The What, When and Where of Content that Converts from Dan Zarrella, Science of Inbound Marketing

• 12 years ago

During the Science of Inbound Marketing webinar Hubspot social media scientist Dan Zarrella talks like a radio traffic announcer, barely stopping to catch his breath. His tone relays excitement, value, now. He’s fast and fruitful sharing his results on content that engages and converts.

Right away Zarrella asks his audience to start tweeting. He offers a reward for those who tweet the most during the webinar. According to the data he collects and analyzes, those who ask for retweets get more of them. Zarrella definitely wants more – for everyone.

Here is my summary of the data results he shared on inbound marketing.

E-books

More people prefer reading e-books on Kindles that are less than 5 pages or more than 100 pages. Business books are still favored in print.

Facebook

Self-referential, positive sounding posts with photos, posted on Saturday or Sunday receive the most “Likes”. During the week posts are more popular between the hours of 6pm and 11pm.

Twitter

Contrary to popular belief, the highly followed on twitter are less conversational than average. Sixty to 80% of retweets contain a link. The “Please retweet” phrase quadruples chances of being retweeted. Popular time of day for tweets is 4:30pm.

SEO

Keep page titles short. No need to hire an SEO specialist. Rely on a content writer to create and optimize relevant content to get links.

Blogging

Seventy percent of decision makers report being influenced by a business blog when making purchasing decisions. They read blogs more than once a day. The best time to publish is between 9-10:00am. To receive more links publish earlier 6-7:30am. More posts, more views. The number of comments doesn’t correlate with links/shares. People are looking for a personal perspective on blogs – insights, questions, answers and reviews.

Email

Zarrella says he would trade twitter followers for email subscribers. His research shows the following factors can influence email effectiveness.

• Show some passion in your email subject line to get more opens.
• Use ampersands[&] in titles to get more click throughs.
• Include multiple links in the text.
• More is more. There are no detrimental effects from sending out lots of emails. Unsubscribe rates are higher when fewer emails are sent.
• Avoid questions in the subject line.
• Don’t use (parenthesis), use [brackets instead] in text.

Forms

Don’t ask people for their age. The word “Submit” has a lower conversion rate than others such as “Sign Up” or “Register”.

Zarrella reported that the Science of Inbound Marketing webinar generated 20,000 tweets. That’s impressive. It would be interesting to know how many of those people become email subscribers and buyers. But that is beyond Zarrella’s focus. His data driven perspective is unique giving inbound marketers clues to the what, when and where of content that converts.

What most influences you to register for and attend webinars? Is it the name of the host? The topic? Time of day?