The Complete Guide to Building a Successful YouTube Channel

There are opportunities everywhere for content marketers.

Different channels, different types of content, and different websites.

One that I think is criminally underutilized is a little site you might have heard of:

YouTube.

It’s by far the largest video sharing site—nothing even comes close to it.

Get this: YouTube has over 1 billion users.

Those billion users account for over 4 billion video views a day.

You can find literally any type of audience on YouTube, which means that just about any business can find a way to benefit from marketing on it.

And while other video sites have decent levels of traffic, most businesses could start today on YouTube and do fine because it’s far from saturated.

In truth, few businesses actually invest in YouTube marketing.

Why?

Because it’s difficult. Compare a video and a blog post about the same topic and of similar quality levels, and the video will cost more.

Smart businesses know that the cost can be worth it, but the higher barrier to entry scares away the rest.

If you’ve been considering marketing on YouTube, or you’ve just started and haven’t really found your feet, this post is especially for you.

I’m going to show you all the key components of creating a YouTube channel that thrives. Your videos will get views, and those views will lead to subscribers and sales for your business. 

Video is still content, so you need to start with an audience

You should treat a YouTube content strategy just like you would treat a content strategy on any other channel.

Your content needs to be created for a specific audience you want to reach.

The more you define your niche, the more your content will resonate with viewers.

At this point, there are three main aspects you need to determine.

Aspect #1 – The type of person: First up is the type of person you want to create content for, which should be the same type of person who buys your product(s).

For example, if I were creating a channel from scratch today, I would be creating content for business owners and marketers because they are also the ones who buy my training courses and hire me as a consultant.

Try to get even more specific than that. For example:

• beginner marketers


• expert marketers


• marketers in North America

You can often narrow your audience by being more specific about their knowledge level of your topic and location.

A narrow audience is a good thing because it allows you to make your content just that more targeted.

You can’t create content for beginners and experts at the same time, so if you try to, at least half will always be dissatisfied.

Aspect #2 – What do they want to do? The second part of defining your audience is to specify their main goals.

Are they trying to make more money? make their home look better? learn to cook better? get in shape? And so on…

Determine the things they care about the most. Ideally, it will relate to your product as well, but it’s not always necessary.

For example, I could create content for “expert marketers who want to get in better shape.”

Even though those videos wouldn’t be directly related to my products, they still attract the attention of my target market. This would allow me to get my marketing advice in front of them and, eventually, my products as well.

The main point of content marketing, including videos on YouTube, is to attract the attention of your target audience.

So, if you see a need that hasn’t been filled, jump on it regardless of whether it’s directly tied to your product.

Aspect #3 – How do they want to consume it? Finally, you just want to do a common sense check and determine whether the audience you’ve nailed down actually wants to get their solutions in the video form.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole audience, but it should be a large part.

Video is great for certain types of content:

• tutorials


• overviews of strategies


• education on a specific topic


• demonstrations


• product reviews

Marketers, and just about any audience, would love to get fitness tips through videos. It makes sense because it’s the simplest way you can show movements and explain complex topics.

But it won't suit all types of content.

For example, let's say your audience wants to find resources.

You can’t exactly put a list of tools and resources in a video because it’s not easily scannable.

Once you’ve come up with an audience with a specific need that can be fulfilled with video, you’re good to move on to the next step.

3 Steps to videos that attract views

Marketing on YouTube has a lot of similarities to SEO.

To get views, one of your main goals will be to rank in YouTube's searches without putting in more effort than your initial promotion.

You could try some black hat tactics, just like in SEO, to get the extra views, but that’s never a long-term solution.

Instead, you need to create videos people actually want to watch. There are three steps to it.

Step #1 – Accomplish or entertain, pick one: Ask yourself why someone watches a video. There are really only two reasons why.

Either they want to learn something to solve a problem, or they want to be entertained.

You need to make sure that your video accomplishes at least one of these, if not both.

The reason why understanding this is so important is because it will shape how you make your videos.

Does a super long introduction help your viewer learn what they want? No, they don’t care about a theme song. This isn’t a TV show.

Does the viewer care about an in-depth history to the problem? Again, no.

They want their solution delivered as concisely as possible.

Your goal is to make your videos as useful as possible because that’s what’s going to bring you subscribers and long-time viewers.

Step #2 – Quality always comes first: Even though YouTube is far from saturated, one aspect that really impresses me is the quality of the videos put out by popular channels.

They’ve quickly figured out that viewers won’t watch low quality videos.

Compare this to blogging: the standard level of content has only gotten to a high level in the past few years, and there are still plenty of businesses producing ugly content without much value.

There are two main types of high quality videos that you’ll come across and that you’ll probably want to produce yourself.

Let me clarify what I mean by quality: I’m talking about how good the video looks.

High quality videos look professional: they have good lighting, aren’t blurry, and look like someone invested some time and effort in them.

The first type is the classic white background. Derek Halpern often uses it in his videos:

Not only does it look professional, but it keeps the focus on you rather than some random things in the background.

The other kind of popular video is the whiteboard video, where narration is done alongside drawings on a whiteboard:

These look great and are an entertaining way to explain complex products.

How do you make videos like these?

Well, the white screen background (you could also go with a green screen) type of video is pretty easy.

It’ll cost you a few hundred dollars in a photography store to get set up the first time (for a low cost version), but that will last you a long while.

Here’s a great video on how to get your own setup:

Once you have the screen in place, you just need a decent camera, and you’re good to start filming.

The whiteboard videos are a bit trickier unfortunately.

If you don’t have the illustration skills yourself, you don’t have any choice but to hire someone to do it for you.

Create a job posting on any of the major freelance sites to find a whiteboard explainer video creator or designer, and you should get a few applicants with experience:

• Upwork


• Elance


• Guru

On top of filming a high quality video, you will also need to edit it.

Good editing allows you to make the video flow nicely from one section to another to keep the viewers' attention.

Again, you’ll need to hire a freelance video editor if you don’t have the skills yourself.

Step #3 – You need to make a name for yourself: Having your own YouTube channel is a lot like having your own TV show. You need subscribers who will watch your videos on a regular basis.

That’s why a single video, no matter how good it is, is not enough for YouTube marketing success.

Compare it to the pilot episode of a TV show. Even if it gets good ratings, that doesn’t ensure that it gets picked up for a second season.

You need to commit to making regular videos for your channel.

Take Derek Halpern, whom I mentioned before. He has close to 90 videos on his channel from my quick estimations.

He created those over a period of a few years.

This does a few major things.

Firstly, it gives him the chance to accumulate subscribers. Even if your first video doesn’t impress a viewer enough to make them subscribe, maybe another one of your videos in the sidebar will.

On top of that, every time a subscriber sees a video, there’s a good chance they will share it. This will lead to more views every time you release a new video.

The number of views your videos will get is not linear. It will start slowly, but like a snowball, it will grow exponentially over time.

If you’re going to do whitehat video marketing on YouTube, plan to give it a year or so before you see real results—but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to get them sooner.

Start with basic video SEO

The next step of making your videos work for you is optimizing them for search.

Your primary goal is to get a video to rank in the results of YouTube searches, but it'll have an added benefit of ranking in Google results as well:

Videos often show up in Google results, and it can drive a decent number of views to your video.

I wouldn’t rely on showing up in Google because videos don’t show up in all searches. However, it can be a nice boost to your views, and you can maximize your chance of showing up in searches by targeting phrases with the following keywords in them:

• tutorial


• review


• test


• what is ____


• video


• explanation


• how to ____


• walkthrough

Now back to YouTube optimization. There are two major parts of the ranking algorithm that you need to optimize for.

Part #1 – Your video information: The first thing YouTube looks for is whether your video is relevant to a search.

It’s a fairly simple search engine; it looks for keywords in three areas of your video:

• the title


• the description


• the tags

You don’t need to—and shouldn't—keyword-stuff.

Include your keyword once in the title, once or twice in your description, and in the tags if it makes sense.

Here’s an example of the description from Brian Dean’s “advanced SEO” YouTube video that he ranks highly for:

He mentions the keyword at the very start and the very end of it.

But notice there’s a lot more to the description than just the keyword.

YouTube doesn’t have much to work with when it comes to ranking videos. The title is only a sentence long, and tags can’t be weighed too heavily because they contain limited information.

This makes the description the main source of additional information for YouTube’s algorithm.

By including a detailed description of the video, you’ll naturally include related terms the algorithm can use to understand the topic of your video. This will make it easier to rank for relevant terms.

Part #2 – User engagement and feedback: Not surprisingly, YouTube’s algorithm has taken an approach to ranking videos that's similar to Google’s approach.

Instead of just using the basic information an uploader provided with a video, it also looks at how users interact with your video.

The simple concept behind it is that if users are indicating they really like your video, it’s probably a good one to show to more people. Naturally, the algorithm ranks it higher.

So, what does it look at?

There are a few major areas of user feedback YouTube can consider when evaluating a video.

The first is how much of the video most viewers are watching.

If they all drop off after the first 10 seconds, that’s a bad sign. But if 50%- 60% of your viewers watch the whole video, that’s fantastic.

You can check this in your account’s statistics, where you’ll see a graph similar to the one above.

Where else can YouTube get feedback from?

• Overall views - From YouTube’s perspective, if a video is getting a lot of views without its help in the search rankings, it must be good. More views typically lead to better rankings (as long as the audience retention is good).

• Rating (thumbs up and down) - Users can also rate a video by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. The higher this ratio is, the better.


• Views to subscribers – If a video is really good, a lot of people who view it will click the "Subscribe" button underneath. Similarly, no one will subscribe after watching a bad video.


• Views to favorites or social shares - Just like with subscribing, people will also share a video only if they like it.


• Comments - If a video is inspiring a lot of comments, it may be good. YouTube can’t put much weight on the comment count since comments could be negative too.

Using all these factors, YouTube comes up with an appropriate score for each video to decide how to rank it.

The biggest thing you can do to optimize these engagement factors is to make high quality videos (as discussed above).

There are a few other small things you can do as well, which I’ll show you throughout the rest of this post.

Views rule YouTube rankings

While there are several factors that contribute to YouTube rankings, quality views are the most important.

When I say “quality views,” I mean a situation when the average viewer watches most of the video.

For almost any term you search, the results will have one thing in common: all the videos will have a lot of views. Here is an example:

For “advanced SEO,” the lowest view count of the top results is over 3,600.

It’s important to understand what “a lot” is to an algorithm.

The difference between zero and 2,000 is greater than the difference between 2,000 and 200,000.

Once you have a few thousand views, you have what you need to rank.

Why? Because now YouTube has a large enough sample size to compare your video’s engagement to the others'. Things such as retention and rating become viable ranking factors.

The takeaway:

You don’t need to get hundreds of thousands of views to rank well, but you do need to find a way to get your first few hundred and, if possible, first few thousand on each video.

As you get more and more subscribers, you don’t have to focus on promotion as much because your videos will automatically get thousands of high retention views from your fans.

When you’re starting out, you have many options to promote your videos. I’m going to show you four of the best ones.

Option #1 – Cross-promotion: If you already have a bit of a name in your niche, cross-promotion is a great place to start.

The idea is to participate in a video hosted by the top YouTubers in your niche in order to get exposure to their audiences.

Rand Fishkin does it often:

At the end of this video, you should be able to ask the viewers of the channel your video is featured on to subscribe to your channel. Make sure you place a link for it in the description.

To find these channels, search for big keywords in your niche on YouTube, and check out the number of subscribers the users on the first page have.

For example, I could take a look at Josh Bachynski’s channel as he ranks highly for “advanced SEO”:

Clicking his name under the video will take you to his profile, where you can see his subscriber count in red:

Obviously, the bigger the number, the better.

Try to target at least 20-30 users with a solid base of subscribers. Find their email addresses, and send them a pitch offering to create a video for them.

Ideally, you’ll get at least a few guest opportunities.

Option #2 – Promote your videos to your email subscribers: If you’re producing high quality videos, why wouldn’t you share them with your audience?

Better yet, why don’t you create a blog post to accompany each and embed the corresponding video into the post? This is exactly what Derek Halpern often does:

Then, readers can choose whether they want to read your post, watch your video, or do both.

When they watch the video while it’s embedded on your site, it still counts as a view.

If you have a couple of thousand email subscribers already, you can get your YouTube channel going really fast if a good portion of those subscribers watch your videos as well.

Option #3 – Email outreach: Videos on YouTube are just like any other type of content. One of the most effective ways to promote them is with email outreach.

Make a list of top bloggers in your niche, and send them an email about the video.

Ask them to share it with their audience if they think their audience would enjoy it, but also explain why you think the audience would.

Option #4 – Advertising: YouTube also allows businesses to buy ads on the site to promote their videos:

The average cost is about $10-$30 per thousand views. With practice, I think you could get the price down even further.

If you’re spending a few hundred dollars (at the minimum) to make a video, doesn’t it make sense to spend $50 to promote it initially?

I think it does, particularly when you don’t have many subscribers.

Here is my complete guide to using YouTube ads for businesses.

Don’t waste those views! Here’s how to make them count

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of how you’re going to make videos and get those initial views.

Assuming your videos are solid, you should be getting a stream of organic traffic from YouTube itself.

But remember what the whole point of creating a YouTube channel is.

It isn't to get views. It's to increase your business’ sales.

To do this, let's take a step back and consider where YouTube would fit within your sales funnel:

It’d be right at the top.

It’s the marketing channel where you get the attention of your potential customers.

But the next step has to be to get them onto your website and onto an email list.

Part #1 – include a call to action to get subscribers on YouTube: When you want to get someone to do something, you need to ask them to do it.

In this case, you want your viewers to subscribe to your channel.

Subscribers will get notified of your latest videos, and a decent portion of them will watch all your videos as you release them.

Not only does this help you rank better, but it also gives you another opportunity to get these people to your website.

And sure, some viewers will subscribe to you without any prompting, but most won’t. A call to action will significantly impact your viewer-to-subscriber conversion rate, which is why all top YouTubers do it.

You have a few different options for a call to action; I recommend testing them all with your audience.

The first option is to create a nice big “Subscribe” button at the end of your videos.

You can see why that’d be effective.

To add the button, you’ll need to modify your Google Adwords settings to allow you to have access to the CTA (call to action) panel in YouTube itself.

Here’s a great video that shows you the entire process:

Your next option is to simply use annotations on your videos, which you can configure when you upload your videos.

For example, look at the way “BBALLBREAKDOWN” uses annotations to prompt viewers to either subscribe or watch another video hosted on the channel:

They compared the conversion rate of this approach with not having any CTAs and found that CTAs converted an impressive 31 times better.

Finally, you can also take a few seconds at the end of the video to ask viewers to subscribe. This can work better because most viewers won’t shut off the video while you’re (or your narrator is) still talking.

Part #2 – put a link to a landing page in the description to capture email addresses: In order to get people to your website, you’ll need a link somewhere.

You can test adding it to your videos, but the best place is your description.

You should add a link to a landing page for a relevant newsletter to all your video descriptions:

Don’t just link to a blog post because those won’t convert nearly as high as landing pages will.

3 Simple but crucial tips about YouTube marketing

By now, you know just about everything you need to know about building a successful YouTube channel.

However, there are a few final tips that I’d like to give you that can make a big difference in your success.

The first is that building a successful YouTube can take time.

If you have a large email list or existing relationships with influencers to leverage, you can get thousands of views in no time.

But if you don’t, like most businesses, expect to create great videos for at least a few months before you start getting thousands of organic views. Don’t give up if a few videos fall flat—keep going.

The second tip is that you will get negative comments from time to time.

There are two types of negative comments, and you should handle them differently:

• troll comments - these are not serious comments; they are made just to get a reaction out of you. There’s nothing you can do about them except ignore them.

• honest comments - when you first start out, you have a lot of room to improve. If someone says something legitimately negative about your video, take it as an opportunity to learn and improve your future videos.

My final tip is to remember YouTube is a marketing channel. Like with any other marketing channel, you should not build your business on it.

Instead, always look to drive those YouTube users back to your website so that you can grow your email list. This way, even if YouTube bans your account for some reason, your business will still be fine.

Conclusion

YouTube is a fantastic marketing opportunity for businesses interested in content marketing.

Almost all audiences use YouTube, and there really isn’t too much competition yet.

I’ve shown you everything you need to know, including the type of videos you should be making, how you can get consistent, how to get free views to them, and how to turn viewers into customers.

Now, you need to take action.

If you’ve been considering YouTube marketing, pull the trigger. Create a plan based on this post, and create your first video as soon as possible.

If you have any questions about how to determine whether YouTube is right for your business or how to make the most of it, let me know in a comment below.

How Eventbrite Built and Scaled Their Marketing Organization

Picture this: You've just been hired as the marketing head for a promising startup. Your job is to help the company build awareness and find users.

Where do you start? Certainly, you know that getting off on the wrong foot can have disastrous consequences. Bad hires and processes not only hurt the company, they also make you look bad and can destroy your credibility and trust within the company.

On the other hand, if everything goes smoothly from the start (barring some inconsequential missteps), you'll know that you helped the company grow and played an important role in its success.

How do you know where to begin, and what mistakes should you avoid?

These are the challenges that Tamara Mendelsohn faced when she joined Eventbrite in 2009. Mendelsohn built the Eventbrite marketing team from the ground up, to a team of 60.

And the company has turned into a pretty big success, hosting over 1 million events per year and processing over 4 million tickets.

Mendelsohn and her team deserve a lot of the credit for helping establish Eventbrite. They grew awareness of the company, helped it reach new user groups, and built a solid marketing team.

Mendelsohn learned a lot of lessons along the way, and she shared what she learned at True University. This blog post is a recap of her presentation.

Mendelsohn broke her presentation into three sections:

1. Laying the Foundation


2. Driving Growth


3. Building a Team

Each section is chock full of good advice. Let's get into it.

1. Laying the Foundation

These are the lessons Mendelsohn learned in the first year at Eventbrite. They are the foundational pieces you have to get right.

Understanding Your Customers

At the time, Eventbrite had thousands of customers. Because of the self-service nature of the business, they didn't have a sales team. When Mendelsohn joined the company, she launched the blog. Unfortunately, she didn't know much about events or event management. So she emailed customers who had used Eventbrite to run events, and she interviewed those customers and posted the interviews on the blog.

The value in these interviews was not just blog content, but also being able to talk to and understand customers.

Mendelsohn says that hearing from customers helps shine light into areas you may not think of regarding your brand, messaging, and positioning.

Crystalizing Your Value Prop and Positioning

After talking to a lot of customers, Mendelsohn created a list of all the reasons people were using Eventbrite.

There were about 20 different reasons. Here are just a few:

From there, Mendelsohn sent out a survey to users. She kept it short and sweet, limiting it to three questions. This was the first question:

• How do you use Eventbrite?




• I love it and would recommend it to a friend


• Eventbrite suits my needs but I'm open to other solutions


• I'm really dissatisfied

From there, she cut the data with this second question:

• What originally prompted you to use Eventbrite?




• A dropdown of the 20+ reasons list

And this was the final question:

• After using Eventbrite, what is the greatest value you find from it?

She got two takeaways from this – the perceived benefit and the realized benefit.

Then Mendelsohn created a series of paid search campaigns that paired a perceived benefit in the headline with a realized benefit in the text underneath. There were a lot of different combinations to test. She took the top three perceived and realized benefits and then created dozens of ads based on the different combinations. So, for example, the #1 perceived benefit could be paired with the #2 realized benefit. And the #3 perceived benefit could be paired with the #1 realized benefit. All these different ads were then tested against each other.

She found a big winner, which was this:

Headline: All in One Solution

Text: That lets you get access to your money quickly

This process can give you a place to start. (In the case of Eventbrite, their positioning and messaging have evolved a lot over time.) At the very least, this gives you a starting point for your messaging, and you'll know you have something that gets people to click on an ad.

Considering Your Brand and Culture

Once Eventbrite raised their venture capital, the team sat down and asked themselves some introspective questions:

• What kind of company are we?


• What kind of company do we want to build?


• What do we want to stand for?


• What do we want to represent?

This was the beginning of their “brand and culture” discussion. Mendelsohn thinks that brand and culture go hand in hand, and she uses the terms interchangeably. She says:

Your employees and the culture of your business will make its way into your brand whether you like it or not, and vice versa.

There are two important exercises for building your culture and brand. We'll start with the “why” question.

The Why Question

Mendelsohn recommends starting with one question:

Why?

She recommends viewing this TED Talk from Simon Sinek (and watching it again if you've already seen it). It has been so influential, in fact, that Mendelsohn watches it every couple of months just to remind herself of the importance of answering the “why” question.

Mendelsohn expounds on the reason the question is so important:

If you want to create a brand that people have an emotional connection with, that outperforms the market, outperforms the competition, and outperforms your expectations because people feel an emotional connection to it, the heart of creating [such] a brand…is the answer to this question: Why do you exist? What is your authentic reason for being?

In addition to watching the TED Talk and answering the “why” question, Mendelsohn also recommends reading this AdAge article.

Understanding the reason for your existence will be the core of all your marketing and messaging, and it will make its way into your culture and your customer experience.

Airbnb is the quintessential example of this. They make it clear: It's not just about renting a room, it's about a feeling of belonging, and belonging anywhere. And when you travel, you don't have to feel like a stranger.

Their ad campaign made this clear as well:

That is what they stand for, and that is why they exist.

If you can develop a relationship with your customers, that will translate into loyalty. And loyalty translates into higher lifetime value, greater word of mouth, and all the great things that come along with sustainable business metrics.

After poking around and doing some brainstorming, Eventbrite came up with this:

At its core, this is what Eventbrite is about. This was what they sold investors on in their first pitch deck. Even as technology advances and people spend more of their time in front of screens, the power and importance of connecting in person, with real people, remains. Humans will always want to learn together, grow together, and celebrate together. That will never go away. That's Eventbrite's pitch. If they can help bring the world together around live experiences, then ultimately they're doing some good.

So that takes care of the “why” question. The second exercise for building your culture and brand is the “brand tenets” question.

Brand Tenets

In that very first customer survey (that Mendelsohn created after talking to customers), if a person answered that they loved Eventbrite and would recommend it to a friend, they were asked an additional question: What are the words you think represent Eventbrite?

They got a huge list of words.

Then they did a similar exercise with the executive team, asking them what Eventbrite stands for, what are the company’s principles, and what do they want to build?

Once Mendelsohn got answers from both customers and executives, she put the lists of words up against each other, and there was a lot of overlap between what the customers said and what the executives said.

To put it another way, instead of deciding what they wanted to be and forcing that on customers, Eventbrite went to users and asked them what they thought Eventbrite was. Then they asked themselves the same question, and finally they found the marriage between the two sets of responses.

This gave them the list of brand tenets. This may change over time as the brand changes with the business. For example, an early word for Eventbrite was disruptive. They wanted to disrupt the industry and get people's attention. But once they got that, they felt they didn't need to keep disrupting.

You may want to look at your tenets a year or two down the road to see if they still match who you are.

Over time, as Eventbrite grew, they realized that it wasn't just marketing that owned the brand voice. There were sales people and product people writing copy. People outside of marketing were talking to users. Because they needed to speak with one brand voice consistently, Eventbrite created the voice and tone guide.

When doing this, you don't need to create a huge manifesto. Just some easy to remember guiding points. Note that the above screenshot is not their entire guide.

2. Driving Growth

How do you build on this foundation and drive growth?

Metrics

It is important to maintain focus on 1-2 metrics. The metric(s) will change over the life of the company. In the early days, you may choose an acquisition-driven metric, and, later, you may focus on a retention-driven metric.

Once you know your metric, you can define the funnel to get to that metric.

Funnel

You need to define each stage of the funnel and measure it appropriately. Look at it at least every week to see your progress.

Eventbrite’s funnel had these steps:

– Visited signup page

– Signed up

This conversion rate was important. They dug deeper into the next steps:

– Signed Up

– Saved Event

– Published Event

– Sending out invitations

Once you have your funnel reporting, you can break down the data and decide where you want to optimize. Is there an area that's doing well that you think can do better? Or do you want to improve an underperforming step?

It's also important to find the people that dropped off in the funnel. Send them a survey and ask them why. You may think they won't respond, but people actually do. Getting this qualitative feedback from people will uncover insights you haven't previously thought of.

The Eventbrite funnel became so important that Mendelsohn hired a full-time person whose only job was to optimize their funnel. This person is the equivalent of what is now known as a growth hacker.

This was her third hire. Her first was a designer and second was someone to work on all their channels – social media, the blog, etc.

Channels

This was Mendelsohn's job in her first couple of years. Her MO was this: Figure something out, and then hire someone better to do it.

When Mendelsohn was running channels, she used data to figure out what worked (social was a big driver of growth) and put more horsepower (resources) behind it.

Here's what she discovered (your results will vary, of course):

– Display was unsuccessful for the first couple of years, but retargeting worked. It's important to experiment with retargeting – test your messaging, who you retarget, where you retarget them, etc. Mendelsohn retargeted people who visited the press page. Why? Because these people were either journalists or people looking for a job. Suddenly, these people were seeing the Eventbrite brand everywhere. These are low-cost things that are not directly for acquisition, but they make the brand appear bigger than it really is. Here are some more tips for retargeting users.

– PR was brought in-house after about 6 months. Having a PR person working only for Eventbrite helped them create much more creative PR ideas than an agency ever did.

You'll need a good analytics tool for measuring all these channels. You need to know what you want from the start, and you'll need a tool that's flexible enough to fit your needs as you grow.

As your company grows, you'll want to look at your marketing campaigns from three perspectives – paid, earned, and owned media.

Mendelsohn explains:

You don't just launch a campaign in one channel, because you won't get the maximum benefit from it. So when you're thinking of reaching an audience with a specific message, [think about] how [you'll] create campaigns that have this 360 degree view [and] think about each of those. So, what is the content you're creating (that's owned media), then how will you amplify that through paid channels…and then how do you get the stage where it's earned? And that's when your customers are sharing things, press is picking things up….if you get those three (paid, earned, owned) to work together, [then] that's the golden triumvirate because you're getting so much more value for the initial work that you do.

At some point during your growth, you'll want to coordinate your marketing campaigns around those three buckets and how you can get them to work together.

Content

Mendelsohn is a big believer in content marketing. She saw it work at Forrester Research and took what she learned to Eventbrite.

Here's the blog post that started it all:

When Mendelsohn was an analyst at Forrester, she understood that people wanted to know how social media impacted commerce. However, no one at the time knew the answer, except Eventbrite. When she got to Eventbrite, she connected the dots and released the report.

This was the first time they got all three buckets working – they put out some paid advertising for this report, the press picked it up (even Zuckerberg mentioned it in a press conference), and people shared it across their social network. It was one idea and one answer to a question that drove a ton of traffic and signups for Eventbrite.

As Eventbrite breaks into new verticals, they need to reach new audiences and gain credibility. The way they approach this is to listen to these specific user groups. Figure out what they're talking about, what questions Eventbrite has, and then get answers to those questions.

One user group they discovered was the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) subset. There wasn't anyone dominating this event market, which presented a big opportunity for Eventbrite. They went and talked to the promoters of EDM. The promoters didn't know who the fans were, but they wanted to know, and they wanted more of them.

Eventbrite then worked with a company called Mashwork to gather social data on what EDM fans were talking about. All the data led to this popular infographic:

They also published a report showing the differences between EDM fans and traditional music fans:

This led to an explosion of coverage. Eventbrite competitors covered it, and Billboard magazine wrote about it. Ticketmaster, a competitor to Eventbrite, mentioned the data in their analyst calls.

Mendelsohn says that content has been the best way for Eventbrite to break in to a new domain. They don't force their way into the conversation. Instead, it's organic, relevant, and people are willing to embrace them.

This content approach doesn't always work for Eventbrite. They've had a few that have flopped, and it's usually a result of picking the wrong topic and not doing enough research.

3. Building a Team

Mendelsohn's strategy for building a team was simple – what deserves investment, find the best person to do it, and then move on.

Early on, Mendelsohn hired people who were young, not very experienced, but really hungry to learn and really curious. After a couple of years passed, she began hiring more experienced people as she realized that the young people had reached their capacity for growth and she didn’t have the time or the knowledge to help each one.

To put it another way, her formula was this:

Start with a rock star, hungry team of junior folks and then over time, start layering in more experienced people to help the juniors continue to grow. Today, her direct reports have a minimum of 15 years of experience.

Wrapping Up

Not every company is the same. Some of what worked for Mendelsohn won't work for you.

Does your first hire have to be a designer? No, not unless you have that need.

But there are some key lessons to learn. Never underestimate how important it is to learn about your customers. After all, these are the people you are targeting. You need to know about them and how to get more of them. And always do your research before you enter new user groups. Content may not be the best way for you, but whatever you do, you’ll want to make sure your name gets out there in a respectful and organic way that users are receptive to.

Here are some other key takeaways:

• First, understand your customers, and then crystallize your value prop and positioning.


• Watch the TED Talk from Simon Sinek and answer the “why” question.


• Test channels and see what works for you. Pour more investment into what works.


• Get a funnel that measures your key goals. Measure every step and optimize every which way.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

Measuring Content Performance for Higher Sales Conversions

In the Mad Men era, marketing was considered a cost center where “creative types” made glorious advertising campaigns but had very little ability to measure their impact on sales. Now, thanks to the Internet, marketing automation, and marketing analytics solutions, we can measure nearly everything in marketing, tracing our impact all the way down to influence on revenue and ROI. This ability to measure marketing’s performance and receive instant feedback on what works has revolutionized marketing.

Analytics are the key to performance optimization. Real-time feedback on what is working empowers us to improve message quality, creative, channel and offers to quickly improve the outcome. Without accurate performance analytics, we’d be back in the Mad Men era of creating content and launching campaigns into a black hole with no idea if they worked.

And yet, that is exactly the scenario in which most organizations find themselves today when it comes to content—no ability to measure whether their content has any impact at all.

Most marketers and sales enablement professionals (research shows greater than 85%) have no ability to objectively measure whether sales reps are using their content, how often it is being used, how effectively the content engages the customer, which customers, and whether the content has any impact on sales. Without this feedback loop, these content publishers lack the technology and processes to systematically optimize content.

Why is it, that a practice we consider de rigueur in top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) lead generation marketing has not been adopted in bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) analysis?

Well, ‘best-in-class’ organizations have figured out that closed-loop sales enablement is the answer and are seeing incredible gains from it including 3x higher revenue growth and 50% greater sales quota attainment (compared to ‘average’ companies). By closing the loop on the ‘content value chain’ between marketing, sales and the customer, organizations have created a systematic process to improving customer engagement, communication and sales’ ability to sell.

9 Metrics for Measuring Sales Content Performance

Content Management

Content Coverage of Buyer’s Journey – To ensure that the right content is available for each of your sales teams, map content to the buyer’s journey in each of your sales segments (could be product line, geo, industry segment, or whatever else makes sense for your business.)

For instance, if you have targeted 4 stages of the buyer’s journey with your sales content (interest, education, solution assessment, decision validation) and you have 3 product lines, you want to ensure you have the right content for each stage for each product line—12 squares in the matrix. Similarly, if you have teams in Brazil, Germany, Japan and the U.S., you’ll have 16 buyer’s journey needs and 16 matrix cells to consider.

Content Freshness – Ensure that content does not get stale and out of date by tracking content age and version dates.

One of the primary activities of content managers is to keep track of the content in the system. And one of their primary checks is whether the sales teams are using outdated content.

A simple report to watch for outdated or stagnating content is to run a content aging report based on last versioned date. Content that hasn’t been updated in a long time, or before the last messaging or branding refresh should be reviewed.

Usage

Content Awareness – Are sales teams aware of new content? Can they find it? Are they adopting updated versions?

A fundamental question for sales content management teams is “Are the sales reps not using my content because they can’t find it or because they are choosing not to use it?” A report that measures the views (has a rep viewed the content), pitches (have the pitched or emailed the content) and downloads helps content owners understand why or why not their content is being used. In the figure shown, you can see that the case study “Freezone Holdings” was viewed by nearly everyone, but hardly ever used. The content owner could then follow up with sales teams to discuss why they weren’t using the new case study.

Content Usage – What content is being used in various sales deals? Which pieces are being used the most? By what segments?

SiriusDecisions research in 2015 stated that 60% of the content generated for sales is not used. One of the first things sales enablement teams must do after implementing a sales content management platform with good analytics is to understand what is being used, what isn’t, and why.

Start with a basic report on content usage (shared with the customer), first by looking at top performers and then by worst performers. Then drill into the data by sales team group, region, and product line. This often surfaces pretty useful insight. The last step is always to follow up with front line sales reps to ask why they don’t use the content. This is key to understanding how to fix it. But proper analytics will point you in the right direction and help you identify which questions to ask.

Pitch Activity – Track pitch activity by content piece, rep &/or account. Measure what is working and what’s not. Understand the pitching practice of your best sales personnel and share best practices with the rest of the organization.

Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement – How is the customer responding to content and pitches? Measure opens, views, downloads and shares. Measure how much time customers spend on each particular page to understand what topics interest them the most.

In many respects, measuring customer engagement is the same as measuring content usage, but focused on the activities of the customer, not the sales reps. Measuring how a customer engages with your content is a powerful measure of content quality and effectiveness.

Content Evolution

Content Evolution – Most sales content, and particularly sales presentations, are modified in the field to customize to a specific selling situation. Often this entails updating the title of a sales presentation to customize it to the intended prospect, adding a prospect’s logo or modifying key messages to adjust to the particular sales situation. These are all practices that help engage the prospect and increase sales effectiveness. In short, these are modifications that you want your sales teams doing.

This helps marketing, too. Marketing needs to know how the content is being modified in order to improve content quality, by aligning with sales teams’ needs and getting real-time feedback on how the messaging needs to change to more effectively engage its audience.

In the image below, the presentation in the column on the left is the original file. The columns to the right show slides (pages) that are similar enough to the one on the left to be considered part of the same family. In this way, content owners can see what other “similar” content is out there and how the message is evolving.

Performance analytics that track how content evolves provide insights into what new messages are more successful in the field are very powerful in improving content quality.

Additionally, all the content performance metrics discussed here should account for content “families” –all content that evolved from the same original piece. This is a deep pothole that many analytics solutions fall into and should be avoided. If a single sales presentation is pitched 1000 times in one month, but modified for each presentation (even a little bit), many analytics solutions treat that as 1000 different pieces of content, and in so doing, throws off all analytics on content usage, pitch performance, influenced deal conversions or influenced revenue. Only by grouping this content into a “family” of virtually the same presentation, do these analytics become useful again.

Business Impact

Influenced Revenue – Measure how content has been used to help drive revenue. What content has the biggest impact on revenue? What content is being used, but not helping close sales?

While ROI on content is not achievable, at least not yet. (I have not seen the complex attribution models necessary to accurately measure return on content. But they will come.) This is a good early proxy. By measuring the amount of revenue a piece of content has influenced, marketer’s finally have one data point on the value of content. Inherently, we know some content is used in nearly every sale. By measuring content’s usage in Closed Won deals, by revenue, it gives us a much better picture of content’s importance in the sales process.

Conversion Uplift – Measure content usage against sales stage conversion rates. What content is most effective in moving a deal to the next stage?

Content should be designed to solve a specific need for a specific stage in the buyer’s journey. Measure how effective that content is in progressing the buyer to the next stage by measuring content usage in deals that advanced vs. content in deals that didn’t advance. Between this reporting capability and the content to buyer’s journey mapping exercise, content managers have the tools to know which content is most effective in advancing deals in their specific buyer’s journey stage. And that is the holy grail to improving sales content performance.

A Phased Approach

Technology has advanced considerably in the last 3-5 years to help you with this analysis. Modern Sales Enablement platforms have moved beyond being just a content repository to also providing customer engagement (email, online pitching), integration with CRM systems and content performance analytics. Most Sales Enablement platforms provide some level of reporting—often starting with content awareness and usage. Pick a platform that meets both your short-term and longer term needs. For a complete list of Sales Enablement solution providers go here.

After you have put a closed-loop sales enablement solution into place, you can begin to take advantage of its features to enhance your engagement with customers. We have found that companies typically start with the basics, and then over time move to applying data-driven techniques to their entire sales process in order to analyze and optimize it.

Here is a typical path that companies follow in applying the analytics capabilities of the system.

It’s an evolution in which companies can very quickly establish a process to get the analytics they need to drive improvements, and then work continuously to optimize and drive greater impact. But once they have the closed-loop process for measuring content effectiveness, the improvement in content quality and sales practices drives a significant uplift in sales effectiveness.

About the Author: Jeff Day is the VP of Marketing at Highspot and a veteran of sales enablement for over 10 years. As a marketing leader for companies including Apptio, HP, Sun and PolyServe and the VP of Sales for DomainTools, Jeff understands the need to train and enable the sales force from all sides. Jeff’s current soapbox mission is to elevate the role of the sales enablement professional and help them drive continuous effectiveness and productivity improvement among their sales teams. Learn more at www.highspot.com/sales-enablement.