Oli Gardner and Philipp Schoeffmann discuss key tactics for any content marketing strategy and more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Oli Gardner | Co-Founder, Unbounce

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
True or false. You legally tried to change your name into “Landing Page“?
Oli:
I didn’t try. I researched it cause back in the beginning, I was doing a lot of guest blogging on different blogs to get traffic to Unbounce.com. And I realised at the end of every post is my bio. And my name is linking back to our website. So I thought, if I change my name to “Landing Page“, they’ll have to do it, if it’s official, so I’ll get all that link juice of the landing page coming back to our site. It’s not that hard, to change. There’s hassles, you know, you’ve got to change all your documentation. The hard part is changing it back.
Phil:
That’s awesome. I’m here with Oli, co-founder of Unbounce. Thank you so much for being here. You stick to your original name now?
Oli:
I do. Or Oliver if I’m in trouble.
Phil:
Okay, alright. That’s what your mom calls you right?
Oli:
Yeah.
Phil:
Okay, anyways. Thank you so much for being here. I just visited your speech for a couple of minutes and, oh boy, you’re a machine. I mean, you’re on fire onstage. What did you share onstage? We can’t go through all of it, maybe you can give us the main takeaways.

Content Marketing Optimisation Map

Oli:
Sure, it was called “Content Marketing is Broken and Only Your Mom Can Save You,” so another mom connection there. What it really stands for is marketing optimisation map. It’s a pretty advanced content marketing strategy specifically for product awareness and it’s based on events. So it’s not so much on which page did someone go to, it’s all the little micro interactions they do on the way to converting. So it’s about creating more interactive moments so that we can learn in the moment what people are deciding to do, how they’re self-identifying. Let’s say, what job do you do? Marketing, designer, copywriter. If they click on or if they self-identify and then change the experience after that. Dropping cookies, that kind of thing.

Content Based on “aha” Moments

Phil:
So it’s really about segmenting your visitors and then building out different paths for them?
Oli:
Yeah, in the moment. So if you look at some of your data, some of your content, you might not have repeat visitors. They might not come back.So you can’t just rely on, “Oh look at the analytics after the fact.” You need to change in the moment. And the fundamental part of it is all designed or is based on “aha” moments. So when you figure out which are your products’ “aha” moments, then you design content for that and interactive experiences that expose your product in the right way, in a valuable way, showing interesting use cases so your visitors will go, “Oh that’s cool, I can understand why this is for me.“
Phil:
Okay, that’s fantastic. Can you share a couple of examples?
Oli:
We have an industry bench-marker for different industries, how copy impacts conversions. So if I ask people, “Hey, what industry are you part of or are you in? And in exchange, I will give you this data.” And then they tell me. On the next page of the course, I have a video where I’m explaining fundamentals. And in the middle of that I have a demo, how to use that information. And I’m inside the builder with a generic template. If I know what industry they’re in, I recorded the video ten times, just the middle part, the demos, a minute long. So now, with that cookie set, I will show them their industry-specific one. So the feature I’m showing is designed for the “aha” moment, the fact that they’re industry template is being shown is an accelerator, to get to the “aha” moment more quickly.

Designing The Content

Phil:
So you actually take a lot of time designing the content before you put it out right?
Oli:
Yeah and something we’re learning as well, you’re always trying as a business. We need new content, we need new channels, but what we’re finding is sometimes you lose track. Once you’re an established business, you start to forget that there’s always a new person who doesn’t know what you need to teach them the fundamentals of landing pages. I get bored writing about the basics so I write more advanced stuff and you forget that there’s always somebody new who needs the basics. The examples I gave in this was all about our landing page course, which is the fundamental stuff but it’s all context. So I went back and the content exists. Now I’m placing these interactive content elements within that to change the experience, learn context in the moment and change the experience of something that already existed.

The 3 C’s Model

Phil:
Right, that’s cool. I think you have a model, the three C’s right? Can you explain this as well?
Oli:
Yeah, you start with the “aha” moment, but then it goes through context, content and conversion. So you understand the known context, what you know, maybe you do some research, some surveys and the key words come in, that’s what you know. And then there’s the context you want to know. What questions can you ask that, when answered, will allow you to create a different experience based on those answers? Then the content, the interactive content is what you build to get those answers and deliver something in return. And then the conversion side is based on all of these events. Basically you end up with an event map of everything that was done and you can look at it. What are the events that happened for people who did convert and for people who didn’t? Which “aha” moment content were they interacting with the most if they converted? So it can guide your content strategy after that because you can see the behaviour that’s actually working.

Unbounce’s Biggest Wins

Phil:
That’s pretty cool. What would you say is one of your biggest success stories and one of your biggest failures? It’s a bit of a personal one, I think.
Oli:
In terms of the things that were successful for us, two things. One was our early content marketing, we just went really hard on that. It was much easier then to succeed because everyone was doing that. And also just the integrations we chose, technical integrations with like-minded companies. MailChimp, for example, was our first. It was very connected to what our audience wanted to do. It’s funny, if you ask me about failures or anything, for the first six years I would’ve said, “Nothing.” Everything’s gone our way.
Phil:
Really? That’s not a good answer.
Oli:
Everything’s gone right. It was true then. But now, the growth phase is the hardest. When you get from 50 people, like we’re 180 now. When you go through the 75 plus, that’s when all of the problems occur. And we were told this by other companies.
Phil:
Fantastic. Well thank you so much for sharing all of that. Great pleasure having you.