#6: It's like living in the future!

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We take algorithms, analytics, and spreadsheets off your plate so you can focus on storytelling, branding, talking to customers, making tapenade from scratch, absolutely anything else.

In this issue:

• Cleaning up analytics trackers
• Great marketing is about creating shared value
• Nurture tracks are a powerful distribution channel
• A craving for mango dragonfruit juice, and our favorite content library

🍉 A quick way to improve basically everything about your site (we are only exaggerating a little)

Have you ever gone to a website, and suddenly everything on your computer slows down? And the fan on your computer gets really loud? And your Zoom interlocutors ask, “Should you really be talking to us while flying a vintage prop plane?”

That’s JavaScript, baby!

Websites use JavaScript to do pretty much anything that involves any kind of processing – animations, various widgets, some types of form submissions, and, best of all, tracking your every move.

Some JavaScript can be useful. But too much JavaScript will slow down your site, frustrate your visitors, and hurt your rankings and conversions.

🏄 What you can do

If your company uses Google Tag Manager, it should be fairly easy to take a look through and pause tags that aren’t needed. (Without GTM, you might enlist the help of your web dev.)

Remove outdated or unnecessary trackers from third-party services:

• That analytics service you tried out 3 years ago
• A/B testing tools that only need to run on the pages you’re conducting A/B tests on
• Advertising pixels for channels you’re not using anymore

Or ask your analytics manager to add “triggers” for just the correct set of pages where appropriate.

🪢 Great marketing is about creating shared value

We recently read a LinkedIn post that inspired a lot of great conversations on our team.

Last week, Sarah Colley wrote about one overlooked benefit of adding expert quotes to her content: When you quote someone for a piece, they’ll probably share that piece with the world.

How does this benefit your content distribution?

It’s social proof, which every content distribution channel (and its almighty algorithms) depends on.

• Google loves backlinks
• LinkedIn loves content that’s shared by more people
• Good old fashioned word-of-mouth increases when interesting people join in

More importantly, great marketing is about creating shared value.

Sarah’s tactic is a great example. Expert quotes benefit everyone involved with the content:

• Customers get more thorough content
• Experts expand their reach and esteem
• Marketers have an easier time writing

🧨 So here’s a challenge for you

Ask yourself: how can you make current content projects more valuable by including others? Extra credit question: How can you do this with your product?

Thanks, Sarah, for inspiring us with your post.

✂️ The nurture tracks need you

A lot of companies send nurture tracks to new users or new leads (or both). These email campaigns are sent automatically by machines on a pre-defined timeline, and often include tips on how to use a product, what content resources are available, why you’d want to talk to a sales rep, and so on.

It’s like living in the future!

Except that, in our experience, most nurture tracks are lovingly crafted and then ignored for months or years on end.

Which is a shame because, depending on your company, this might be thousands (or even millions!) of users who you could be seeing all your brand new content. And it doesn’t take all that long to take a red pen to those email tracks and make sure you’ve got the latest stuff in there.

🏄 What you can do

Talk to your demand gen team. Graciously. Ask them about the nurture tracks. You might say:

When was the last time we looked at the nurture track? If it was a while ago, I’d love to take a look at it.

Let them know what you have to offer:

• Update content links in the emails
• Add additional emails with more resources
• Refine the email copy
• Remove the lowest-performing emails and replace them with better ones

You might even add “nurture track” as one of your distribution channels. Every time something new gets published, see if you can include it in an onboarding or nurture flow.

(Too many nurture track emails? Start segmenting them, by persona, by company size, by buyer stage, and so on.)

🎭 Dramatic readings, and one of our favorite content libraries

• We’ve been doing dramatic readings of marketing copy, and our friend Gary Dietz took it to the next level with a spirited reading of Welch’s Dragon Fruit Mango Juice. Our joint production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premieres on Zoom later this summer.

• We while away the occasional half-hour over on Nielsen Norman Group’s UX library. It’s way outside our wheelhouse, but go check it out, we learn something every time.

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