24,000 Leads in 6 Months- This Content Made It Happen (with Bob Jenkins from Leadages)

Tim: Hey fellow marketer, welcome to ConversionCast. Here at Leadpages we’re always trying new things to find out what’s working and be able to pass that info along through our webinars, courses, blogposts, etc. One of the folks who are responsible for getting that info out to the world is also one of the folks who spearheaded a new experiment and allowed us to prove that it works. His name is Bob Jenkins. He’s our marketing educator here at LeadPages and today he’s on our show sharing a really unique case study about a tactic that we implemented that generated 24,000 new leads in around six months. on top of that, 8% of those new leads have already become customers. Pretty impressive considering it’s an evergreen content piece that continues to grow our business every single day. You’ll love this tactic and you can implement it regardless of what industry you’re on or what size of business you run.

So with that being said, let’s get into it. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey, Bob, welcome to ConversionCast.

Bob: Thanks Tim. It is so cool to be here.

Tim: And it’s cool to have you here. You know, we have known each other for a while now since before you were at LeadPages. Now you’re here and now you have some really cool details to share on some of the amazing things you’ve been doing here at LeadPages. So can you just tell us the results of the case study we’re going to talk about today?

Bob: Absolutely. So we have been able to receive over the last six months a little under 24,000 new leads from this tactic and 8% of those folks have gone one to become customers which is a pretty freaking good conversion rate.

Tim: Yeah and that’s a what multiple six figures in revenue from just this one kind of thing that we’ve implemented?

Bob: Exactly and it’s a very counterintuitive tactic so I’m excited to share it today.

Tim: Yeah. I’m excited as well. Before we get into it, can you tell us just a little bit about kind of how you got into the whole online marketing space and what your role is here at LeadPages?

Bob: Sure. So I was a ten-year veteran of the high school classroom as a teacher, looking to make some extra money, dabbled in a few things and realized that my ability to teach was something that people needed in order to learn how to grow their businesses online. Over the last ten years since then I left the classroom, I’ve been training online entrepreneurial marketing ever since. In September of 2014, I joined LeadPages as the marketing educator here. I have been creating courses, I have been teaching webinars, I have been doing some of our conversion webinars when you are previously occupied making sure that people understand how to get more conversions to grow their audiences  and help more people with less effort.

Tim: I love it and so what I find really interesting too is that you have been a LeadPages customers I think since the beginning right?

Bob: First day. Customer #43.

Tim: [Laughs] I love that so it really just came full circle. You were a customer in the very beginning and now here you are showing other people how to get great results. I just love that. So all those things being said, let’s go ahead and get into it. Let’s talk about the tactic. Can you just break it down for us, tell us what you did and how it works?

Bob: Sure. So before I joined LeadPages, I was creating marketing courses, courses that would be two to four hours of content and I would sell them for $300, $400, $500 apiece. I joined LeadPages and Clay Collins our CEO and cofounder said okay, Bob, I want you to create those same kinds of courses but we’re going to give them away for free instead of charging for them.

Tim: [Laughs]

Bob: I was like well you’re going to miss out on a big revenue source, aren’t you? He said no, we’re going to use what’s called a reverse squeeze where we’re going to give away the entire course, all the videos and then we’re going to ask people to opt in to get the downloads of all the videos, downloads to the audios, the transcripts, the handouts, the mind maps, the checklists, any spreadsheet that you want to come up with, etc. You do your magic, you do what you normally do with the course but we’re going to give it all away and we’re just going to ask people to opt in in order to get the supplemental material. But all the videos, all the actual contents in video format will be live online with no opt in required. We’ll send traffic there and then people will be so overwhelmed with value that they won’t want to miss out on all the other cool stuff that’s behind the opt in. They’ll want to download, they’ll want to possess it, they’ll want to own it.

So that’s what we’ve done and we’ve done that with three courses over the last six months and the result has been over 23,000 new contacts and about 8% of those folks have joined as LeadPages customers.

Tim: That’s awesome and I want to talk about the specifics of the courses too but know this really speaks to something that you and I both have heard a lot which is people are so afraid to give away a lot of content. They think that if they give away a lot of great high value stuff, then people aren’t going to want to pay for their stuff. But I feel like this is further validation that we’ve proven the opposite. Would you agree?

[0:05:00]

Bob: Absolutely. You know, the beauty of this is we get to be industry leaders not only in the software platform that we have but also in the intellectual space of what matters to marketing which elevates our brand, which elevates the connection of what people make up about LeadPages. it’s not just we have beautiful software but we know what matters in marketing. These courses help to do that.

Tim: Yeah and that’s kind of one of those additional benefits. I know we don’t talk about that a lot on ConversionCast because we’re so focused on data and the numbers but it is an important aspect of growing a business that’s not just a small profit driven business but a business that’s designed to be scaled, that’s designed to grow to a massive level. So that’s a really great point.

So you said there are three courses, what are the three courses on?

Bob: Sure. So we started out with a webinar funnel system course and it basically breaks down what we do here at LeadPages to get a huge amount of attendance, a great attendance rate on each of our webinars, a great dollar per attendee and all the things we do before the webinar, how to present a webinar itself like how to come up with the content, how to sequence it so that if you’re doing a webinar where you’ll want to offer something for sale at the end, how to do that in a very tactful and respectful way while still providing a lot of value for folks whether they purchase or not and then how to releverage and repackage the webinars that you create so that you can have a long term impact and more list grows from it.

The second course that I’ve created is called the Facebook advertising system and that’s basically breaking down how we use Facebook advertising in a very strategic way. It’s basically a three-step process of advertising to different types of people depending on where they’re at in our campaigns. Retargeting all that kind of cool stuff and it lifts out the hood and shows people how to actually do it for themselves as well.

We generate about 4000 leads per month and about 250 new customers per month using Facebook ads and this course breaks down how we do it and how people can replicate based on their budget and scale and etc.

Then the third course is called the affiliate marketing system and this is all based around the idea that service professionals and expert leaders, thought leaders and so forth who are really good at what they do are missing out on about a 30% revenue boost by making recommendations of other products that are useful for their ideal clients and audience members. So it’s not just you know, here’s how to find a product and promote it just because it makes good commissions but how to actually boost your authority and gain credibility in your marketplace by making those specific recommendations.

So here at ConversionCast and on the webinars that LeadPages do we’re always talking about resource guides so that’s a key element of the affiliate marketing course as well to help you build your list and have a bigger impact by making those recommendations.

Tim: Awesome and where does somebody find these courses? I mean I know they’re on a LeadPages page but how would somebody find and access the courses?

Bob: Sure. So you can go to LeadPages.net/webinarfunnel/affiliatemarketing/facebookadvertising. If you want to see them all on one page, you can go to LP.LeadPages.net/courses. We’ve got them listed there with the first videos of each so you can take a look at which one might apply first in your business.

Tim: I love that. So there’s easy access and then the other thing is that I know that both of us are hearing this all the time. People say well how do I drive traffic to this kind of stuff and obviously one of the courses specifically talks about how to use Facebook ad traffic. But is that the primary traffic source that we have? Is there kind of a mix of warm and cold traffic to these courses or how does it work?

Bob: Yeah, yeah. We rely heavily on our affiliate partners and we rely heavily on our paid media. So we definitely have good keyword optimized paid media on Google and the other search engines. And then every now and then we’re running a good campaign within the Facebook ad marketplace, other paid media you know, content driven areas. We’ve tested out a few other sources like Tabula and out brain those types of things. The best so far has typically been Google and Facebook to drive traffic for the volume and scale. You know, we know our numbers now. We can keep track with our analytics within the LeadPages of course of what it takes to get somebody convert on the LeadPage itself and then what the numbers are for turning them into customers. We can scale up quickly with the paid media sites. But we rely on our list as well and then on the list of the – on our affiliates.

And then because we’ve had these courses and we optimize them, they’re so heavy in content on the pages themselves that they get like super search engine results. So you can do a search for a webinar course for example or a webinar and you’ll see our page come up right on the first page. So if you go to one of these pages, you’ll see there’s 11 videos, there’s probably 4000 words of text on the page. IT’s really content driven, value pages so we get treated well with the value ranking and the paid media sites and of course, the organic search loves our pages as well.

[0:10:13]

Tim: Yeah that’s fantastic and I know that you shared with me some conversion rates for opt-ins for those courses. Can you kind of let me know what those are like based on I think I’m really particularly interested in the cold traffic you know, from the ads that we’re sending.

Bob: Yeah. So a typical cold traffic conversion rate that you would find and be excited about is 7% to 8%. Most people when they first were out of the gate and doing Facebook ads other types of paid media you know, you’ll likely see a 2%, 3%, 4% opt in rate. And then if you can get up to that 8% or 9% you’re like yes I’m making it. With this overwhelming amount of value on these pages, we’re getting 18% to 20% from cold traffic. It is unbelievable how much people will respond to great value with a highly targeted ad, with a great piece of content tied together that people really want.

So those elements come together and make for what would be a double to triple industry averages for our conversion rates from cold traffic.

Tim: Amazing and somebody wanted to create a course like this, you know, they could create the videos, they could create the content. If you’re using LeadPages, we have a template specific for it. If you’re not using LeadPages you know, just really involve putting a lot of that content available for free to access on a page. But if somebody wants to download it along with all the resources, they would have to opt in to get that. But obviously, a great way to save yourself a bunch of time and development cost and that kind of thing would just be to use our templates. What’s the name of that template by the way?

Bob: It’s called the PPC course template I believe. I’d have to look it up again to verify that and I’ll do so here real quick. But one of the other key things that I think is really fun about this particular template and the opt in is we’ve tied it together with our lead magnet system. So the entire course is actually delivered from our server as a lead magnet.

Tim: Yeah.

Bob: So even people who don’t have their own website yet with storage or they haven’t figured out amazon S3 yet or those types of things, it’s all part of the package. The template is called free course 2.0 and we design this template specifically for these courses for ourselves. So then we can hand it off to our users. If you actually do a search on our blog for a free course 2.0 page, I believe we give this template away for free as well even if you’re not a LeadPages user.

Tim: That’s great. I love that. Well this has been a really cool case study and you know people were so excited when we had Chris on the show that I knew you were kind of the next person we wanted to bring on and share one of the I think really unique things that we’re doing. I haven’t seen anybody else doing anything like this. So thanks so much for sharing this with us and look forward to having you back to share the next crazy thing that you decide to do here at LeadPages. [Laughs]

Bob: Thanks, Tim. Always a pleasure and I can’t wait to listen to the next episode of ConversionCast.

Jason: Hi. This is Jason. I’m the project manager at LeadPages.

Taylor: Hi, this is Taylor and I’m the web designer at LeadPages.

Adam: Hi, this is Adam and I’m the videographer at LeadPages. Thanks for checking out this episode of ConversionCast.

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