Boom, shake the room fire nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entruder's On Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today we're pulling a timeless e-fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down how to build trust and grow your business online without grow. To drop these value bombs, IraBots, Randy Reyes, and the e-fire studios. Randy is a co-founder of outgrow.co.
He is passionate about digital marketing and growth hacking, and previously worked investing at Silver Lake in an online advertising at Ampush. He studied business at Warden Engineering at UPenn, and today our financial will talk about interactive content. We'll talk about developing that interactive content, which will make it useful for your end users, and how to experiment with different content to make sure that you are engaging with your customers, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Randy and our sponsors.
The Gold Digger Podcast hosted by Genicuture is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals, tune in and discover your dream career with productivity tips, business hacks, and so much more. Genic's recent episode on four questions to qualify your digital product idea is a must listen. Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Randy, say what's up to Fire Nation, and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.
Hey everyone on Fire Nation. I would say one interesting thing that most people don't know is I do a lot of hip hop dance. Whoa, what is a couple of your favorite songs like the hip hop dance too? I like a lot of Latin type music.
I like G6, it's fast-paced and it's loud, and you're trying to get a group going. That's the best. Love it. Well listen, Fire Nation, we're here not to talk about hip hop dance.
We're here to talk about building trust and growing your online business. And I want to start off Randy with today's focus, which is interactive content. What the heck is interactive content? A good way to think about it is there's static content all over the internet now, and so you'll see over the last 15 years a lot of people have been building up blogs and building out a lot of great content, which you can consider kind of static content.
You have e-book, you have white papers, you have blogs. But if you land on the blog or I land on the blog, we're kind of seeing the same piece of content. So what interactive content allows us to do is it allows us to personalize the content based on the person landing on the page. So if you're coming onto a page and you have a question about advertising on Facebook, and I have a question about advertising on Instagram or advertising on Google AdWords, and there's a page about how to optimize your ad spend, personalizing that content for each one of us is going to make the content much more effective.
So interactive content makes it easy for you to personalize what exact information you're showing someone, because of what they're actually interested in. Fire Nation, interactive content. When you're actually serving people what they want to hear, what they want to see, what they want to learn, when you're actually giving people real solutions to their actual problems, that's going to have a very high conversion rate compared to the alternative. But let's talk specifics here, Randy.
How does this help with lead acquisition? How does this help with qualifying your leads and your customers? How does this help with overall conversions? So what you have to think about is there are two things that you're doing when you have an interactive tool, so you can have a chat bot or an org calculator or an assessment, depending on the situation that you're in.
So the person is still top of the funnel and you're just trying to get them to get a sense of the value of some sales software. So you might give them an assessment on their current sales processes. So that, if you're a really good assessment, that's going to really not only improve your conversion rates, because you're going to tell them what they're currently doing well and where they can improve their current sales processes. So it's a very helpful piece of content.
And so your conversion rates are going to be much higher. So usually, let's say you're converting it, let's say 10 to 20% on a page. Here you might convert 40 to 60% because it's a light assessment that's just focused on adding value to the user. It's not just by now.
And so that type of conversion rate is going to be a lot higher. So that's the first thing to think about. The second thing to think about is from a qualification standpoint, to create an assessment, you need at least six questions asking someone about their current processes. And so now you qualify them.
You know how many people they probably have in their sales department, you know, with current technology they use, you know, the processes they have in place. And so you also know if they're a good fit for your company. So you get the lead, you get the qualification while at the same time building trust with the customer, because now they're like, oh wow, you just helped me with something. Your brand is legitimate because you just told me things I can do to improve in a minute without talking to anyone on a site at any time that I'm available.
Fire Nation, when you can improve your lead acquisition, you can improve the actual qualifications and you can improve that conversion. You're improving your business, you're improving your life. So let's talk about coming up with actual ideas for not just any kind of content, Randy, but useful content because we're going to have to have useful content to make this interactive content work well. So break that down for us.
100%. So a lot of people will come and say, okay, so we can build interactive content, so many different types of content, right? Chatbots, calculators, assessments, recommendation engines. But if you come on to the tool and you build, so like, let's say you come on and you build a recommendation tool, but the recommendations you're giving are very simple or very basic, and you like a good example.
So let's say you only have two products, right? A shirt product and a shoe and shoes or whatever an idea. You're selling e-commerce and you're just starting, you only have a couple products. If you're building a recommendation tool and you have one shirt product and one shoe product, then the recommendation tool isn't going to be that useful because if you're only sending me to this one shirt or this one shoe for whatever input I'm giving you, it's not going to be as useful for someone where if you're doing a recommendation engine for someone who has 1000 products or someone who has 100 products, right?
So like a car recommendation tool is really useful because there's so many car options and there's electric cars and there's my budget, the custom anions that I like on a car, do I want autopilot or other driving? There's so many different features and customizations that a recommendation tool is going to work really well. So I think the key thing is, is this useful? Is it going to determine whether or not this interactive content is going to be really useful?
And so you can't assume that every interactive content piece is going to be a home run unless you really focus on how useful the content is and there are going to be some content pieces. You're going to be like, you know what, I'm just going to compliment my top 50 or top 30 blog posts with an interactive tool assessing your understanding of a blog post. So those are nice, they're small, they're giving them some value right away in the blog post and it's going to help invert you convert people on the blog. But when you're really talking about your main, your most important content pieces, really focus on is this useful and how can I make it useful for the end user?
In financial, I'm speaking from experience here, you can't assume what you think is useful and what you think is not useful for your audience. You need to test and you need to study the results and the data because you might be surprised. You're going to get surprised on something that clicks and something that doesn't click. I mean, there's been things I've done before where I'm like, this is going to be an absolute home run.
I mean, a grandslam and it has flopped on his face. And there's been something else I've been like, I really don't even want to put this out there because I just really feel like this is a dud of a topic or whatever it might be and ended up blowing up because guess what? I was assuming I was incorrect. Let your audience speak.
Let the people speak. What's useful and what's not, but you have to make sure, hey, I am actually taking this information. I'm studying the analytics. I'm making things happen.
And Ray, you've really gotten Fire Nation fired up. We'll all just talk about interactive content. So let's get specific. How the heck could we build a tool like this?
Yeah, so this is an interesting question and one where, so eight years ago, the mobile app store was taking off and we kind of wanted to build a mobile app cost calculator. And that's kind of how we decided to create an outgrow. But it's really hard to actually build a really good piece of interactive tool. You need developers, you need designers, and then every time you want to make a change or optimize or e-b test different variation, you got to go back to developers.
It's really a great process. And so what we did was we created the tool called algrow.co. And the idea is to outgrow your current marketing strategies and kind of complement them with this additional interactive tool. And we tried to make it optimize it for the modern marketers so that anyone can use it.
You don't really need any technical experience whatsoever. And then all the things you would want to do, which is integrate it with your email tools, run different analytics on different types of pages, analyze user funnels, run comparison tests and compare different variations, all those things we kind of built it right into it. So that in my opinion is probably the fastest and easiest way to build it. And of course, if you have really large development team, you could go the development team route as well.
It's just that we found there's just so much more time consuming and expensive and it's just much harder to move forward when you're doing when you're working with developers on it. So I highly recommend using a tool like outgrow because it just makes it so much faster and easier. Fire Nation, I know you're getting excited about interactive tools and we still have so much more to share with you about charging potentially about where it should be placed, about different parts in the funnel that it works and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors time. It's our most precious resource and something that I strive to maximize every day of the year.
And maximizing my time comes a form of using tools that can help me work smarter, not harder. The key is finding the right tools for your business, ones that are easy to use, they give you access to the data that you need to make strategic business decisions and ones that make collaboration a breeze for your team. One tool that have you accomplished this is HubSpot HubSpot helps empower teams to do their best work by eliminating friction with connected, easy-to-use tools, imagine your team on the same page working together towards a common goal and with a centralized platform, you spend less time managing software and more time serving your customers. A HubSpot CRM platform is easy to integrate, use and love.
Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. So Randy, we're back and I kind of teased before the break some different things about interactive tools like charging or not to charge. That is the question.
So what has been your personal experience? Should we charge these interactive tools? I generally say we should not charge. So the reason being is if you're focused on making a lead magnet, it's generally best not to charge for the interactive tool.
However, we see a lot of people giving you a result. So what you'll do is you go through a piece of content that's doing the assessment example or an ROI calculator. So you're saying like what's the current ROI in your ad spend? On the results page, you can show them, okay, this is the ROI from each channel you're advertising on, like podcast ads or Facebook, Google, et cetera.
But you give that for free, just while they're giving you their email, right? But on the bottom of the results page, you can say download detailed reports and then you can charge like $10 or $20 or whatever you think is reasonable for that report. So you're still charging them within your interactive content. But after you've given them a decent amount of value, so you give them a pretty good results page.
And then if you think you can go a lot further and go into detail about all these are like best practices, you should make sure you're incorporating in your keyword targeting on Google or whatever, then you can charge for that. But after you give them some value. So usually we say those types of things work out well if you're charging for them after you're giving them some value. So that's kind of how I like to think about where to charge.
And if you charge them right on the beginning of a content piece, it's going to hurt your conversion rate obviously because it's not free. And it really will only work if they've done a few other interactive content pieces for you and you've built trust with them and the content piece you're charging for that result that you're giving them that recommendation is worth like it's like a consultation, what you would give like a 15 minute consultation for like it has to be really good if you want to charge for them and them to be happy about paying you. Now that we know like that process and what you recommend and you know what you've successfully done the past for interactive tools on that part of things, where should we actually place these interactive tools that be most effective? Because there's a lot of different areas that we could have these interactive tools.
But what have you seen this piece of actually work the best? I love this question because there's so many options. It's overwhelming, right? And what I like to look at is I like to say we should not assume that there is one place that works for everything.
It really depends on the type of content and the situation. So for example, if you've acquired an email already, but it's a very top of the funnel, you have no qualification about them. If you're trying to qualify a lead, then launching it with an email embedding the content right within the email is a great way to qualify the lead and move them from just an email to seeing, okay, is this person even relevant? Maybe move them down to the middle of the funnel or down the funnel a little bit.
So in that case, you launch into the email and so you just get some embed code, right? Based on your email provider. So when I'll go like we give that to you, you just put your email provider and give you some code. And then you drop it.
And the first question is actually going to show right there in the email. And now you can qualify that. So that works well. Obviously, if you don't have someone's email that's not going to work because you cannot launch an email.
So in those cases, you want to think about the content. Is the content a complement to a blog post? If the complement to a blog post, then I'm either going to have it as a time pop up or exit intent on the blog post page or just embed within the blog post page at the bottom or even at the top depending on the situation where it's kind of embedded within the blog post page. And so now you're going to say, oh, I have so much traffic to the blog post, but it's not converting any needs.
So maybe I should create like a, you know, see how much you understood about the blog post content that case embedded on the blog post page or have it as an exit intent to where someone's leaving the page, the blog post page pulls up. So that's a really good idea for that case. And then you have the content pieces. You're probably going to have five or so content pieces, which are kind of like, you want everyone to go to them, right?
So find the right podcast. If you have a thousand of podcasts or if you have thousands of YouTube videos or blogs and you just try to help them figure out which blog they should start, which podcast they should start listening to. And you maybe want to give them four recommendations, like the top four for their use case, then I might put that on the home page of the blog, like the first page of the blog, or I put it as a tool with a on the welcome on the homepage of your whole site. You say, Oh, like go to blog, you know, figure out which blogs or which podcasts you should start with.
And then, and then go from there. So in that case, I would put that on the on the home page. And then the last thing are the pieces of content where it's like, what's the ROI of my software? Or, you know, assess your understanding, assess your current sales processes and your sales software company or assess your current marketing processes and your marketing software company or whatever it might be.
Those I would definitely put either have a call to action on the welcome page or even embedded on the welcome page depending on the situation. So we know by now that our content has to be useful. Like we know that's very important, but how do we actually know what type of interactive content works best for our audience? Like what have you seen other entrepreneurs and business owners effectively do to specifically identify the type of interactive content that works best for us in our audience?
We always recommend running comparison like an A-B test to see what works best, but in general, it's very good to experiment with different versions, right? So most people when they come at least on the outgrow, they start with an assessment because those are easy, those are fast. Okay, and then they might create a chat box for like frequently asked questions. So the assessment will be if you're an agency or security software company, you create assessment assess your current security processes.
So that is a good content type to start with. And then you might create the chat box to handle the top 20 questions people get when they land on their site. So you can have a chat box for that kind of an FAQ chat box. Instead of having a list of every FAQ, you basically will ask them a question and send them to the most likely FAQs they have and answers for those FAQs in a more interactive chat box.
So those are two that people usually will start with. And then you'll go to your ROI calculators, right? Maybe a quiz to recommend which plan product or service is relevant. That could work.
And then obviously if you have a lot of products, you should build a full recommendation tool for e-commerce cases. So those will be the first kind of for that I start with. And then over time, you can start adding things in or taking things out depending on how you want to do it. If you want to build a full on grader, so like grade your blog, then I would do that later on because that takes a bit more work.
You have to scrape the blog, you have to seek out your tags, you want to do like a SEO type, SEO optimization one. Those graders are going to take a lot more work. So usually you'll do those later because they do require you to do your part much more work than the others. Man, Randy, you have been dropping a ton of value, so many value bombs coming at us.
Of course, Fire Nation, you know that you can go to outgrow.co. That's outgrow.co to just learn a ton more about what Randy's talking about putting this into actual action and so much more. But before we go any further, Randy, I want to give it back to you because I want you to give us a key takeaway. Like we've shared a lot, a lot of content with Fire Nation.
What's the one thing you want to make sure that we really walk away with from this entire interview? Then of course, let us know how we can connect with you over at outgrow and any call to action you have for us and then we'll say goodbye. The main point that I like to highlight is it's really important for every company to experiment with different types of content and different ways to engage with the customers, especially now as everything moves online in 2020 with COVID. So it's really important to think about how am I building trust with customers online?
And how can I do a better job building trust with customers online? And creating a more personalized experience, whether you're using outgrow or you're building a custom on your own, it's just a much better experience for customers and they're more likely to choose you over the other options they have that give giving them kind of a static piece of content that might not be as relevant. So I think that's the main recommendation is figure out how you're building trust and always be open to experimenting, experimenting with different forms. Within each content, interact with content like there's so many different options.
You want to experiment with them and really see okay. Do I have the tracking in place to assess it? So that would be the main thing from that point. For the other aspects around call to action and how to keep in contact.
So if you go to outgrow.co forward slash fire, we're giving every all of your podcast listeners 30 days completely free, no card required to just try out building these pieces of content. And obviously you're going to have chat access on the bottom right gives a chat support and we're right there to help you. If you have questions or you're not sure how to do things the right way. So that's a really good way to start and we have everyone has a coupon from your audience so that they can get custom plans or small business plans.
And then how to reach out to us. So the easiest way and the fastest way to reach out to us and the best response you're going to get is if you go to outgrow.co forward slash fire on the chat on the bottom right, we're basically nearly always there to help you. And then if you want to email us or tweet at us questions at algo.co and Twitter is just the hand goes just to add outgrow.co Fire Nation, cash in on that coupon head over to algo.co slash fire. Check out the chat, everything else you have going on there.
I mean, Randy and his team are there to serve you and help grow your business and help outgrow your competition for sure. So Randy, I just want to say thank you for joining us today because Fire Nation knows that the average of the five people that spend the most time with they've been hanging out with you are in me and JLD today. So Fire Nation, keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com type Randy in the search bar for access to the show notes with all the links to everything we talked about. And of course, outgrow.co slash fire is your call to action fire nation.
Randy, thank you brother for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Thank you. This is great.
Hey Fire Nation, today's value bound content was brought to you by Randy and if you ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, the podcast journals for you, it is a gorgeous full other journal that will guide you step by step in the creation and launch of your podcast in 50 days, we're talking five zero visit the podcast channel.com use promo code podcast for a $15 discount and thank you for listening to my podcast and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. The gold digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kuchar is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals, tune in and discover your dream career with productivity tips, business hacks and so much more. Jenna's recent episode on four questions to qualify your digital product idea is a must listen. Listen to gold digger wherever you get your podcasts.