Oh, The Journeys You'll Know
Every Monday morning, the marketing team gets together for our weekly sync. We usually talk about projects that we’re working on, solicit help, and maybe do a bit of brainstorming if time allows. This week, one of Uberflip's co-founders, Randy, joined the meeting and we all went around the table reading from Dr. Seuss’, Oh, The Places You’ll Go.
Now, this post isn’t about how we were all transported back to kindergarten and how our nostalgia-induced high fueled the rest of our morning (even though that’s a true statement). It’s about what we spoke about after reading the book. Randy walked us through a few of his favorite quotes and related them back to the work we’re doing by building better content journeys for our prospects and customers.
We were all pretty jazzed by this and spent a good amount of time talking about other books from our childhood that could also be used as guidance for our jobs, but that’s a blog post for another day. Today I’m going to share with you some of the quotes that our team loved the most and what marketers can take away from them.
Choosing A Journey
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
This could be related back to a marketer and how they are able to choose what types of campaigns and projects they work on, but when we read it, we thought more about our Hub visitors and customers. “They know what they know” and are most likely looking for the specific information they need. By giving them an experience that allows them to choose where they want to go gives them the power to keep consuming and engaging with your content.
In other words, give your visitors a great content experience that sends them on the journey they want to take, maybe with some guidance, but don’t force them down a path they weren’t intending to take.
A Leap of Faith
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. Bust mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
Here’s another section that we can relate back to our customers and how they view our content. A lot of content is publicly available to read, but a majority of B2B marketers also gate their premium assets. When our customers are hit with a darked out window (i.e., a landing page or form), they have to weigh the pros and cons of giving their information to access the asset.
Is there enough information available to tell them about what they’re going to get? Is other content from the company enticing and well written? Is this a topic they need to know more about?
When gating your content, think about these questions and try to decide if what you’re presenting to a visitor is enough to get them to convert. Try giving them a sneak peek of the content with an overlay CTA or if you’re gating a video, try using a delayed form to get them engaged. It’s all about keeping your readers on their journey and throwing up a misplaced form can put a damper on their momentum.
Burning Out
You can get so confused
That you’ll start in to race
Down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
And grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
Headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…
Do you ever feel like marketers are constantly bombarded with information about the best practices we should be following, new ways to attract leads, new channels for engagement, and so much more? It can become overwhelming, so much so to the point where we as marketers can find ourselves trying too many things at once and not really seeing any results. We’re stuck in a waiting place just hoping that the results will roll in at any moment (hint: they don’t).
This reminds me of when I was at Content Marketing World a few years ago and someone asked Joe Pulizzi a question about where marketers should start when building out their content strategies. He said to focus on one thing and excel at it rather than going crazy trying to do everything under the sun.
At Uberflip, we find that we and our customers succeed when they focus on building out a better content journey for their visitors. Once you get that under control, adding on different strategic elements becomes easier because your base experience has been created.
Success Is (Mostly) Attainable
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)
I love these few lines because, as marketers, we can follow all of the best practices, create incredible content, launch amazing campaigns, and they’ll succeed – but not 100% of the time. And that’s ok.
There will be times when circumstances out of our control will lead to us losing a deal or someone will bounce when they get hit with a form. Maybe the lost deal was due to budget issues and maybe the bounced visitor just wasn’t at the right place in their journey to continue on to that specific asset. Take the losses and learn from them.
If you do, “kid, you’ll move mountains.”