Online Content: Is Longer Really Better?

Writing online content is something of a balancing act. For years, SEO experts have pointed out that Google loves longer content.

Your readers? Not necessarily.

As a writer, that means you’re kind of stuck in the middle. Write too little, and your content won’t rank. Write too much, and most people won’t read your content.

‘Tis a conundrum, no?

The good news is, Google has realized that word count and keyword density aren’t always the best predictors of relevance. People care about their on-page experience—not the keyword count.

As a result, Google has placed an increasing focus on user experience. In Moz’s 2015 report on non-keyword ranking factors, 4 of their top 10 factors relate to user experience:

Given this trend, the odds are that as Google gets better at discerning great on-page experiences from the ho-hum ones, many pages with a lot of text but little value will start dropping through the ranks.

As a result, it’s not enough any more to write in-depth, keyword rich content—you have to optimize your content length for user experience. And, to do that, you need to know how much content your audience really wants on a page.

Fortunately, figuring that out isn’t nearly as difficult as you might think. To help you out, let’s take a look at how users interact with content and how you can test your content to maximize its effectiveness.

Is Longer Better?

Since Google has historically prioritized longer content, most companies and blogs have spent years producing long-form content. Often, this content is good, high-quality writing that delivers a lot of value (case in point, the Kissmetrics blog).

But the question is, is longer better?

For some sites, it probably is. But, to tell you the truth, I rarely read through everything on a page, even if I care a lot about the content. As it turns out, most people act the same way online.

In fact, Chartbeat ran a study to see just how far people make it through a typical blog post. Turns out, your average user only reads about half of a blog post:

So, while you may have written an epic, 8,000-word blog post about the psychology behind the Chewbacca Mask Lady’s viral video, most people aren’t going to read the whole thing. They’re going to bail long before your oh-so-compelling conclusion.

Sure, your article might rank well, but if people don’t finish reading it, will your article help your business? That’s debatable.

This idea holds especially true for site pages and landing pages. The internet is littered with enormous pages like this one (I rearranged the page into 3 side-by-side columns to improve your reading experience—see what I did there?):

Pages like this have a lot of good content, but all of that good content gets lost in the length of the page. Yes, the information a potential customer needs is probably on the page, but if they can’t find it, they’re not going to have a very good experience.

The point here is that crafting a compelling user experience doesn’t mean writing a lot of content. In fact, depending on your audience, writing more may mean people read less and therefore convert less.

But how can you know what sort of content length your audience prefers? To answer that, you’ll need to run a simple test.

Testing Out Different Content Lengths

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, a lot of companies focus on major page elements like headlines, hero shots, form fields, CTA buttons, etc. Content length often sits at the bottom of the list.

This is a shame, because content length is a major part of your user experience—especially if you run an active blog.

For example, at Disruptive, we were recently helping OURrescue optimize their site. Now, OURrescue is an amazing group. They travel the world saving kids from sex traffickers. It’s pretty hard to top that.

To fund their rescues, OURrescue runs a regular blog that discusses the (often heart-wrenching) details of their “missions.” Each blog post ends with a call for donations to help fund further rescue efforts.

In keeping with most blogs, OURrescue’s articles were usually a minimum of 1,500 words long and very detailed. The blog was generating decent donations, but my VP of Conversion Rate Optimization, Chris Dayley, started to wonder about the length of their content.

Were they writing too much? Too little? Would OURrescue get more donations if they changed the length of their content?

To answer these questions, Chris asked OURrescue to write short, medium and long versions of a few articles. We then used Optimizely to send traffic to each of the post variants. Similar to Chartbeat, we tracked how far users scrolled through each post (using Hotjar), time on page and the donations generated from each version of the article.

On desktop, the results were about what you’d expect (note, we tested multiple articles, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re only showing the variants for one article):

The longer the posts, the longer people spent on the page. That makes sense, since longer posts take more time to read. However, the mid-length articles actually had the highest completion rate.

So, while readers spent more time on the longest version of the posts, more people actually finished the articles and saw the donation CTA on the medium-length versions.

Things got even more interesting when we looked at our mobile users:

On mobile (which is where most online time is spent these days), the longest post variants had the lowest time on page. The middle-length page variants had the highest time on page.

The shortest version of the posts, however, had the highest completion rate—nearly double the completion rate of the longest variants.

Now, these stats were all very interesting, but none of them really answered the most important question: which length of content provided the best user experience?

Or, to put things in more concrete business terms, which version of the articles produced the most donations?

As it turned out, the “winning length” varied between desktop and mobile:

Compared with the longest version of the articles, the shortest versions drove over 80% more donations on mobile and the medium-length versions drove almost 30% more donations on desktop.

So, was longer content better for OURrescue? Not by a long shot!

What makes this data particularly interesting is the fact that time on page wasn’t a particularly good predictor of donations. Page completion rate, however, was.

If you think about it, this makes sense. After all, with a CTA at the bottom of the article, if people weren’t finishing the article, they weren’t seeing the CTA, which meant they weren’t donating.

Now, it’s possible that adding a floating CTA users could see throughout their reading experience could help improve donations further, but that’s hardly the point of this test. Since the CTA was at the bottom of the article, that meant that people who saw the CTA were having a good enough experience to get to the bottom of the article.

So, what drove donations for OURrescue? It wasn’t the articles with the most words—it was the articles with the best user experience.

All this being said, these were OURrescue’s results. Your audience will be different. It’s very possible that you could run this same sort of test and get completely different results.

But, if you don’t test the length of your content, can you really be sure that you’re providing the optimum user experience?

Conclusion

So, is longer content really better? For years, long content has been a great way to get ranked on Google, but that’s beginning to change.

These days, both Google and your readers are looking for content that provides a great experience. That means your online content needs to be the right length for your audience.

As Google continues to focus their algorithms on providing ever better user experiences, it’s time for online marketers to do the same.

Have you ever tried a test like this one? What were your results? Do you agree that online content should be optimized for user experience, rather than word count or keyword density?

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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The Secret to Business Growth

The Secret to Business Growth written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

There are countless books, websites, and even podcasts dedicated to the topic of business growth. (Or its second cousin twice removed – growth hacking)

Most of this teaching focuses on things such as the building blocks necessary to scale a business, the proven tactics required to employ robust lead generation funnels, or the people management skills vital for creating a winning culture.

All good and essential things for sure, but the race to grow revenue, acquire clients, and build process fails to take into account this underlying truth.

If you want to grow your business, you must focus on growing your client’s business.

I don’t mean to oversimplify here, but this must be your first goal. Do this, and there’s a chance everything else will take care of itself – or at least the time you spend on building process will become amplified.

Strip this idea to its core, and you’ll see:

For it is in giving that we receive.

I don’t intend for this to come off as even slightly religious, spiritual or quantum physics sounding at all.

The very practical fact is that if your client’s are showing growth and realizing benefits, things like your revenue growth, profit, and scale can happen with little friction.

Job one is getting and reporting the results you get for the people that pay for said results. Job two is growing revenue and systems.

You can have one without the other, but it’s oh so much work.

That’s the point of today’s post.

• How can you begin to base your business and marketing decisions on helping your customers gain greater results?
• How could you focus your content on your customers rather than your business goals?
• How could you create email campaigns, social media posts, training, customer support, repeat offers, tracking and reporting with this single question in mind – Will this help my customer gain a better result.

I’m not suggesting that you throw business best practices out the window in a blind effort to care more about results than your customer does, but I am suggesting that you base a few more of your decisions, campaigns, and projects on this idea to achieve real growth.

How many of your customers benefit from what you offer? Are they merely taken care of, satisfied, and happy or are they completely blown away, surprised, and loyal beyond reason?

That’s what comes from a focus on customer results rather than typical growth metrics, and that’s what leads to innovation and delight in business.

I have not always been successful at applying this concept in my own business if I’m to be terribly honest, but I do understand the power it holds.

It is far better to teach than to sell.

It is far better to understand than to be understood.

It is far better to create real impact than it is to simply build authority.

For in the results of others, we ultimately grow.

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To Be Agile CMOs Must Align Digital and Traditional Marketing Strategies

One of the definitions of the word align is to bring into cooperation or agreement with a particular group. According to the findings of a newly-released survey, presented by The CMO Club in partnership with Accelent Consulting and Oracle Marketing Cloud, CMOs the world over would be wise to bring into cooperation digital and traditional marketing. 

An attribute of digital excellence that emerged from the survey was the ability to align digital strategies – within marketing and across all business functions. Although all respondents indicated that traditional and digital marketing strategies are at least “somewhat aligned," only 12% claimed "complete alignment."

But, in world-class performers, the level of alignment was found to be much higher. All world-class respondents felt that digital and traditional marketing was "well aligned" and close to two-thirds claimed that it was "completely aligned."

This distribution is similar for broader organizational alignment of digital marketing with digital activities in other functions. Looking at the overall numbers, the vast majority of respondents claimed that the digital marketing organization is "well aligned" with other functions but only 9% claimed that it was "completely aligned."

Once again, in world-class organizations, three-quarters of respondents claimed that digital activities between functions were at least "well aligned and a staggering 42% claimed they were "completely aligned."

Singles Only

No, this is not about the latest dating site or the next chapter meeting of your local community association. This is all about the inherently important need for your organization to have a single customer identity that unites behaviors across digital and traditional channels into one comprehensive profile.  

Today, certain technologies can link all the unique cross channel identifiers of a customer back to a single unique identifier. Once you have a single unique identifier, you can really know who your customers are across all channels, and begin to:

• Personalize interactions based on channel preferences and behaviors.
• Reach a more precise level of targeting and segmentation by using cross channel behavioral information in real time.
• And most importantly, integrate cross channel communications and speak to each customer with a single voice regardless of channel. 

Many marketing technology vendors can execute on some aspects of personalization. And some might even be able to help marketers target their customer better. But the ability to actually use personalization and targeting to integrate cross channel communications differentiates Modern Marketing solutions from other, less comprehensive alternatives.

By unifying cross channel identities and creating campaigns on a scalable cross channel program canvas, the right technology empowers marketers to reach new levels of digital sophistication. 

Reach For This

While you're reaching for new levels of digital sophistication, reach for and download Digital Agility Survey: CMO Insights on the Journey Towards Digital Agility and get insights directly from your fellow CMOs and marketers as to how they stay agile in our digital world. 

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The New Face of LinkedIn: What You Need to Know about the Redesign

 Even the most starched-shirt professional can use a new look every now and then. Skinny and wide neckties go in and out of fashion. Hemlines trend up and down. You can be fashionable and professional at the same time.

All of which to say, LinkedIn has started to roll out a substantial redesign. Not everyone has it yet, but it’s coming soon for everyone, and it’s definitely a bid to keep up with the cutting edge of web design.

The redesign cleans up the interface substantially, fully committing to the card-based look the site has been flirting with for the past two years. Icons are simplified and are a closer match to the mobile experience. And some features that were hard to find before are now front-and-center.

Let’s take a quick look around to see what’s new.

#1: New Menu Bar

If you’re still on the old design, your menu bar looks like this:

By contrast, the new design is more compact and more visual. It highlights the sections of the site you’re most likely to visit:

Under that, you’ll see a quick snapshot of your profile – your picture, background, headline, profile and content views.

This sidebar makes it simple to see at-a-glance how much attention your content is getting.

#2: A Notable Notifications Tab

Rejoice! Notifications have finally escaped from their skinny little box. In the new design, notifications is a full-size feed, just like the feed on your home page:

 

Unread notifications are at the top, tinted a subtle gray until you look at them. You don’t have to click through to respond to a notification anymore—you can interact with them right in the feed.

#3: It’s All About Me

Notice “My Profile” is now just “Me.” The new profile features a round photo up top – you’ll need to make sure your square picture has enough of a border to work in the new format.

Background images have changed slightly, too. The recommended size is 1536×768, a little shorter than the old one.

The new design offers easier access to the tools you need to update your profile and interact with your connections. Here’s what LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ Alex Rynne had to say about the new layout:

“The redesign features a new ‘Me’ tab where you can control and see everything about you – your privacy and setting, who’s viewed your profile, and who’s commenting on your posts.

The new tab, located on the far right at the top navigation, includes a ‘suggested skills’ tab based on what’s most in demand by recruiters. People with at least five skills listed on their LinkedIn profile receive up to 17x more profile views, so it makes a difference.”

My favorite feature in the Me tab is the Activity feed, where you can see your previous posts, likes and comments. Before, if you wanted to repost an article, or share something so you could look at it later… you basically couldn’t. The new feed makes it simple to browse your history, sorted by articles, posts and activity:

#4: Sharing Is Caring

To my marketer’s eye, the most interesting change in the whole redesign is a subtle one. Here’s what the top of my feed used to look like:

And here’s the new one:

See the difference? There’s no extra click for deciding what type of update you want to publish–it’s designed to encourage you to just start typing. Most intriguingly, “write an article” now has pride of place. It’s clear LinkedIn wants you to publish long-form content on the platform.

#5: Search is Simplified

The last big difference you will see is in the Search dialog. If you’re not a premium user but were enjoying the advanced search options, you won’t love this change.

Filtering by first and last name, title, location and keyword have all been streamlined away. There are a few filters left: location, industry, company, language, schools, and level of connection. But the meaty advanced search features—and the ability to save searches—are reserved for Premium and Sales Navigator accounts.

A Professional Facelift

LinkedIn’s new design is definitely easier on the eyes than the previous incarnation. But it’s more than just a pretty new face. Each new tab and feature seems designed to express how LinkedIn hopes you will use the platform. There’s an emphasis on number of profile views and interactions with your content. It’s easier to pick up old comment threads and keep track of your activity. And posts published on LinkedIn are front and center.

While a few of your favorite features may be altered beyond recognition, on the whole the new LinkedIn should make it easier to make connections, track your content performance, and optimize your profile.

Do you have the new design yet? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client. 

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ABM Quickly Evolved from Latest Trend to What Felt Like Full Adoption

Account-based marketing popped up in all corners of B2B marketing in 2016. Every martech vendor started offering it. Ever marketer implemented some form of it, or was planning to implement it.

In the world of B2B marketing where a marketer's job is to get in front of and identify those prospects who are likely to become customers, it only makes sense to focus on companies that marketing and sales have determined are more likely to become customers. That's ABM in a nutshell.

When we asked our panel of global experts to call out what had the most impact in 2016, several of them identified ABM. The funny thing is that nobody called this out as a thing to pay attention to in 2017. That doesn't make it a short-lived fad. That made it something that many B2B marketers implemented and nobody was talking about it anymore.

Here's what some of our global marketing experts said about ABM in 2016.

Account-Based Marketing is more than just a marketing strategy; it’s quickly become the cornerstone of most B2B marketing plans. In 2016, we saw more than 70% of B2B companies driving ABM programs to align their sales and marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and accelerate their revenue gains.
 - Peter Isaacson (@peisaacson), CMO, Demandbase  

Clearly account-based marketing has had a huge impact on Modern Marketing in 2016. As the silo between sales and marketing continues to be broken down, and social selling and employee advocacy programs bring sales and marketing closer together, account-based marketing has emerged as a natural extension of these efforts for marketing to use increasingly sophisticated social CRMs. ABM combined with big social data and social ad custom audiences creates the ability to generate more revenue from targeted customers. With more than 90% of B2B marketers acknowledging that account-based marketing is either important or very important, it is clearly an idea that came out of nowhere to have a huge impact on Modern Marketing in 2016.
- Neal Schaffer (@nealschaffer), CEO, Maximize Your Social  

There's no doubt that talk of account-based marketing (ABM) consumed the most oxygen in 2016. Whether you think it's hype or a decades-old fundamental, one ITSMA study reported 84% of marketers said ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing initiatives. Various other surveys placed the percentage of companies considering ROI in the next 12 months at "all of them."
- David B. Thomas (@DavidBThomas), B2B Tech Marketer

To learn what these experts and many more predicted for 2017, download the Future of Modern Marketing: 2017 today.

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Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product: They Care About Progress

It’s true. Your customers don’t care about your product. Don’t worry, they don’t care about your competitor’s products either. Your customers don’t care about any products. Thankfully, your customers do care about something, which is why they buy your product.

Your customers care about the progress they will make as a result of using your product.

As Growth Marketers and Product Builders, it’s our job to make sure customers understand how our product will change them for the better. Then we can create an efficient customer funnel that turns potential customers into loyal, repeat customers. We use data to optimize each stage of the user lifecycle. However, it’s easy to get bogged down in user data and product features. When we lose sight of whether or not our customers have realized the better life we’ve promised, the customer becomes stuck in our funnel and we lose our customer.

By understanding the progress our customers are hoping to make, we can increase conversions at any stage of the user lifecycle: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Customers Buy Progress

Customers actually don’t buy your product. They aspire to be more awesome, and they believe your product will help them get there. They buy the vision of themselves being more awesome. This visual from Samuel Hulick explains why customers buy products.

Customer progress is a key concept of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). I was first introduced to the above Super Mario graphic by Alan Klement’s book on JTBD, When Coffee & Kale Compete. The JTBD helps us focus on the customer’s desire to make life better and the progress they are hoping to achieve. With this focus, we can grow faster and build better products.

Alan lists 10 JTBD principles in his book. We’ll focus on two.

1. Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better.
2. Solutions and Jobs should be thought of as parts of system that work together to deliver progress to customers.

The rest of this article will show how growth and product teams at B2B and B2C orgs have used these two principles to create better top of funnel marketing messages and increase LTV and retention through progress-centric product updates.

Acquisition

• Create ads and content that focus on progress. Progress is overcoming an emotional struggle to make one’s life better.
• Make sure you have the right understanding of progress for your audience.

Case Study

TownHound was a dual-sided marketplace that was picked up by Google just 8 months after launch. It was a mobile app that brought restaurants more patrons during off-peak hours by offering discounts to its users. In just 3 months, TownHound was able to sign on 6x more restaurant partners in the San Jose, CA region than it’s behemoth competitor Groupon.

This is a huge accomplishment because two-sided marketplaces are tricky. You need a high volume of Demand (customers redeeming TownHound deals) in order to build up Supply (restaurant partners that offer deals). Bryan Solar, Co-Founder of TownHound, understood the progress that his customers were hoping to achieve, which he used to guide his paid acquisition strategy.

Early on, his Facebook and Instagram ads were just doing okay. TownHound was bringing on new users, but they weren’t sticky. Users would download the app, redeem a single deal, and then poof, they were gone. He wasn’t acquiring the right users.

He needed more quality users in order to satisfy the balance of his two-sided marketplace. He decided to interview customers that had redeemed more than one deal.

Bryan’s interviews led to a huge discovery. He learned that his best users were dating app users. His repeat customers were using TownHound while on first, second, or third dates.

• TownHound’s Restaurant partners want more patrons during slow hours: Monday – Thursday nights.
• Dating app users typically meet for dinner during the week because weekends are too precious to waste on a potentially traumatic first Tinder date experience.
• It’s a match!

Bryan learned that his best customers didn’t use TownHound to get discounts on meals. They use TownHound in order to find the right person for a relationship. He also understood that his customers didn’t necessarily love to go on dates. Dates are exciting, but they’re also stressful and expensive. For many, dates are a necessary evil.

When TownHound’s ad content changed, quality user growth and restaurant partner growth rapidly increased.

• Before: Ads focused on saving money on dinner.
• After: Ads focused on relieving the pain of going on expensive dates.

Bryan found his core audience and tailored acquisition efforts to focus on their progress, rather than the function of his product.

Activation

• Re-highlight the progress that was promised in acquisition.
• Link onboarding process to progress or overcoming a struggling moment.

Samuel Hulick, the creator of the Super Mario graphic above, runs UserOnboard.com – a site dedicated to onboarding and activating users. He sat down with Ryan Singer of Basecamp and discussed how JTBD can be applied to the onboarding process. Ryan noticed a change in the way he approaches onboarding when customer progress is his goal.

“That’s really interesting to look through a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens, because then the question becomes ‘what can we do to help this person decide that this is the right tool for them?’ That’s a very different task for the designer than ‘how can I thoroughly explain the mechanisms of my products?’”

Case Study

Le Tote is an e-commerce subscription service for women that delivers a personalized box of clothes directly to their customer’s doorstep. Le Tote’s monthly subscription lets customers wear the clothes they receive as long as they want, and then receive a new box in exchange for sending back their previously worn garments. Le Tote is old-school Netflix for women’s clothes.

Le Tote uses style preferences, ratings of previously shipped garments, and sizing info to curate a box of clothes for each customer. In theory, the more you use Le Tote, the better the service is at matching you with clothes you’ll love.

However, Le Tote doesn’t have a history of customer feedback to leverage when shipping a box to a first time user. It’s critical that Le Tote gets the first box right because it’s essentially a “test drive.” Send a bad box to a first time user and the likelihood of them sticking around for a second box is slim.

If the first box is critical to a new user adopting Le Tote, then the onboarding process incredibly important. Le Tote needs to gather as much info about their customer’s style preferences during onboarding as possible in order to make a great first impression, without bombarding users with tedious onboarding tasks. So how does Le Tote get users through a lengthy onboarding process without seeing a drop in conversion?

Here are two steps in the process. The user is met with easy to answer questions about occasions that are hard to dress for and weather, which is uncontrollable.

Now, think about the progress that Le Tote’s customers are hoping to achieve. They want access to new, trendy clothes in order to feel confident in situations that matter. Buying a new garment from a traditional e-commerce site for every special occasion can get expensive. Plus, ‘that perfect new shirt’ tends to lose it’s magic after a few wears and a couple months in the closet. A Le Tote customer wants to feel confident in new clothes while maintaining wallet-friendly peace of mind.

Le Tote communicates progress by highlighting a few occasions that customers have struggled to get ready for in the past. This reminds the user why she’s jumping through onboarding hoops — to overcome these struggling moments and make progress. This is easily forgotten when onboarding focuses too much on the product and not the user, and we activate fewer users as a result.

Retention

• Use data to track changes in usage behavior.
• Interview customers when behaviors change to understand if customers are making progress.
• Make product changes when features are standing in the way of progress.

Your marketing and sales efforts have promised the solution to a struggling moment, and your customer has chosen your product to take them from ‘Normal Mario’ to ‘Awesome Fireball Throwing Mario’.

If you don’t deliver progress, your customers will churn. How do we know that we’re delivering progress?

Behavioral data helps us understand which features are being used and how often customers are coming back. This data is incredibly actionable, but it doesn’t tell us if our customers are actually making progress.

Customer interviews are key to improving retention. Data will help uncover behavior changes of our customers, but interviews will reveal the why behind those changes. Alan Klement gives us examples of behavior changes to investigate through customer interviews: “When someone purchases a product, begins to use a new product, stops using a product, suddenly uses a product more, and suddenly uses a product less.” (p. 190).

Case Study

Wade Warren, Co-Founder of Resource, is using JTBD to guide the product roadmap of his candidate sourcing platform. Resource finds candidates and then writes personalized, custom outreach that comes from an internal recruiter’s identity. It’s a platform that helps recruiters with limited hiring bandwidth to build teams faster.

Resource has a feature where new candidates are automatically screened in – which means that they are contacted without explicit recruiter approval.

Wade noticed a decline in usage in the product. People were signing up for Resource, adding a number of roles and using it for a few weeks, before suddenly pausing their roles and stopping usage. His team interviewed customers to understand the root of the issue. One of his interviewees was a user that had stopped using Resource, but then began to use it again.

She got responses from a few candidates who had been automatically screened and was forced to speak with candidates that weren’t a good fit, which caused anxiety. She paused her Resource roles and went back to contacting candidates through Linkedin.

Then, she saw a recruiter on her team using a buried feature that allowed her to individually pick the candidates to be contacted: “I saw Sarah clicking approve and asked, ‘what is that’. She explained to me that you can screen each individual candidate in Resource if you change this setting.” She immediately went back to Resource.

Wade heard this same story from a few different customers, so his team made a product change. Automated screening was switched from a default feature to a feature that must be toggled on by the user. Once this switch was made, he saw usage go up and churn decrease across all of his customers.

Although the original feature performed its intended function of reducing work for his customers, it caused anxiety. Wade’s interviews helped him better understand the progress his customers wanted to achieve: “We didn’t think that giving our customers more work in the product would mean them making more progress, but counterintuitively did.”

Revenue

• You’ve already delivered some progress. Find ways to deliver more progress.
• Add features that make progress easier to achieve.

Case Study

When Bryan’s team at TownHound focused their acquisition strategy on dating app users, he started acquiring quality users. He noticed an increase in quality feedback as a result. The feedback he got informed a product update that increased both retention and revenue because it helped to deliver more progress for his users.

TownHound rolled out a new feature that is similar to a feature in the expense reporting app, Expensify. The new feature allowed users to redeem their discounts by snapping a photo of the paper receipt in the app after the meal was over. Before this feature, the user could only redeem a discount by showing a waiter or waitress a confirmation page in the app during the meal.

At its surface, this new feature provides TownHound users more flexibility when redeeming their discounts while at dinner. It could even allow a user to redeem a discount after leaving the restaurant if they forgot to show their waiter the in app coupon.

The new snap-a-photo feature does offer flexibility, but more importantly, it contributes to progress for users who are on dates. Dates are stressful because first, second, and third impressions matter. We want to impress the person sitting across the table. Although most would agree that living frugally where we can is an admirable characteristic, a first date typically isn’t the place to tout this trait. The new snap-a-photo feature allows a TownHound user to redeem their discount without their date knowing. They don’t have to worry about being perceived as cheap!

TownHound is used to help create a meaningful dining experience for users that are looking for a new relationship. Bryan’s team at TownHound had a deep understanding of the progress his customers were hoping to make and the role that TownHound played in delivering that progress. If he had viewed his product simply as a “deals app”, he wouldn’t have been able to make a key product update that brought in more revenue as more users redeemed second, third, and fourth deals.

Referral

• Use incentives that align with progress to influence referrals.
• Don’t assume increased credits, storage, or currency equals progress.

If you help your customers make progress, it’s likely that their friends will hear about your product. Unfortunately, word of mouth alone won’t raise our K Factor above 1, so we must encourage referrals. Social networks like Linkedin and Twitter have had huge wins through productized referrals. Josh Elman explains how his teams at Twitter and Linkedin created winning referral programs in this video called 3 Growth Hacks: The Secrets To Driving Massive User Growth:

Linkedin and Twitter are social networks, so the “better with friends” referral play works incredibly well. What about products that aren’t social? How do we build an effective referral program for customers?

The common referral incentive we see looks like this: “If you use my referral code when you sign up, we each get $10 off our purchase.” Sometimes the reward for the referrer is delayed until the new user makes a purchase, but there is usually a give and a get incentive. In other words, “I give you $10, I get $10.”

Case Study

Le Tote used the standard give/get strategy early on, but couldn’t find the right mix of give/get secret sauce in order for their referral program to take off. Le Tote is not a social product.

Before working as Director of Growth at Le Tote, Luke Langon implemented referral programs at Lyft and two other mobile apps that he co-founded. Luke interviewed his customers in order to find out what give/get incentive would work best. His goal was to increase the percentage of users participating in referrals.

He learned that many of his customers weren’t referring friends because their give of $25 only covered half the cost of their friend’s Le Tote box. This means that their friend would still have to pay in order to test drive Le Tote. His customers didn’t like the idea of recommending a new product that forced their friends to pay. The get of $15 was intended to incentivize a referral, but not all customers were motivated by saving money on their next Le Tote box.

Le Tote’s referral program became a top acquisition channel when it shifted from ‘Give $25/Get $15’, to ‘Give a free box, Get nothing.’ Referrals achieved the lowest Cost Per Acquisition compared to all other acquisition channels and ranked second in volume of new subscribers.

Le Tote’s subscription does help customers save money on new clothes, but this isn’t how they make progress. Le Tote’s customers make progress by feeling confident during important occasions involving people they want to maintain or create a healthy relationship with. This progress is more important than saving money, which is why the old referral program didn’t work for many customers.

How to start using progress to benefit you and your customers

Customer interviews will help you discover what progress means to your customers. Remember, progress is overcoming an emotional struggle to make one’s life better. You need to uncover an emotional hurdle that has nothing to do with your product. When you use progress as your guide, you will create more wins throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jobs To Be Done, JTBD.info is a great place to start. It’s run by Alan Klement, who’s book I linked at the beginning of this article.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please comment below or feel free to reach out!

About the Author: Chris Brophy likes to drive growth for consumer-focused startups. He’s currently consulting startups on growth strategy at Tradecraft and exploring his next adventure. If you’d like to chat about growth, JTBD, or live music, reach him at cabrophy89[at]gmail[dot]com.

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