I recently had the opportunity to interview Neil Patel, co-founder of the web analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. At only 28, Neil has already launched two successful start-ups, runs the high traffic blog QuickSprout and helped hundreds of websites see a dramatic increase in traffic and conversions. Neil shared with me how he was inspired to take the path he did with his business.
“The way I got started in the industry was at a marketing agency. At the marketing agency, I realised there was one big problem. The problem was that companies were getting all this traffic to their websites, but they didn’t understand what was causing the conversion, how people engaged with their website and how they could adjust their design or funnel to maximise conversion rates and revenue.”
Neil on the Importance of an Integrated Strategy
Neil has a lot of advice for marketers on how to achieve their desired quantity and quality of traffic. In my experience, I have found that just like in other forms of marketing, individual SEO tactics are not enough – online marketing needs to be a fully integrated program that extends well beyond search engine optimisation. Ultimately, it all comes down to customers and leads and in order to gather those successfully you need an integrated strategy across SEO, social, content. Neil agreed with this approach:
“You need to drive traffic and you need to help make sure conversion rates are as high as possible so you can spend money on promotional tactics like PPC. Plus, you need to be leveraging social media because that helps with your brand and engaging with customers as well as search engine ranking because Google takes social signals into account. So all these things come into play and they all work together.”
From the same perspective, businesses can’t just blog and hope people will find their content. It’s critical to blog with a purpose and promote the blog content through the proper channels. I have found many companies dismiss blogging before they understand that there’s more to blogging than just the writing itself. Neil’s take on blogging is that it’s not as simple as most people think.
“You can’t just randomly crank out content, especially if you’re a bigger company because there are a lot more people watching. There’s a whole art and science to it, and to do it right you need to make sure you’re providing value.”
Neil on the biggest mistake with blog content
Neil told me that the biggest mistake companies make is failing to write detailed articles that are evergreen. “Evergreen articles, such as, such as how to articles, guides, lists resources, are ones that are still relevant and useful a year or two from now. If companies don’t create this sort of content then they’re not going to get as many leads, traffic, [the content is] not going to be shared as much on social media, people aren’t going to be talking about them and ultimately [the content] not going to help drive more customers.”
I thought it was interesting that he mentioned evergreen articles, as it accurately reflects my own experience with blogging. Once a blog is out there, if it’s good it gets more and more traffic and more popular over time. A number of my clients are surprised when blogs written a year and a half ago are some of their best performing posts in terms of traffic and conversions.
Neil on selecting blog topics
When I asked Neil how he comes up with ideas for blog articles, I was surprised when he told me keyword research doesn’t play any part in influencing what he writes about. His philosophy is writing what he thinks will be useful and likeable for his audience.
“I just blog about what people read and what I love and if I get traffic for it - great, if not, oh well, but it usually ends up working out. I do put in keywords when I think, ‘oh, this keyword is good,’ but I don’t really do any keyword research or anything like that. I’m typically writing blog posts about things people are asking me or things I’m going through or working on, or it just randomly comes to my head when I’m reading a magazine or whatever it may be... It’s not like I go out there and say okay I need to write a blog post this week, what should I write about?’
Aside from keyword research, one of the things I do a lot with clients is buyer persona research - getting a feel for who the customers are and what their problems are before putting any marketing strategies in place. It sounded to me like Neil does some informal buyer persona research just through the volume and types of emails and questions he receives, but I was wondering if he does any more formal client surveys to find out what they are interested in. Again, I was surprised by his response:
“Not much. A lot of it just comes from emails - I get so many emails from readers that spark ideas. A lot of them will just say, ‘Hey, can you blog on this or blog on that?’ And I just pick some of those topics.” Sounds like informal client surveys to me.
Neil on content assets
Of course, a blog is just another way to promote the heart of content marketing—your content assets. These are the pieces that drive conversion and increase leads. When I asked Neil about his content assets, he said he tries to create pieces he thinks will provide value for the long run.
“The thing that I learned about creating assets too is that it also helps brand yourself as an authority. So if you can actually create good assets, and make them really detailed as well as look good. Going above and beyond helps people really see you as an authority on that subject.”
Now what about creating content for “boring” industries? It takes a bit more creativity to make a refrigeration compressor sexy or spice up a server. How does Neil go about looking at ways to make things interesting and engaging? He gave me an example of one content piece he poured his creativity into developing for a life insurance company: “I once wrote an article about 22 or 23 things you didn’t know about death. You can make anything fun and exciting and interesting; you just have to be really creative.”
Neil on driving conversions
My next question was about tactics to drive conversions once those valuable, credibility-enhancing content pieces were on deck. Neil told me the most critical component of converting leads is figuring out what bottlenecks the visitors experience by using data.
“You can ask them on your checkout page why they aren’t checking out after they’ve been there for 20 seconds using a tool called Qualaroo. Once you get that feedback, you can modify that page to maximise your conversion rates. But you shouldn’t be making A/B tests based on what you think is great that needs improvement—you should be more so making it from data.”
The essence of improving conversions is “test, test and test” some more. There are a lot of good A/B testing tools on the market, of which Qualaroo is just one. If you really, really love testing and data. like me, you’ll love Which Test One.
Neil on Promoting Content
What good are content assets if no one knows they exist? I asked Neil what the best way to promote content assets is, and I definitely wasn’t surprised when he told me that the best way to promote content is through social media—“Leverage Twitter and Facebook, build up your profiles, participate in the community, write tweets, ‘like”’ things on Facebook, post status updates.”
He said that social media has a strong influence on search engine results these days and that not participating in social media could be the biggest mistake a marketer could make. Then he suggested something I’ve never considered doing:
“A popular way to promote content is to go on Twitter and find all the people who tweet about your subject. You can do this by going to the Twitter search box and typing in your industry or keywords related to you content. You’ll find a list of people you can direct message and ask if they will retweet your content to their followers. Let them know you’ll do the same for them if they want you to tweet out something, but make sure you’re not sending out the same generic message to everyone or you’ll get in trouble by Twitter.”
I hadn’t actually considered doing anything like that before because I didn’t think many strangers would be receptive to retweet requests. When I expressed my reservations to Neil about this strategy, he said that most people will say no, but a small percentage-- under 5%-- will say yes and “that’s really enough to get the ball rolling, especially if you message a few hundred people over a period of time.”
Sounds like a good social experiment to me. I plan give Neil’s idea a go using this very article as my guinea pig content piece. So please retweet away.
Need help understanding the B2B buying lifecycle and getting your content assets in order? We just updated our content mapping template to help you organise your ideas and track your content assets over the buying lifecycle. You can download it for free here.
