The Business Growth Advice You Missed at Converted 2016

“I just attended a 48-hour webinar … and I loved it!” That’s how attendee Jenny Miranda described the whirlwind marketing and business-growth summit that was Leadpages’ second annual conference, Converted 2016. And although we did give people breaks to sleep, eat, and kick back with craft cocktails, Jenny’s summary is pretty accurate. Over two days last week, 600 people heard from 18 world-class marketers, filling hundreds of pages of notes with business-growth advice and leaving with countless actionable tips to implement the moment they got home from Minneapolis. Which advice resonated most with all those marketers and entrepreneurs? I asked around at the conference and reached out on Twitter to uncover the biggest insights they took home. If you were there, let this post supplement your own notes. If you missed Converted this year, don’t worry. While the signature cocktails aren’t available anymore, it's never too early to reserve your ticket for Converted 2017, which is already filling up fast. [cta-box]

Insight #1: Get Other Influencers to Do (Most of) Your Content Marketing for You

Just about everyone at Converted 2016 seemed well aware of the power of content marketing. But finding time to create all the content everyone tells you to create—on top of, you know, running your business—can feel close to impossible. Laura Roeder, CEO of social media scheduling app Edgar, brought a refreshing dose of sanity to the standard content marketing advice.

'Pick a strategy and stick to it...' Team Edgar's Traffic strategy - gotta love simplicity #Converted16 @MeetEdgar @lkr pic.twitter.com/gUs9TalOen

— Kerry Anne Orr (@TheSystemsCoach) October 18, 2016

Her traffic strategy while she was growing Edgar was as follows:

• One blog post a week
• One email newsletter a week
• Regularly running Facebook and Google ads
• Regularly soliciting customer reviews
• Using Edgar to repost content
• Appearing on 10–20 podcasts a month

In other words, she maximized her marketing time by maintaining a consistent but minimal blog and email presence … and then getting other content creators to feature her and spread her message on their podcasts. While appearing on a podcast does take time, it’s typically far less effort than writing, publishing, and promoting an effective blog post. Laura Poindexter, who teaches seminars on marketing and social media, was immediately inspired. “I’ve already implemented getting my virtual assistant on booking me as a guest on podcasts,” she said. “I think it will help me reach new audiences with very little resource investment.” What kind of low-resource, high-exposure forms of content might you be overlooking in your own business? Even if the answer isn’t podcast appearances, I’m willing to bet that there’s at least one kind of media that’ll work for you. To get more stellar insights like this next year, click below to reserve your ticket now: [cta-box]

Insight #2: Sometimes You Need to Focus on the Problem, Not the Solution

Business coach Alissa Daire Nelson was, unsurprisingly, a bit overwhelmed by the wealth of information available at Converted. “One of the biggest obstacles I’ve had implementing an online marketing campaign is where to start,” she said. But something she heard from a couple of different presenters gave her an idea: “One of the tips that was given was if you can articulate the problem better than your customer can, then they already implicitly trust that you can solve that problem.” During her presentation, Chet Holmes International CEO Amanda Holmes recommended creating marketing content that focuses on solutions to problems—not on products or features. Lots of marketers have heard that advice in one form or another. But Amanda took it to the next level, observing:

“Marketing data is way more motivational than product data.”

So, for instance, she advised a luxury real estate company to stop talking to wealthy prospects about their vacation condos, and start leading with dire statistics about Fortune 500 CEOs’ sleep habits and the health risks of not getting enough relaxation time. To say it worked is an understatement. The company increased their sales by $600 million in 12 months. As for Alissa, she walked away from Converted knowing her next step was a simple one: creating a problem-focused landing page with a great lead magnet optimized to get her more leads. For her coaching business, which focuses on the niche market of couples working on a business together, this simple solution will help her to target new leads and to help educate them on some of the issues that come with working with a significant other.

Insight #3: Tomorrow’s Marketers Need to Master Messaging, Not Just Email

When Andrew Warner of Mixergy took the stage, he wowed us with a look into the future of marketing: real-time messaging.

Everyone's jaws are dropping at #converted16 because of what @AndrewWarner is telling us about messaging.

— Kelly from Ekcetera (@ekcetera) October 18, 2016

In his own experiments using one-to-many real-time messaging with Facebook chatbot program ManyChat, Andrew has seen clickthrough rates above 80%, and even higher message-read rates. Compare that with average email open rates hovering around 20% (depending on industry)—then take into account that most users under age 45 spend more time in messaging apps than in their email inboxes—and you can see why Andrew’s so excited about the possibilities.

Insight #4: Segment Your Leads to Serve Them the Best Possible Content

Of course, given that we were hosting the conference, Converted 2016 was also full of ideas for making the most of Leadpages and Drip from cofounders Clay Collins and Rob Walling. And some of the best insights came from Brennan Dunn, one of Drip’s very first customers who’s gone on to become a master Drip user and educator.

@brennandunn has taken to the stage! #Converted16 pic.twitter.com/4I0LwW9Cng

— Teresa Heath-Wareing (@theathwareing) October 19, 2016

The audience was especially excited to see Brennan’s ideas for segmentation. Divorce advisor Karen Covy said her next step would be to jump right into Drip and get started by creating a survey within an email to segment her list better. “My target market is one kind of person, but I also know that on my email list there are a lot of other professionals who do the same thing that I do,” she said. “So I’d like to know who are the professionals versus who are the real customers.” Not only will segmenting help Karen to figure out which subscribers she should be selling her current services to, it will give her a head start in expanding her business to offer services for fellow professionals as well. Drip makes it easy to tag all of your subscribers based on their actions or based on a trigger-link email survey like the one Karen is creating. Then, you can send campaigns or broadcast emails only to customers with certain tags, meaning that you can deliver personalized content based on where they are in the customer lifecycle, what kind of content they’re looking for, or how often they want to hear from you. Plus, this tagging system also means that you wont spam subscribers, unlike list systems where the same subscriber might be on multiple lists.

Insight #5: Remember This Important Acronym: H2H

What’s “H2H” mean? Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer told us:

So many acronyms at #Converted16. Loved this one from @ryandeiss: #H2H. Human being to human being (as opposed to #B2B or #B2C). pic.twitter.com/IJZJP81KTq

— Nora Rubinoff (@norarubinoff) October 19, 2016

That was an important reminder for personal-finance and small-business author John Cummuta. “Just asking the customers more often what they’re really struggling with,” was one of the strongest messages he took away, John said. “I just realized we do not ask our customers enough what they want, we don’t let them design the products—and we should.” The major change he’s implementing in his work is to include opportunities for feedback in every step of his email sequence, both for his customers and for new leads, to gather input and build exactly what his customers are looking for. “We’re really going to design how we approach the marketplace more in their terms rather than ours,” he said. Don't miss out next year. Reserve your Converted 2017 ticket here: [cta-box] Were you at Converted? Share your favorite takeaways in the comments.