We earlier shared notes from the previous UnCafe, a regular meetup we conduct in association with Accel Partners to facilitate collective learning in the startup ecosystem. Last time, Girish Mathrubootham, Founder & CEO of Freshdesk shared 3 Content Marketing Lessons to make Awesome Content work for you. This is the second set of notes from the previous UnCafe. In this edition, Paras Chopra, CEO of Wingify, shares how to get eyeballs and how make webinars work.
1.
One of the tricks we use is to customize the landing page depending on where the customer is coming from. We have a behavioral targeting function. For instance, if people are coming from Smashing Magazine, they get to see a special offer for readers of the magazine. Such customization really works. We also do a lot of personalization. For example if someone has come from Delhi to our page, we would show them a small widget on the side saying that we are hiring in Delhi.
2.
Interesting statistics will get you eyeballs. We haven’t tried infographics. But we have tried publishing statistics. For example, top 10 landing pages with highest conversion rates or what are the average conversion rates in a particular industry. We have also tried writing about tactics and a variety of other things. A mix of special content with appropriate visuals works better than just content.
3.
Question by Tejaswi Naidu, Founder & CEO of Tek Arena : We’ve heard a lot of startups say that Webinars work for them. What is your opinion?
Yes. Webinars have worked really well for us in the past. We would do webinars with our partners and customers. We would reach out to industry publications and ask if they are interested in webinars. In webinars, you would generally find that 50-100 people would come. But if 50-100 people are devoting an hour to what you are speaking, they will be interested in it. If you are able to do webinars, there is nothing like it. There should be a strategy to whatever you are doing though.
4.
Try reaching out to non overlapping audience. Say you are reaching out to a set of designers in California with a piece of content, in the next webinar, try to focus on a different set of audience like ecommerce companies. This increases your reach.
5.
Question from Krish of Chargebee: How do you reach out to the people you want at the webinar?
We never talk about our product. We talk about A/B testing or something which is useful to the audience. Once you are published on a popular site, you have the authority and people know what you are talking about. When you reach out to partners like trade magazines and tell them we want to conduct a free webinar for your audience and that I’m already a published author, it works. You have to make a case as to why their audience would be interested. They are always on the lookout for interesting new people. The leads you get from webinars are high quality leads.
6.
Question from Ashish of NextBigWhat: Do you use any tools? How do you measure RoI?
Reaching out to influential writers has become difficult these days. They get 500- 1000 emails every day. Convincing someone to spend 5-6 hours on your product and asking them to write about it is impossible unless you provide a good perspective. Because they probably have a lot more things to do and why should they give your product preference to 10 different competing products that are out there.
If we are contributing to other publication, you have to emulate the kind of content they have. We use things like keyword searches, to find out which keywords are maximally searched. You have to really keep up with the industry trends. We always have a spreadsheet going on where we dump all ideas and when we need new content, we use that to generate content. We measure ROI by keeping track of the leads generated by a piece of content.
