In SaaS marketing, we’re always trying to better understand how our customers and potential customers view our product.

How does a customer decide “Is this the right software tool for me?”

How do buyers evaluate your software product? How do they decide “Is this the right tool for me?”

Here are 6 questions they may be asking themselves as they decide if it’s the right tool for them.

1. Does the product highlight my “features/use-case” questions on the website? 

– where do they look to verify?

– main product page with features bolded

– main menu features dropdown 

Takeaway:
List out features about what you’re product actually does AND highlight frustrations a user may have and how your product solves that frustration.

2. What experiences have others had with it?

 We all tend to do some research on a product before we dive in. They may search your product on Google, ask others in their professional network, review forums, ask slack/discord/reddit/facebook groups, or ask ChatGPT.

– does it do what it says it does?

– have others had a mostly positive experience with it?

– how’s customer support?

Takeaway:
Try to get reviews from your users and showcase them. This can be directly from customers, feedback in support tickets, or on forums.

3. Is the price reasonably in my budget for the return on investment I’ll get?

 – does it provide what I need and want?

 – even if slightly higher than my expected budget, do I think it will do the job I need?

– will it make me money in the long run?

– will it save me a significant amount of time and money?

Takeaway:
The user has to already see tangible benefits they will get, whether in revenue, time saved, or concern of what will happen if they don’t use the product, before they will buy. You can provide this in the form of other user stories and how it helped them, a calculator of time or money earned or saved, addressing fears and concerns in your messaging, and highlighting both emotional and tangible benefits.

4. Can I get started and set up in a timely manner?

– if I pay right now, can I start the process of doing what I need?

– do I understand how to start using it, whether it requires me to set it up or an onboarding process?

– if I need help or need to better understand something, will I be supported in a reasonable amount of time?

Takeaway:
The user has to already see tangible benefits they will get, whether in revenue, time saved, or concern of what will happen if they don’t use the product, before they will buy. You can provide this in the form of other user stories and how it helped them, a calculator of time or money earned or saved, addressing fears and concerns in your messaging, and highlighting both emotional and tangible benefits.

5. How does it compare to alternatives?

– does it have each feature or most features I need compared to another tool?

– do some prefer one tool over the other?

– what’s the cost difference and does it matter in comparison to what I need and want?

Takeaway:
You’re probably not the only tool they’re reviewing. What features do you have that another tool doesn’t or what feature do you not have that users might request? Understanding the differences between you and the competition is something to keep in mind. This doesn’t mean you’re trying to be everything they are, but knowing what your user sees.

6. What’s my overall vibe about it?

– Sounds silly, but all of these factors in different ways will influence how they “feel” about it.

– What about the micro-interactions they have with your customer support, forum posts they read from others, or your brand?

Takeaway:
You can create a tool that helps people and present it to those who do need it. Their final decision is probably based on multiple factors. Some may connect and understand immediately and for others, they just may not be interested. That’s ok!

The post 6 Questions Your Customer Might Have Before Purchasing appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.

Case studies are a more extensive version of a customer testimonial or review. And almost 45% of marketing professionals say that customer testimonials and reviews play a vital role in moving prospects through their sales funnel.

What’s a Case Study?

In a marketing context, it’s an in-depth look at how your product or service helped a customer solve their challenges. It’s a story about how your customer was struggling with a particular challenge and how you were able to solve it.

What’s the Purpose of a Case Study

Its purpose is to show potential customers how your product or service helped another company and how it can also help them. It’s a customer success story and it’s effective for sales and ‘social proof’ to showcase how you’ve helped others.

Case Study Example

Let’s say you have a software app that helps birdwatchers track bird locations.

A large bird watching group, Bird Watchers of Texas, with over 830 members, needed a way for each person in their group to log in and track bird locations. They wanted to be able to work together to see everyone’s bird locations, be able to comment on each location, and for each person to have a profile.

With your software app, you worked with Bird Watchers of Texas to create a member portal so all members could create their own profiles, track bird locations, and comment on bird locations by others. You solved their challenges and helped them in a big way!

So, you create a Case Study about how you helped Bird Watchers of Texas address the challenges they had.

Now, Bird Watchers of California reached out to you to help them with similar challenges. Because of your Case Study, they know what you’re capable of and that you can help them solve their problems! Once you write it, promote it so others can see.

Let’s look at how you can do this for your company.

How to Write Case Studies

1. Interview the Customer
2. Ask the Right Questions
3. Use Your Customer’s Words to Write the Case Study

Interview the Customer

First, you need to interview your customer. This is the most important part!

Set up a time for about 30 minutes to discuss the project.

For the interview, be positive and personable! Start with small talk and ask them things like what they’ve been working on this week, etc. A little bit of kindness and genuine interest goes a long way.

Now, it’s time to get down to business and ask questions about the project.

Case Study Questions to Ask the Customer

Here’s a list of questions you can ask.

You don’t have to use all of these, but they can help guide the conversation.

You want to be sure you dig in to what their challenges were before you came along. (Plus, this helps you come up with a list of content ideas you can write about for other customers.)

It’s important to paint a picture of the issues the customer was having, so you can then showcase how you saved the day!

Overview about the Company

• Tell me about you and what your company does.
• What do you enjoy about it? (their job, company, values, etc.)

About the Challenges

• What was going on that made you look for our solution/product?
• What were you struggling with?
• What made you finally decide you needed to solve the challenge?
• What were you using before?

How Our Product Helped

• How did you find us?
• What made you choose our product?
• What other options did you try and what else were you considering?
• What are you doing with it?
• What setup did you use? What does that look like?

Extra tip: It’s helpful to get them to give you a demo of their setup and how they use it! They will typically tell you more about it, in their own words, than answering your questions!

Results

• What can you do now that you weren’t able to do before?
• How has it improved your process?

In the interview, you don’t have to stick to this exact question process. Your customer might bring up something you didn’t think about, so you decide to focus on asking a couple of related questions to their comment.

Writing the Case Study – A Simple Outline

Now, that you have all the answers to your questions, it’s time to put together the Case Study article! Here’s an outline you can use for the article. Your customer has already given you all the answers to these!

About

About the customer’s company

Industry

The industry they’re in

Product

This is your specific product. Provide a description of what it is and what it does.

Challenge

Paragraph or two describing the challenges they were having. Then, 5-8 bullet points of the needs they had (that your product solves)

Solution

Talk about the specifics of how your product solved their problem, i.e. you created 830 member profiles, members can input bird locations on a map to track them, members could comment on other profiles and bird locations, etc.

Results

Provide bullet points of what your product was able to solve for them

Example:

• 830 member profiles created
• Over 3,500 birds tracked
• 8,480 comments written
• Enabled better communication between members
• Saved 15 hours of data entry each week

How You Can Use Case Studies

An in-depth look at your product through the eyes of a current customer can provide others with the proof they need to finalize their decision to buy from you.

Use this Case Study tutorial and outline as a way to capture stories from your customers about how you’ve made their business even better. If you need someone to create a Case Study for you, contact me to learn more about how I can help.

See a couple of example Case Studies I’ve written

The post How to Write a SaaS Case Study in 3 Steps (And Help With Sales) appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.

Rather than just writing random stuff, write about what they’re looking for and answer the questions they have.

This is one of the ways you can do quick and easy research to see what people might be searching in Google.

Once you find out what your potential customers are looking for, you can create an article, write an email, or create a post on social media that gives them exactly what they need.

Grab this Content Curation template to easily save all your ideas!

The post 10 Minutes to Find Content Ideas to Create For Your Customers appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.

And then I deleted some of the writing.

I made the article a better fit to answer a question that potential customers and middle/bottom-of-the-funnel traffic need answered.

It was originally titled to capture a keyword in a Google search. I had researched the keyword and it was a fit for the blog. And while the article answered exactly what someone was searching for, there was a better purpose for it.

After reading about a frustration potential customers were having over and over again (and one that was solved with the software product I wrote about!), I realized this article was the answer.

I had already been directing people to it, but it needed some updates.

I changed the title to better match what the customer was looking for. I’m now going through it and making some small changes, so it’s easier to follow and quickly answers their question.

So, don’t be afraid to update and change articles when needed! It did have some traffic, but it was better served for those who had the exact issue I had seen many times.

The post Don’t Be Afraid to Revamp a Blog Article appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.

Nerd Fitness has a unique strategy and they’ve used it to grow from a 1-man show to over 1 million traffic visits per month.

What’s Nerd Fitness? A fitness website for nerds and average Joes. Helping you lose weight, get stronger, live better.

Level up, Nerds

I’ve been following them for several years now because I wanted to be more fit, use best practices for working out, and build strength. Their branding caught my eye because it’s so UNIQUE.

They incorporate the use of The Lord of the Rings with a LOTR Workout, a Hobbit’s guide to walking, Star Wars with a themed SW workout, and LEGO obsessions.

Nerd Fitness was started as a simple blog in 2009 by Steve Kamb. It started out with him googling “nerd fitness”, wondering if anyone had combined the two subjects. When he found nothing, he bought NerdFitness.com and started writing nerdy articles to help beginners with exercise.

Nerd Fitness now has over 50,000 customers, over 1,100 active clients in their online coaching program, and an email list of 150,000. They even have famous people like Tim McGraw’s lead guitarist, Denny Hemmingon as part of “The Rebellion” as they call themselves.

I get an email from them every couple of weeks. It’s from Steve, the founder of Nerd Fitness.

The emails seem like they’re from a nice friend just saying hi, hope you’re doing ok. (I don’t know Steve but after some research, we apparently have a common love for the classic Legend of Zelda game.)

Every time I see his name in my inbox, I KNOW it will be interesting and useful.

If I want to know “How to lift weights,” they have an article about it. If I want to figure out how to stick to my new year’s resolution, they have some tips. Or “How to Lose Weight without Dieting” – that’s right here.

Nerd Fitness Traffic and Authority Stats

Their stats, according to Semrush.

They have a domain authority of 61. Their monthly traffic, worldwide, is approximately 1.1 million. In the United States, their monthly traffic is 507,000. They have 414,000 backlinks and 13,830 referring domains.

For comparison

History.com has a domain authority of 77 and traffic of 54.2 million.

Kitchenaid.com has a score of 64 with 3 million in worldwide traffic.

Colgate.com has an authority score of 67 with 6 million in worldwide traffic

In 2012, their traffic was at 9,840 per month. Now, in 2021, it’s over 1 million.

How SEO and a Content Strategy Makes the Difference

Now, here’s one of my favorite parts. Their traffic cost for the United States is $754,600!

What does this even mean?!

It means if they paid for the same traffic they receive ORGANICALLY through their blog content, it would cost them $754,600 every month in ads!

Not sure if SEO and relevant content works?

Yes.

Yes, it does.

Their top article right now is one containing home workouts with over 60,000 estimated organic traffic.

Their second top article is How to Hire a Good Personal Trainer. It’s a prime example of speaking to a targeted audience, teaching them something they want to know, and telling them about your own service. (They have an online coaching program with a personal trainer.)

What keywords do they rank for?

As of January 2021, they had almost 20,000 keywords ranking in the top 10 in Google! Remember that organic traffic cost? Yeah, this is why. They have over 144,000 keywords in the top 100 (in the US.)

High volume keywords

The keyword they capture with the highest volume traffic “crossfit” has a volume of 301,000 searches per month. They receive approximately 1,800 estimated organic traffic hits per month from this keyword. And they rank #9 in Google for it.

The article causing all this hullabaloo?

A Beginner’s Guide to CrossFit: 8 Things to Know Before Your First CrossFit Workout

It has an estimated $7,400 in paid traffic cost per month. That’s what it would cost them per month if they paid for ads to target the keyword.

It also ranks for an additional 1,200 keywords, several of them for #1 in the SERP.

What types of content does Nerd Fitness have?

Case Studies – They have specific use-cases of others who have used their program and lost weight and got more fit

Extensive How-To Guides – They have a page dedicated to Beginner’s guides, 101 guides, and many more. This is in addition to all their helpful articles.

Meal Plans – How about 10 meals that only take 10 minutes to prep each? They a have a meal plan for that.

Internal Linking – every article links to tons of other articles on their website. In one article, I counted 9 in the first 900 words. That doesn’t even count some of the other links sending you to their coaching program or links to their research sources.

Calculators – Like this Total Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator or this Protein Calculator.

Worksheet Templates – They have ready-made templates so you can get started with workouts right away. If you want to start doing Kettlebells, here’s a worksheet.

Custom Character – You can create your own superhero character

GIFs/Memes – Not all businesses could get away with using silly GIFs, so this is part of their branding.

Ebooks – Several articles have been turned into ebooks.

Published Book – Steve wrote a book, Level Up Your Life, in 2016.

Email Newsletter – They send out a free bi-weekly newsletter to 150,000+ subscribers

Content Upgrades/Inline Opt-ins – There is an opt-in on most articles offering free helpful guides to help you on your fitness journey. Just add your email and you’ll receive a ‘Nerd Fitness Starter Kit’

Archives – They have a dedicated section on their site listing out every article by month and year. Here’s 2020, 2019,  2018, 2017, and on and on.

They use all kinds of content to reach users!

Additional Lead Generation

Phone App – You can download the NF app on the Apple App Store or on Google Play

Community -They have a Facebook Group, Discord channel, forum on the website, app forum, comments on articles. Inside the communities, they have monthly challenges and daily log check-ins.

Online Workouts – They have a variety of workout routines you can do.

Live Events – They try to meet for a big in-person event occasionally.

Content Observations – Common Themes in Most Articles

I dissected several articles to understand what they do to make each one shine.

• They use an image, video, or GIF every 100 – 200 words.

It’s easy to follow along with lots of variety between text, video, and images.

• Table of contents

They make each article easy to navigate and you can see a summary of what you’ll learn.

• Word count varies

This article has 2,955 words. This article has over 3,606.This one has 2,056. This one has 2,119. This one has 1,977. This one has over 5,200.

(Each of these word counts include about 400 words in the call-to-action buttons and opt-in boxes)

Their top 3 articles have 2,688 words, 4,200 words, and 4,448 words, respectively.

• They add multiple opt-in boxes, call-to-action buttons, clickable images, or CTA text to each article.

I counted 14 total in this article. While that may seem like a lot, it doesn’t detract from the article at all. The content is still helpful and informative and I’ll be able to immediately start doing bodyweight workouts in my living room because of this article.

• Infographics and custom graphics

They create custom graphics for workouts, meals, and more.

• GIFs

They use generic GIFs and they create their own custom gifs showing how to do workouts.

• Videos

 Many articles have short videos showing how to do a specific exercise.

• Use of multiple formatting options

 Varying font type, bold, italics, underline, bullet points, all caps, quotes,

• Silly Alt text

This is something us web nerds find interesting and fun. And hopefully it gives those who need accessibility a chuckle.

Internal link strategy

Nerd Fitness uses internal links liberally.

In this 20 Minute Beginner Kettlebell workout article, they added 26 internal links. That doesn’t even count the links they include to their online coaching program.

Backlink strategy

They have about 405,000 backlinks. Over 325,000 of them are Do Follow links, which means search engines will crawl them and see them as quality and they can continue building domain authority.

GIF Strategy

If you want to see what a GIF strategy looks like, go read any of their blog posts. They sprinkle GIFs into every email and article. They have GIFs showing you how to do specific workout routines and random funny GIFs.

Building a LEGO-Style Branding Strategy

Apparently, Steve loves to build stuff. When he was younger (and even after 30 years), LEGOs were a way to express his creative, building side.

Because of this, you’ll find LEGO figurines all over the site who are lifting weights, doing pushups, struggling to choose between eating ice cream or running on a treadmill, or eating a pizza. They are everywhere…

Pretty sure the LEGOs are my favorite part of their strategy.

And some more…

Ok, I’ll stop now.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t take a genius to see Nerd Fitness can give you a mini-education on better fitness, training, and nutrition.

And what they’ve built brings in readers far and wide who they educate through a variety of content, articles, workout GIFs, and funny LEGO figurines.

Download the Nerd Fitness Strategy

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The post How Nerd Fitness Uses Content and Unique Branding to Reach 1+ Million Organic Traffic appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.

Google Analytics 4 is the new standard for analytics tracking on your website or for your app.

One helpful event to track is to see what webpage or article someone clicked to first enter your site. It’s a valuable report for content marketing purposes because it helps you measure what content is being seen and clicked on in the SERP or by referral. This event is tracked as an Entrance in GA4.

What are entrances in Google Analytics?

An Entrance in Google Analytics 4 is the number of times the first event recorded for a session occurred on a particular screen. Entrances are incremented on the first pageview or screenview hit of a session. 

If you’ve previously used the Landing Pages report in Universal Google Analytics, Entrances is your answer to this report. 

The Landing Pages Report in Google Analytics is one of the main ways to see where someone first lands on your website. This report shows you the webpage or article that made them interested in your website and where they first enter.

In the new GA4, Landing Pages, now Entrances, is not as simple to find, so I’ve put together a quick tutorial on setting up the Entrances report for your website.

Landing Page in Universal Google Analytics

In Universal Google Analytics, you can find Landing Pages by choosing Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. 

Or, if you have Google Search Console connected, you choose Acquisition >  Search Console > Landing Pages.

Entrances in GA4

Now, let’s set up an Entrance report in GA4. If you haven’t already added GA4 to your Google Analytics dashboard, here’s how to add it.

Once you’re in the new GA4 property, you’ll notice the dashboard looks much different.

In the left menu, choose Analysis, then select Analysis hub.

Now, click Blank analysis to create a new analysis.

In the Variables column, you’ll see an area called Metrics. Click the + button.

Another menu will open, and you’ll choose Entrances. If you can’t find it, search it or look under the Others category. Click Apply.

Next, find Dimensions in the Variables columns and click the + button. Choose Page title as the Dimension. This will show you the title of the page on your site. Click Apply.

Now, drag the Page title block over to the Rows section and drag the Entrances block over to the Values section.

You should now see your information in the Exploration tab!

You may need to sort the data by clicking on the Entrances column a couple of times to sort it from highest to lowest.

Explore More

You can add additional Dimensions such as Device category to the Columns section to see how many Entrances came from Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet. Or add the Region Dimension to the Columns section to see where users are located.

Final thoughts

GA4 is a whole new way to view your traffic analytics. Even if you’re savvy in Universal Google Analytics (or have your individual qualification or advanced certification), it’s worth learning since it’s already the default when you create a new property. 

Read through the GA4 documentation to learn what all the new terms mean and how you can start setting up reports to help your company.

The post How to View Landing Pages (Entrances) in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) appeared first on Hannah Wiginton.