What is a content upgrade and why does it help you increase your conversion rates more than a lead magnet? Kevin McGrath from Beacon will explain you this and how you can create it with Beacon tips and tricks.
But before delving into the topic, let me start introducing you, Kevin McGrath.
About Kevin McGrath
Kevin is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon, a plugin that can be used with WordPress to help you generate more leads.
He has a background in Design and initially ran a web design agency called Starfish for about 6 years. But he is now more focused on Marketing and Growth.
Through his webinar, he talks about:
- Lead Generation
- Landing Page
- Lead Magnet
- Content Upgrade
- Time-Saving Tips and Tricks with Beacon
- Exclusive Bonuses from Beacon
Lead Generation
- Every marketer looks for more leads to gain more clients. However, most people don’t buy on their first interaction.
Indeed, people like to do research before they make a purchase (web price comparisons, shipping rates..). If people spend a big budget, they will want to make sure they get it right. When you do your research, you want to find out things like: How does this company work like another business like mine? Can this company offer a solution to the problem that I’m facing?
- As marketers, we want to help you with your research and also available and stay in touch with you through the course of that research.
We want leads and email addresses from people who are likely to buy from us in the future.
- Better Leads.
Avoid having an email list of poor leads not interested in your products. This will be a waste of your time to target these people.
So, in order to get email addresses, marketers have been doing this for decades. If you give somebody something of value in exchange for their email address, they are more likely to give it to you. We can give something like an eBook in exchange for an email address.
Generally, when people offer eBooks, they do so on a dedicated landing page to offer the prospect a lead magnet. A lead magnet is essentially a downloadable piece of content like an eBook, or a whitepaper or something that is basically information-based that you are giving your prospects to help nurture to become your customer.
Now, there are two points in this strategy:
1. Landing Page
2. Lead Magnet.
The Problem with lead magnet strategy
The strategy is flawed. Basically, if you are putting a lead magnet up on a landing page, you are going to have to spend a lot of time preparing the content for that lead magnet.
- Large lead magnet.
The lead magnet will have to be impressive and well package (100 pages long).
- Another page to drive traffic to.
That’s a new page in your website. You are not having the benefit of, say, a blog post, that is already gaining lots of organic traffic. You are going to have to come up with a new traffic acquisition strategy, in order to drive customers to the page.
- Visitors need to be ‘warmed up’.
Once your visitors get to the page, you are going to have to warm them up to get them to download an eBook and see its benefits. You are essentially starting from scratch.
- Trying to appeal to everyone is another issue with this lead magnet strategy.
I’m sure, guys, to have familiar with various customers’ personas, various stages in the buying cycle. Say, you have 2 or 3 personas with their individual needs and problems that they want to resolve, each may be at a different stage of the buying cycle. Some may not know you at all and others may know you well and just need a gentle reminder note.
- eBooks aren’t anymore the new kids on the block.
They have been around for a while and as marketers tend to overdo these strategies with this as soon as we see some success with that. People have become jaded with the overall eBook strategy and do not take the time reading a lengthy book.
But don’t worry, there is a solution to that.
the SOLUTION WITH content upgrade system strategy
A content upgrade is a targeted resource for individual blog posts.
So, instead of having a dedicated landing page for a big eBook type of resource, it’s just a bonus offered as part of a blog post. You will place this free bonus just after the introduction of the blog post in a centred embedded box for better results. If you click on the box, you will get a pop-up asking for your details. It will bring you to a checklist or short 1-3 pages long content.
- So, a content upgrade is a short actionable download like a checklist or resource guide.
- It will build on the subject of the blog post.
So, the blog post is the theory and the free bonus is the practical application of that theory. So, you are educating people with the blog post. They are already interested in and read it and you are helping them to implement the advice in the blog post with your download.
- It’s just a simple strategy and that’s why it’s so effective. You basically capitalise on that existing blog traffic.
- It is also very targeted as related to a blog post for a specific persona at a specific stage in the buying cycle.
After anyone downloaded that targeted content, you can segment them as, for example, ‘a copyrighter who is interested in SEO’ if that’s the blog topic.
- When you have that extra information, you are more likely to sell and market to them more appropriately in the future.
So, they are more likely to purchase his premium products from him.
- But most importantly, this content upgrade system strategy results in high conversion rates.
Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of people that come to your blog post and give you their email address. For eg, if you have 100 people visiting your page and 10 people downloading your content, you have a conversion rate of 10 %, The higher conversion rate is, the more efficiently you are using your traffic. It means the fewer resources, i.e time and money, you will have to spend driving traffic to your blog posts. So optimising for conversion rates is important. You can generate between 5 and 16 times more leads for your business. It’s a life-long evergreen strategy.
So, why is it working? You are offering something is short.
- It’s a short article. Most people are more likely to download something short as they have a short attention span.
- It’s useful. It is directly related to the blog post to help implement tactical and practical advice. It helps reader getting closer to the goals they want to achieve.
- Because this is part of a blog post, readers are already engaged. The next part is to convince them that you can help them further by doing the content upgrade. People are more likely to opt-in when they are already engaged.
People tend to ignore pop-ups when they scroll down the page. So, if you can include your call-to-action within the main flow of the blog post, you will see better results. I would say to use the in-line forms.
Actually, LeadPages did some research into the number of clicks required to opt-in. They said that the two-staged call-to-action is more effective/ than the single stage one and perform better in terms of conversions. So, if you show an email box with an input form straightaway, people will try to avoid it.
So, before we move on, I’d like to recap.
What is the difference between a content upgrade and a lead magnet?
| Content Upgrade | Lead Magnet |
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Content upgrades should be part of your blogging routine and go along with it.
So, your blogging strategy probably looks like this:
What I’m proposing is that you add an extra step to that process:
I want to show you how you can create these content upgrades.
Beacon can help to speed up the content upgrade strategy for you. I want to show you time-saving tips to implement these content upgrades into your blog posts quickly.
Beacon Time-Saving Tips and Tricks
- Set up brand colours. This is quickest overly most overlooked feature within Beacon.
- Create a re-usable content library, so that you can drop in any pieces of content into any content upgrades you create in the future.
- Create a re-usable template so that you can create your branding and keep re-using it, instead of having to work from scratch every time.
So, in Beacon’s normal interface, I create a workbook with one of our standard templates. The template contains a cover page, a short introduction, a worksheet with some questions to answer. This kind of school-like exercise helps people think about strategic things by working through the process on their own. The content upgrade finishes with a call-to-action.
- If you choose that template, go through each page to see what you can customise for your business. First thing, you are going to have to change that logo. You will need to pick your brand colour on all pages to get the colour scheme in line with my brand. I would advise a more sullen kind of colour but there is no colour to avoid.
Obviously, that’s not ideal. So I want to show you this trick. It is buried a little bit under the document settings (4th icon down the left-hand side). Once you click on it, it will open this ‘default styles’ panel. You will notice that the colour template is set up for you. This means that if you set up your template colours, this will be updated throughout the document.
- What you are going to find in content upgrades is that you may be re-using certain types of content in every single content upgrade that you make.
One example of that would be an ‘about the author’ page to give readers context about who prepared the content upgrade. Why should they trust you? The purpose is to nurture prospects into qualified leads.
Let’s create an ‘about the author page’. Underneath the first ‘pages’ tab, I’m going to click on the ‘Add New Page’ button. I’ll look for a text focused page template. I’ll filter that. I’m going to choose the two columns layout. I’ll include an image. It’s always good to add an image of the author. I’ll also add some information from social media in a headline box/card at the bottom.
Every time I make a content upgrade, I don’t want to go through all those steps each time. Instead, I’m going to go to ‘Pages’ tab, then click on the 3rd button down ‘Page settings’. Then I’ll click on the ‘Convert’ button under ‘Convert this page into a template’. I’ll save that template and refresh the page. So, next time you click on ‘Add New Page’, you will have your template saved if you scroll down the templates.
- How to convert an entire publication into a reusable template. I want to show you how to convert a document into a template.
Let’s create a re-usable template as a starting point. We are not going to have a worksheet in each template, so let’s delete that. You can your logo/image. You will be able in a week time to save image library as well.
To convert this into a reusable template, I’m going to click on ‘Document Settings’ tab on the left-hand side and click on the ‘Convert’ button. I’ll give this template a name and save it. Then I’ll leave the editor, go back to the ‘Dashboard’. When you go and click on the ‘Create New’ button, then ‘New Editor’. This will lead you to the ‘Pick your Magnet’ screen to choose a template. Let’s say we create a ‘Checklist’, select ‘No’ to import content. Then, on the next screen for ‘Choose a theme’, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find your re-usable template. Then, you’ll click on ‘Add New Page’, filter for the checklist and add what you saved.
Note: Some of the features that I did show you are Premium Features. The part where I showed you the convert templates (page and document), you need a paid account to use that feature. However, the brands and colours are available for free. To justify going for a paid account, you will get exclusive bonuses.
EXCLUSIVE BONUSES
These will be available to you if you upgrade to a paid account after this webinar (Kevin will be notified once you do so). For that, just shoot an email to Kevin so that he can send them to you.
- Lead Magnet Learning Pack is a swipe file of 13 content upgrades used on our blog to help Beacon grow to 25000 users. This is a good source of inspiration for a content upgrade to make. They are all different in design.
- Expert Audio Interview with Laura Roader, founder of MeetEdgar. Laura has grown to 7 figures business. She developed a software product that uses content marketing, content upgrades and lead magnets to grow her business. I’ll be sharing with you some of the strategies she uses.
- Free Beacon Template Design that I will personally design for to your business worth $1000. I’ll have a consultation with you to understand your needs (2-3 days work).
If you have any questions, drop an email to Kevin@beacon.by and he will be more than happy to follow-up with you individually.
To finish off with this talk, you want to watch its demo and presentation:
Finally, if you are interested in, you may explore these 30 Content Upgrade Ideas to Grow Your Email List (Updated).
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