality of clients is your focus, have you considered partnering with a different type of agency that’s more established, but lacks expertise in content marketing? It still might be difficult without case studies, but you might be able to unlock more projects at once.
Software companies also run into the problem (we run into it all the time) where people don’t understand that success comes from the effort they put into the software, not just the purchasing of the software. Maybe you could partner with some content marketing software and have them direct companies who want content marketing help to you? It doesn’t typically provide the high profile companies you’re looking for, but it could be a good way to build those case studies.
Unfortunately, we don’t have plans for audience persona research on the product roadmap, but if anyone else in the community knows of software that helps with audience persona research, please help Claire out!
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