One Secret to Making Your Marketing More Strategic – Tim Flint

Posted by smartups on October 13, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

Tim Flint, Flint Analytics Principal, Strategist, and Smartups founder shows you how to make your marketing more strategic so you can: drive down acquisition costs, retain customers, and improve brand perception.

One way to get more out of your marketing is to combine your efforts across channels by making them work together. When you speak the same message and reach the customer in multiple ways the message is more likely to stick. In this video, Tim dives into how to use free analytics tools to make decisions on engaging customers across multiple channels. It all comes down to one question: What’s the next interaction?

Huge shoutout to Candidio for helping us with this video.

Hype Isn’t A Four Letter Word – Graham Brown, United State of Indiana

Posted by smartups on December 9, 2014 Posted in Hype, Marketing Strategy

Graham Brown of United State of Indiana, talks to Smartups about how hype is not a four letter word and how you can use it to your advantage in marketing your business. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
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5 Small Tweaks to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Posted by smartups on December 2, 2014 Posted in Marketing Strategy, Optimization

“Changing just one word on your form can have a monumental impact on your conversion.” –Eva McKnight, PR Specialist, Formstack

Online forms are a great conversation starter with your customer. They allow your customer to contact you, fill out a survey, sign up for an event, or even order a product. Since forms are crucial for customer engagement, they need to be pulling their weight.

So, how do you increase the power of your forms, when form submissions are your main conversion point? Know that it’s the little things that make a difference. In 2014, Formstack created the Formstack Form Conversion Report which listed how over 400,000 of their customers used forms. Eva McKnight of Formstack presented to October’s Smartups meetup on the findings of this report. Here are five (of the many) small tweaks she shared to power up your forms.

Match Your Submit Button Wording to the Type of Form and Action

Source: Formstack Form Conversion Report

As simple as it seems, you need to test and find the right words for your form fields and buttons. For example, Formstack found that “Submit Registration” buttons had a conversion rate of 18.72% while “Submit Form” only had a 5.33% conversion rate. So, include words that are specific to the type of form you’re using and the action the user needs to take.

Personalize the Data

An old truth in marketing is people like talking about and thinking about themselves. So use this to your advantage in forms. Use phrases such as “Get my download” or “I want to join.” McKnight said, “I think the key takeaway is the more personalized your button is the more likely people are going to be able to make that final commitment and hit submit.”

Tailor the Length to the Type of Form

Source: Formstack Form Conversion Report

If you give out a survey with only two questions, you might not be receiving the information that you need. Likewise, if you have a contact form with eight fields, no one will want to put in that much information. So, tailor your form to your audience and the type of form you’re using. Users will tolerate more form fields for surveys and contests than they will for order forms and contact forms.

Give Something Valuable

Your customers are giving you their time and information. So, respect that and offer something in return such as a free download, a coupon, or some reward for filling out their form. Users expect rewards in proportion to their effort. So, if your form is asking for lots of information, be more generous with your reward.

Test, Test, Test

As I like to say, “I don’t know. Let’s test it.” With all of these tweaks, you won’t know how effective they are unless you’re tracking your data and testing it. Many form providers, including Formstack, allow you to split test your forms to find the best words, field lengths, design, and more. So, take advantage of these analytics, and test small changes to find the best results.

As in life, it’s the small things that make a difference. Put a little bit of time and energy into making sure your forms are doing their work so that you can do yours.

3 Over-Hyped Companies & How To Avoid Their Mistakes

Posted by smartups on November 11, 2014November 11, 2014 Posted in Hype, Marketing

We’re talking about hype and how to use it for good in your business this month at Smartups. Unfortunately, some companies have gotten hype wrong. Let’s look at three of them and see what we can learn from their mistakes.

Cuil was a search engine that came out and had a rockstar launch in 2008. They claimed to have a larger index and that they were faster than Google. They even had an ex Google engineer running the show, which provided credibility to the claims. And they had already raised $33 million dollars. They got tons of press right away from the launch. They had some unique and innovative ideas. Unfortunately, as people dove into the search engine, they didn’t find the results as good as expected.

The hype turned to backlash, and, eventually, the company shut its servers down.

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How Formstack Adapted Their Marketing To Become One Of The Fastest Growing Companies In America

Posted by smartups on October 16, 2014October 16, 2014 Posted in B2B Marketing, Entrepreneur Stories, Interviews

With Eva McKnight, Content Specialist at Formstack, speaking next week about “How do I increase my conversion rate?” at Smartups, we wanted to learn a little bit more about Formstack and how they have achieved marketing success as one of the fastest growing tech startups in Indy. So, we interviewed Chris Lucas, their Vice President of Marketing, and asked him about how Formstack has grown their business and the changes they have seen along the way. Formstack is an easy-to-use form building tool and was recently named to the Inc. 5,000 as one of the fastest growing private companies in America.

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