by 
Want more customers from a shrinking audience? Then watch the Journey, Social Media Examiner's episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business.
Watch The Journey
This episode of the Journey explores how Social Media Examiner improves their conversion rate by using emotional messaging. Watch as they interview customers, hire an optimization expert, and begin working on a Messenger bot.
The show opens with Michael Stelzner (founder of Social Media Examiner) and the marketing team reviewing conference promotion results. Rather than improving on last year’s numbers, sales are falling below last year. Mike’s not giving up and he wants his team to prepare for the difficult path ahead of them.
Messaging continues to be a weakness, so Mike has hired conversion rate expert Talia Wolf, from Get Uplift. Talia specializes in emotional and psychological messaging.
During a call with Mike, Talia explains that her process involves getting to know the customer in a personal way. She will start by surveying both past attendees and people who are on the site.
Mike calls in marketing team members Jennifer Ballard and Saidah Murphy to let them know Talia is about to email a survey to all of last year’s attendees. When he suggests the surveys may also provide source material for the case studies and testimonials the marketing team has wanted to collect, everyone agrees.
Later, Saidah and Jennifer interview past attendee Meg Brunson.
Meg shares that she was initially concerned about the cost of the conference. After attending for the first time, she realized the value in the conference isn’t related to the cost. The value is related to how much knowledge you take from the conference.
Saidah is very pleased with the result of the interview.
Next, it’s back to the conference table.
When marketing manager Kim Reynolds brings forward the idea that emotional messaging may create a disconnect for people who aren’t emotional decision makers, Mike partially agrees.
He believes the past month’s greatest issue centered on the objection emails the team was sending. The reason? Prospective customers aren’t yet facing objections. Essentially, the objection messaging was timed incorrectly.
What are prospective customers concerned about right now?
They are uncertain. They’ve seen Social Media Examiner cancel Facebook video – a medium we were all in last year. They’ve seen organic reach drop. They’ve seen return on ad spend go down while they’ve seen cost per acquisition go up.
Mike says they don’t care about the number of sessions at the conference or which expert will be there. They want to know someone can help them solve their problem.
Next, the team tackles the decreased email deliverability which Mike believes could explain away much of the issues the team is facing. Jen agrees and says email campaigns are getting less than half the clicks and sales they used to.
Mike tells the team he’s hopeful the new Messenger bot can help solve the problem.
Later, Mike’s on a call with Kyle Willis and Natasha Takahashi from School of Bots. They discuss Mike's goal for the company’s first messenger bot, and begin to develop an editorial bot strategy.
Back in the conference room, Mike says unified messaging also affected campaigns adversely. The same messaging was used in the email newsletter, the marketing email blast, and Facebook ads.
Kim says everyone she’s talked to believes unified messaging is the way to go. When she says the issue might be in the message itself rather than the delivery, Mike says she’s right.
The past month’s campaign was unified around improperly timed experimental messaging. When the experimental objection messaging failed, the unified messaging failed.
The takeaway? Messaging needs to be tested before it goes into unified messaging.
Finally, Mike drops into Jen’s office to let her know he’s just hired YouTube ads expert Tom Breeze to help the company develop a strong YouTube strategy.
Mike is hopeful his recent new hires (Natasha Takahashi,Talia Wolf, Ilana Wechsler, Tom Breeze) will help the marketing team reach their goals.
The show closes with a bleary-eyed Mike staring at his computer screen. What is Mike staring at?
What are your thoughts on Messenger bots? Like them or not? Let us know in the comments below.
Key Mentions:
- Talia Wolf
- Meg Brunson
- Kyle Willis
- Natasha Takahashi
- Ilana Wechsler
- Tom Breeze
- Social Media Marketing World 2019
- AI Media
Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to The Journey on YouTube.
