0 (2s):
What's shaking fire nation, J L D here with an audio master class on how to build trust and grow your business online. To drop these value bombs. I brought Randy Rayess on the mic. He is a co-founder of outgrow.co. He is passionate about digital marketing and growth hacking. He previously worked in investing at Silverlake in an online advertising at Ampush. He studied business at warden and engineering at UPN today, fire nation. We're going to be focusing on interactive content, what it is, how to build it, where to put it, how to charge for it. Should you charge for it? And so much more fire nation. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, grow your online business with online courses, by jumping into Thinkific five day course challenge.

0 (49s):
Today over five days, you'll hear from inspiring speakers who will walk you through the whole process. So you'll know exactly where you're headed. Sign up for this free challenge today at thinkific.com/fire that's T H I N K I F I C.com/fire. Randy say what's up to fire nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1 (1m 14s):
Hey, everyone on a fire nation, I would say one interesting thing that most people don't know is I do a lot of hip hop dance.

0 (1m 23s):
What is couple of your favorite songs? Like the hip hop dance too?

1 (1m 27s):
I like a lot of like Latin type music. I like G six. It's fast paced and it's loud and you're trying to get a group going. That's the best.

0 (1m 35s):
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.

1 (1m 50s):
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 out blogs and building out a lot of great content, which you can consider kind of static content. So you have eBooks, you have white papers, you have blogs, but if you land on the blog or I land on a 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 ad words, and there's a page about, you know, how to optimize your ad, spend personalizing that content for each one of us is going to make the content much more effective.

1 (2m 40s):
So interactive content makes it easy for you to personalize what exact information you're showing someone based on what they're actually doing.

0 (2m 48s):
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 rates 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 conversion?

1 (3m 16s):
So what you have to think about is there are two things that are you're doing when you have interact when you have an interactive tool, right? So you can have a chat bot or an ROI calculator or an assessment, depending on the situation that you're in. So if the person is still top of the funnel, and you're just trying to get them to get a sense of, you know, the value of, let's say you have some sales software, so you might give them an assessment on their current sales processes. So that if you 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. Right? So it's a very helpful piece of content.

1 (3m 56s):
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, Oh, 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 got 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.

1 (4m 43s):
Your brand is legitimate because you just told me things I can do to improve in a, in a minute, without talking to anyone on a site at any time that I'm available

0 (4m 53s):
Our nation, when you can improve your lead acquisition, when you can improve the actual qualifications. And when you can improve that conversion, you are improving your business, you're improving your life. So let's talk about coming up with actual ideas for not just any kind of concept, Randy, but useful content, because we going to have to have a useful content to make this interactive content work well. So break that down for us

1 (5m 17s):
A hundred percent. So a lot of people will come and say, okay, so we can build, you know, interactive content has 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, a recommendation tool, but the recommendations you're giving are very simple or very basic. And you like, I'll give a great example. So let's say you only have two products, right? A sh shirts, product, and a shoe and shoes or whatever it may be. 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 and once you product, then the recommendation tool, isn't going to be that useful.

1 (6m 1s):
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 a thousand products or someone who has a hundred 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, there's my budget. There are the, the, the custom ad-ons that I'd like on a car, do I want autopilot or auto driving? There's so many different features and customizations that our recommendations was going to work really well. So I think that the key thing is, is this useful is going to determine whether or not this interactive content is going to be really useful.

1 (6m 43s):
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, you know, 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, you're giving them some value right away in the block pools, and it's going to help convert you convert people on the blog. But when you're really talk, talking about your main, your most important content pieces, I'm really focused on is this useful and how can I make it useful for the end use

0 (7m 21s):
And fire nation? 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 that I've done before. I'm like, this is going to be an absolute home run. I mean, a grand slam, 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 it ended up blowing up because guess what I was assuming, and 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.

0 (8m 4s):
I'm studying the analytics. I'm making things happen. And really you've really gotten fire nation fired up with all this talk about interactive content. So let's get specific. How the heck could we build a tool like this?

1 (8m 17s):
Yeah. So this is an interesting question. And one where, so eight years ago, we, the mobile app store was just taking off and we kind of wanted to build a mobile app cost calculator. And that's kind of how we decided to, to create algebra, but because it's really hard to actually build a really good piece of an interactive tool. You need developers, you need designers, and then you, every time you want to make a change or optimize or AB test different variation, you gotta go back to developers. It's a really annoying process. And so what we did was we created the tool called algebra.co. And the idea is to outgrow your current marketing strategies and kind of compliment them with this additional interactive. Cool. And we tried to make it, optimize it for the modern marketer so that anyone can use it.

1 (9m 1s):
You don't really need any technical experience whatsoever. And then all the things you would want to do, which is integrated with your email tools, run different analytics, embedded 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. Of course, if you have a 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, when you're doing, when you're working with developers on it. So I highly recommend using a tool like algebra because it just makes it so much faster and easier

0 (9m 45s):
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 of the funnel that it works. And so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, businesses have to be flexible this year from working remotely to pivoting their business models for long-term survival and growth. Just look at all the restaurants that have moved their dining outdoors, or added takeout to their offerings or the major retailers who are now designing and selling a face masks. If you're in charge of hiring for your business, these pivots have made your job even more challenging, especially when you have to hire for brand new roles. Thankfully, there's one place you can always count on to make hiring faster and easier. Ziprecruiter.com/fire.

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0 (11m 7s):
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0 (11m 49s):
It keeps you moving and takes a lot of the intimidation and confusion out of the process. I would highly recommend to this challenge, sign up for this free challenge today at thinkific.com/fire that's T H I N K I F I C.com/fire. So Randy we're back and I kind of teased before the break, you know, 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 for these interactive tools?

1 (12m 18s):
I generally say we should not charge. So the reason being is if you're focused on making it 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, let's say you're doing the assessment example or an ROI calculator. So you say, what is the current ROI on your ad spend on the results page? You can show them, okay, this is the ROI from each channel you're advertising on, right? Like podcast ads or Facebook, Google, et cetera. But you give that for free just, well, they're just giving you their email, right? But on the end, on the bottom of the result speeds, you can see download detailed report, and then you can charge like $10 or $20 or whatever you think is reasonable for that report.

1 (13m 4s):
So you're still charging them within the 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, Oh, these are like best practices. You should make sure you're incorporating in your keyword, targeting on Google or whatever. Then, then you can charge for that. But after you're giving them some value. So usually we say those types of things work out well, if you're charging for them afterwards, after you've given them some value. So that's kind of how I like to think about where to charge and if you're charging them right on at the beginning of a content piece, it's going to hurt your conversion rate, obviously because it's not free.

1 (13m 45s):
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, 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.

0 (14m 8s):
We know like that process in what you recommends and you know, what you've successfully done in the past for interactive tools on that part of things, where should we actually place these interactive tools that to be most effective, because there's a lot of different areas that we could have these interactive tools, but what have you seen as places that actually work the best?

1 (14m 26s):
I love this question because there's, 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 forks for everything. It really depends on the type of content and the situation. So for example, if some, if you've acquired an email already, but it's a very, you know, top of the funnel, you have no qualification about them and you're trying to 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 middle of the funnel or, you know, down, down the funnel a little bit.

1 (15m 7s):
So that in that case, you launch it in the email until you just get some embed code, right. Based on your email provider. So when outgrow, like, we give that to you, you just put your email provider and we give you some code and then you drop it in. And the first question is actually going to show right there in the email and now you can qualify them. So that works well, obviously, if you don't have someone's email, that's not going to work cause you cannot launch an email. So in those cases you want to think about the content is the content a compliment to a blog post. Cause if it compliments a blog post, then I'm either going to have it as a time Papa or exit intent on a blog post page, or just as an embed within the blog post page at the bottom or in the middle, or even at the top, depending on the situation where it's kind of embedded within the blog post page.

1 (15m 47s):
And so now you're going to say, Oh, I have so much traffic to this blog post, but it's not converting any leads. So maybe I should create like a, you know, see how much you understood about the blog post content, that case embedded on that blog post page, or have it as an exit intent where someone's leaving the page, the lock will speed you up, 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 through them, right? So find the right podcast. If you have a thought, you know, thousands 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 with, which podcasts they should start listening to, and you maybe want to give them four recommendations, like the top four for their use case.

1 (16m 29s):
Then I might put that on the homepage of the blog, like the first page of your blog, or I'd put it as a tool with a on, on the, on the welcome on the homepage of your whole site, you say, Oh, like go to blog, you know, figure out which blogs are, 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 homepage. 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 in your marketing software company or whatever it may 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.

0 (17m 9s):
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,

1 (17m 30s):
We always recommend running comparison, like an AB tests to see what works best. But in general, it's very good to, to experiment with different versions, right? So most people, when they come at least on to algebra, they start with an assessment because those are easy, those are fast. Okay. And then they might create a chat bot for like frequently asked questions. So the assessment will like, you know, if you're, if you're an agency, you're a security software company, a security agency consulting company can create an assessment that says your current security processes. So that, that is a good content type to start with. And then you might create a chat bot to handle, you know, the top 20 questions people get when they land on your site. So you can come in, you're going to have a chat box for that to kind of an FAQ chat bot.

1 (18m 11s):
Instead of having a list of every FAQ, you basically will ask them a set of questions and you send them to the most likely FAQ's they have. And then the answers for those FAQ's in a, in a more interactive chat bot. Wait. 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 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 if for e-commerce cases. So th those are be the first kind of four that I started with. And then over time you can start adding things in or taking things out depending on how you want to do it.

1 (18m 53s):
So if you want to build a full on grader to like grade your blog, then I would do that later on. Cause that takes a bit more work. You have to scrape the blog, you have to seek our, you know, their, their tags. If 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, because they do require you to, they do require much more work than, than the others.

0 (19m 18s):
And 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.com, that's outgrow grow.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 said, 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.

1 (19m 57s):
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 their customers, especially now as everything moves online in 2020 with, with COVID. And 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 more personalized experience, whether you're using algebra or you're building it 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 you're giving them kind of a static piece of content that might not be as relevant.

1 (20m 38s):
So I think that that's the main recommendation is figuring out how you're building trust and always be open to experimenting, experimenting with different forms within each interactive content. Like there's so many different options you want to experiment with them and really see, okay. And do I have good tracking in place to assess it? So that would be the main thing from that point for the other aspects around the call to action and how to keep in contact. So if you go to outgrow.co/fire, I'll go, that's your /fire. We're giving every, every, all of your podcasts listeners, 30 days completely free, no card required to just try out building these pieces of content.

1 (21m 18s):
And, and obviously you're going to have chat access on the bottom, right? There's the 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, the fastest way to reach out to us, and the best response you're going to get is if you go to algebra.com forward slash fire on the chat, on the bottom, right, where we're basically nearly, always there to help you. And then if you want to email us or tweet at us, the questions that I'll go that CEO and Twitter is just the handles. Just add outgrow, seal,

0 (21m 59s):
Fire nation cash in on that coupon, head over to outgrow.co/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 who spend the most time where they've been hanging out with RR and me JLD today. So fire nation keep up the heat and head over to EOFire.com type of 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/fire is your call to action fire nation.

0 (22m 42s):
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.

1 (22m 51s):
Thank you. Thank you. This is great.

0 (22m 53s):
Hey, fire nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Randy. And if you've ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, the podcast, Journal's for you, it is a gorgeous, full other journal that will guide you. Step-by-step in the creation and launch of your podcasts. And 50 days we're talking five zero. Visit the podcast, serial.com use promo code podcast for a $15 discount in. Thank you for listening to my podcast and I'll catch you there, or we'll catch you on the flip side, grow your online business with online courses, by jumping into Thinkific five day course challenge today over five days, you'll hear from inspiring speakers who will walk you through the whole process.

0 (23m 34s):
So you'll know exactly where you're headed. Sign up for this free challenge today at thinkific.com/fire that's T H I N K I F I C.com/fire.