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How Data and Design Work Together to Close Deals

Authors: Jess Oli Gardner
Posted Under: The Content Experience Show
Content Experience Show Logo
Hosted By
Jess

Anna Hrach

Convince & Convert
About The Content Experience Show:

Welcome to The Content Experience Show where content experience is the new content marketing. It’s not only about reaching our audiences where they are, but engaging them with a personalized experience of meaningful, useful content that they’ll take with them over time. The guests on the Content Experience Show share strategies, tips, and real-world examples of how they’re taking their content marketing to the next level and providing their current and prospective customers with a true content experience. This isn’t just a trend. It’s a movement.

Apple Podcast Reviews:

It doesn't get any better for content marketers. They present a balanced, insightful discussion of current trends and ask all the right questions. Their guest list is a "Who's Who" of content professionals. Outstanding.

Jared Johnson Piano

I love listening to marketing podcasts and this one is on my must-listen to list. Very knowledgable hosts and topical discussions.

The Marketing Book Podcast

Oli Gardner, Co-Founder of Unbounce, joins the Content Pros Podcast to discuss how data, design, and content work together to convert leads and close deals.

Oli-Gardner-InstagramDesigning For Success

We all know that content and design go hand-in-hand. However, the union between these two is rocky and frequently ends in strained marketing teams that are not collaborating at the top of their game.
If your content is useful but ugly or difficult to navigate, nobody will want to read it. Alternatively, if it’s attractive and user-friendly but ultimately useless, nobody will decide to purchase your product. Your content needs to be both useful and attractive to be successful.
The solution? Put design at the front of the process. This means not only bringing your design team in at the very beginning of the content creation process, but also validating designs long before the content exists. Trying to put content into a pre-existing design template is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
Creating design and content in parallel helps your marketing teams avoid fads that alienate customers and ensures they are using content that works and is presented in a proven and trusted manner that gets results.

In This Episode

  • How a lack of cohesion and data leads to tension on the marketing team
  • Why a winning design means validating the data first
  • How focusing on conversion rate optimization leads to irrelevant content and decreasing conversions
  • Why motivating content means including your product, even if you don’t want it to be too sales-y

 

Quotes From This Episode

“I see a lot of problems in marketing teams between the different people in the team… There’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of broken processes that go into that.” —@oligardner
They can design the experience as relevant to the customers who are receiving that thing. Click To Tweet
“What I’m trying to do is take these design trends looking back over history, and especially what’s coming out now, and trying to figure out what data we need to analyze them and to validate them.” —@oligardner
“At the end of the day, optimization is just making something better from whatever metric you happen to be caring about at the time.” —@oligardner
“When you have that optimization lens as you go through life you become a better marketer, a better designer.” —@oligardner

Resources

 

Content Pros Lightning Round

What’s the “C” in “OCG”? Charles.
Did you really try to change your name for hits? That is a true story. I actually researched changing my name to Landing Page because I figured that if I changed my name to Landing Page, when I put it in the bio at the bottom of these blog posts, it would link to unbounce.com. I thought it was the best link building strategy in the world. I did all the research, and it’s not that hard to change. It’s just really hard to change back.

Transcript

Randy: Welcome to another episode of Content Pros. I am Randy Frisch from Uberflip. As always, I’ve got Tyler Lessard joining me from Vidyard, and today we are going to dive into a whole bunch of fund stuff with a good friend of ours, Oli Gardner from Unbounce. It’s going to be a great podcast today. I’m so excited to talk about some of the things Oli is working on from a thought leadership perspective as well as conversion optimization, which is something that all of us as marketers need to own. Tyler, do you want to bring Oli in here?
Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely. Hello everyone. Welcome to today’s session. I am extremely excited to have Oli Gardner with us, who is somebody who brings a diverse set of experiences in not only marketing and communications, but in running a business and being a part of a high growth company that has to do everything it can to survive and grow and become a market leader. So welcome to the podcast Oli. Maybe you could kick things off just by introducing yourself and how you got started in the world of Unbounce.
Oli: Sure. Thanks for having me on. Yes, I’m one of six co-founders of Unbounce, which kind of surprises a lot of people. It’s not very common. We started seven and a half years ago. Before that I had a hugely varied background, from developer to interaction design usability, creative director, then I became a marketer the day we started the company because we didn’t have a marketer, so that’s what got me into that. Yeah, over time I grew a marketing team to kind of take over for that. Now most of my time is spent on the road as a public speaker, which is pretty awesome.
Tyler: It’s funny, you know, Randy, I think we have more marketers on this podcast who didn’t start as marketers when they joined their company or when they went into their role. I think it’s a flagship for-
Randy: That’s so true, but it also makes sense, right? I mean the skillset of a marketer today is not what it was 20 years ago. I think all three of us probably sometimes wonder if that older school marketer who is fully just focused on brand can adjust to the demands of conversion and things like that. That’s where your experience, whether it be a developer, Oli, or what have you is probably huge.
Oli: Yeah. It’s great, because … And I think you’re totally right. I didn’t have a very good perspective of marketers … Not perspective, opinion when I started. I was like marketers are sleazy. I think I connected more with sales. We have a sales team now that’s like-
Randy: I think half the people listening to us … My gut is sort of like screw it, I’m going on to the next one. This guy is calling me sleaze.
Oli: Yeah. I thought they were kind of … I don’t know, it was kind of my mission when we started I was going to do things differently. I had seen a lot of marketing departments where they weren’t really very accountable. There wasn’t much measurement going on. It was just like spend lots of money, do lots of stuff, but then there was no data in there for the most part, so that’s why it was kind of interesting to start in this age where data is hugely important.
Randy: You mean the people are just like well, I kept it within budget?
Oli: Exactly.
Randy: My favorite line.
Tyler: Oli, let me ask you, you’ve been on a long journey at Unbounce and you started off in I guess being marketing and then growing a marketing team and you’ve now taken on the role of being an advocate, an evangelist, a public speaker and a thought leader in this market. What are you talking about these days? What’s your favorite topic as it pertains to modern marketing and … What’s your next talk about?
Oli: It’s called … What I’m working on right now, it’s called Data Driven Design. I see a lot of problems in marketing teams between the different people in the team, say the marketer, the designer, the copywriter. There’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of broken processes that go into that. I’ve observed it for years and I want to try and do something about it. If you think like most … And I’ve done a lot of interviewing, interviews of people lately to try and get kind of the real inside feelings about this kind of thing, and I got some cool data from that.
A large majority of designers, they have to start their work before they’re given any copy and they’re not really given any customer data at the beginning of a project, so they’re kind of just like winging it, going based on what they’ve done before or what the competition is doing, or … And they essentially start building templated systems that have no real fundamental backing behind them.
Then the copywriter like a week later will go, “Here’s the first ad.” “Oh, wait, the headline doesn’t fit in the design. Well, I’m going to make the headline shorter.” You can’t do that. There’s tension, and then the marketer comes along, critiques it all, and say, “Well I like this one better,” and they have no skill in critiquing design, although from my research 92% of the marketers I spoke to thought they were qualified to provide design feedback, and that’s total bullshit.
I’ve been on both sides of that, and it’s not true. There some weird over-confidence there and it creates a lot of tension, particularly from the designer, that part of the relationship. Marketers think designers are just all into like fluffy, pretty pictures, and they don’t respect data, but then they don’t give it to them, so it’s like this constant struggle.
What I want to do is try and kind of de-marketize the data that’s available, because there’s so much data available. It’s too much, and a designer doesn’t know where to get it or what’s there, and often the marketer doesn’t. I’m trying to bring it down to a simpler level, where say you’re working on a project and … There’s like multiple ways into this, kind of making like a big data library. So if you’re a designer and you’re working on a project and … There’s different things. There’s trends, design trends. There’s page elements. There’s types of page. Whatever your working on, essentially I have this giant master grid where you can go I have to work on a promo slider because my boss or client said I need to have one.
I look along which types of data can influence my design decisions for that. It’s like here’s three things you should look at to inform your design decisions, instead of just going here’s everything. Don’t know what to do with it? Well, neither does anyone else. So it’s trying to narrow the focus so people can actually make informed design decisions. Yeah, that’s kind of-
Randy: Tyler, you and I both after this podcast probably have to go and apologize to our designers, because I’m like listening to Oli and I’m like I think I did that three times today.
Tyler: I mean it’s an important topic though, right? We’ve gone through this in our own team of … Realizing like hey, at the end of the day this program we’re building and this campaign that we’re building is all about the conversion. When you go into it and you everybody isn’t aligned on the goal of that campaign things go off. If design isn’t working alongside the copywriters and working alongside the video producer and working alongside the web team to collectively think about what is our goal here and how can we build this in a way that marches towards that goal, and the goal being getting somebody to act and convert on this, as opposed to the goal of writing content and making it look good.
I think too often we think about hey, the goal of this program is to write great copy that people will like and make it look great and make them want to consume it. But to me, if you’re not thinking about the conversion as a part of that project you miss the boat, and that’s when things start to go south with teams and fingers start to get pointed, because you don’t get the conversions and everybody thinks it was somebody else’s fault.
Oli: Totally, and designers really want the help on this. There’s nothing worse than someone saying at the last minute, “Oh, can you just make this look good?” Or, “Can you just whip something up?” Whip something up? Like come on. Like there’s so much disrespect in that kind of statement, and it’s very common. Yeah, it’s something that needs to be fixed, and I’m thinking of a simple example like on the platform we just released, overlays, like hyper-targeted overlays.
It’s pretty cool, but if you imagine a scenario, and this is based on a test we did. A lead gen overlay has one form field. Sales comes in and says, “Actually we need four form fields. Can you ask them these things?” Sure, just make the thing bigger, right? But then all of the results start tanking. It’s not because there are four form fields, because that’s not that big of a deal always.
You might dent conversion a little bit because there’s more effort involved, but actually what the problem was if you look at the data, it’s because the overlay then became 840 pixels tall, and 20% of your visitors, if you look at Google Analytics, have a browser that’s smaller than 800 pixels in height, so you can’t see the whole thing and it’s a terrible content experience, because you get there and you have to scroll just to see the overlay, never mind the page.
If the designer is told that single piece of data, they can change the design of this thing, put the form on the side, make it wider and not as tall. They can design the experience as relevant to the customers who are receiving that thing, so that’s an example of data driven design. It’s really simple. If you have these little bits of insight that you provide to people when they’re doing their work, everything becomes simpler and everyone becomes smarter.
Randy: That makes so much sense. It’s funny. I’ll share with you guys after this a form that I found the other day that was so clever, like they basically did it as like a fill in the blank works. Almost like Mad Libs. Remember when we were younger? Which was genius in concept, but from a design perspective it feels like you have to fill out like a Mad Libs form. It’s like no one is going to do it, right?
I think sometimes, to your point, we get so caught up on the creative idea versus the ability to and execute that. What’s your suggestion, coming away from all of this? When should designers actually get involved in the creative process?
Oli: Right in the beginning. I mean the discovery … The beginning of a project, where you should be digging in and finding as much possible data that you can or doing a little bit of research at the beginning, that’s something that has to be there. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work as well. It seems like such a simple answer, but people aren’t really doing it. I was thinking about something there. Oh, yeah, you mentioned that … I’ve seen that. It’s really cool and it’s the kind of thing you do once, but if you ever saw it again you’re like no, stop doing that. I don’t want to fill that Mad Lib thing in. I’ll look at it. I’ll share it with the team on Slack, but I don’t ever want to do that again.
That’s an example of a design trend, and that’s a big part of what I’m trying to dig into because design trends come along every year, so we have to evolve the way we deliver interaction methods and visual styles, but a lot of them are never validated. They just spring up, everybody copies them because it looks good or they want to keep up with the Joneses or whatever, and they’re not validated. They come in and they might not perform well. The worse culprit are theme designers.
It’s not their fault. They’re trying to design themes, but you get a theme and it has every possible design trend stuffed into it. It’s going to have back end video, a parallax, a promo slide, scrolljacking, which is the worse thing ever, and this, that, and the next thing. It could be all thrown in there, because they have to say we have all these shiny objects. But then someone who doesn’t know about this, isn’t informed about how thing works, can come and get this, like a startup, they need a website really quickly, and they’re putting out this terrible experience without really knowing it.
That’s kind of unfair, so what I’m trying to do is take these design trends looking back over history, and especially what’s coming out now, and trying to figure out what data we need to analyze them and to validate them. One of the best examples that happened recently is connected to what you just said about that Mad Libs thing. A guy put a script on GitHub at the end of last year for a conversational forum. What it does if you put this in your page of script it will change your regular form into a conversation form, which is kind of like a live chat thing.
All of a sudden it’s like oh, hello, what’s your name? There’s just a single entry field, so you’re not clicking through fields. You’re just like typing like on live chat and it kind of appears like a conversation, and it’s kind of cool, but it’s not been validated. I started … I ran a test doing this and I used Hotjar to put some session recordings on there so I could actually visualize how people were interacting with this thing.
Five minutes after I put it up, this guy goes to the site and I watch the recording. He does something wrong and the error handling is broken because the script doesn’t really know how to deal with the error handling that exists on this particular form, so there’s no way of solving the problem. This guy is clicking around like some crazy person, the mouse is going everywhere, it’s like a million clicks a second. Refresh the page goes to the exact same experience. It’s terrible.
I was feeling really guilty that I ruined this person’s afternoon. Then Nicole, my fiancee, who’s way smarter than me clearly, goes, “But he put his email address in. You can see it. You should reach out to him.” I go, “Brilliant.” So I email the guy and I say, “Hey, I’m really sorry about that bad experience. I’m testing this new interaction mechanism, this conversational forum. I watched the recording and you had such a bad experience, I’m really, really sorry. Here’s the content you were trying to get. Again, my apologies.”
Two minutes later he replies, “Wow, in 25 years as a marketing professional I’ve never seen such a good apology, explanation of trying to fix a bad experience, and I will be much more likely to engage with the brand as a result.” So it was just-
Randy: That’s amazing.
Oli: Yeah, and I fixed the bugs because I saw that. Now I’m running an AB test to see if it’s actually any good. I had to take the validation off so that people can put in fake data, but … And I’ll look at that after to see if there’s more or less, but it’s converting 20% better right now.
Randy: As you were just telling that story I was thinking being in one of those phone routing messages, where you’re like I just want to talk to the operator. They’re like well we can’t let you talk to the operator. You have to answer the next question, and you’re like … You start screaming and yelling, and if only they could adjust on the fly that quickly I would maybe not hang up or give the person who answers the toughest time in the world. This is awesome Oli. We’re going to take a quick break here, hear from a couple of our sponsors, and then we’re going to be back to figure out how you come up with all these ideas and what that creative process is like.
Randy: Welcome back to Content Pros. We’re on with Oli Gardner from Unbounce and we’re talking all about how designers work, and this amazing set of ideas that Oli ended up dealing with. A lot of these ideas are the same type of ideas that us as content marketers struggle with on a day-to-day basis. Some of these ideas tied to this Content Pros podcast … Our parent here is Convince and Convert. That’s what Jay Baer is associated with. Lately, if you’ve been following, Jay’s been doing a great job at highlighting how to succeed as a content marketer.
I encourage everyone to take a look at contentmarketingclass.com. This is something that a lot of us as content marketers have craved, or those that we’re bringing onto our teams and we want to help ramp them up. Jay has put together the ultimate content marketing class at contentmarketingclass.com. I encourage you guys to check that out. Tyler, why don’t we keep digging here with Oli?
Tyler: Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to ask is a followup to what you were talking about, Oli, because to me what you were talking about there in ensuring somebody has a great experience on that landing page and will ultimately take that conversion step, to me that really is the epitome of CRO, or conversion rate optimization, which is an acronym that my team knows and loves, and I think many people do.
Would you mind just for this audience talking about what CRO is from your perspective, and as a follow on to that who do you generally see owning the responsibility for optimizing the performance of landing pages? Is it the designer? Is it the web team? Is it the digital team? Is it somebody dedicated? Who owns this notion as you’re building out these programs to optimize those if it’s not Oli Gardner sitting behind there watching somebody?
Oli: We don’t want that. That’s kind of part of the reason why it’s good to be a speaker. I’m very much an individual contributor and I advise the marketing team, because that’s mainly what I did, because I was a terrible boss.
Yeah, CRO, it’s interesting. I mean first of all pick a different acronym. Come on. A lot of my friends are like the main pros in the industry, and for the most part there’s kind of a movement to pull the R out of that equation. It’s not about the conversion rate, it’s just about the number of conversions, conversion optimization. You want more conversions, more money. The rate is not important. I think it was Pat Bly, or someone said, “If you want to increase your conversion rate just cut your price in half.” So it’s not a smart measurement.
At the end of the day, optimization is just making something better from whatever metric you happen to be caring about at the time. That could be … You know, if lifetime value is the metric you care most about, and it should be, then you need to identify your ideal customer by looking at your metrics and cohort analysis and how long people stay with you, what features they use and how long they stick around, how much they pay you, your ideal customer.
Then you have to design an experience for them so that you’re optimizing your business, you’re optimizing your site, and you’re doing it for the reason you should be doing it rather than can we make this page convert better than it is. That’s not the right approach. It’s about making relevant, semantically relevant experiences for the people you want to attract.
I’m a big fan of just optimization in general, optimizing life. Nicole and I are kind of always talking about this. Being MacGyver is my favorite pastime in the world, whether it’s hacking some weird thing on the wall of our workshop in the basement so I can stick all my … A whole bunch of tools in this thing, or fixing a creaky floor or whatever it is. I think when you have that optimization lens as you go through life you become a better marketer, a better designer, because we’re all designers in some way, shape or form. We just don’t really class it as that or think about it, but we’re all responsible for some part of the experience.
It’s funny, recently … I mentioned before we started, Randy, like I’ve been spending crazy amounts of time on this talk, like 16-hour days for weeks. One night I was up really late, like 2:00 or 3:00 am, and I had the munchies, so I went and got a bag of Doritos from the other room, and Nicole is trying to sleep in the other room. She wouldn’t be able to hear this, but I was just being paranoid, but every time I put my hand in it it was rustling like crazy. It was just too loud, so I felt uncomfortable and I thought how can I optimize this? How can I make this experience better for everyone?
So I went in the bathroom, I got a pair of scissors, and I cut the bag in half, took the top half off, because there’s nothing in there anyway. So now I have this perfect little bowl where I could grab the chips without touching any packaging and it was perfectly silent.
Randy: How did you manage the crunch of the Doritos itself. That’s where my wife wants to kill me. Like the crunch of food is like … It’s like she kills me with her eyes alone on those.
Oli: You just have to put it in your mouth and let it slowly melt, dissolve on your tongue, in the roof of your mouth, then it’s silent.
Randy: I like that tactic. I wonder like where do these … You talk about being up at 2:30 in the morning working on this stuff. I mean for me, when I’m working on a talk that I’m going to do out there … A lot of times for me that’s a long drive. That’s when it comes to me, like I’ve got two hours. A lot of times I’ll actually pull over to the side of the road with something like that’s really good. I’ve got to jot that down.
When do these ideas come to you and when do you find that you get the most creative, and how much time … I mean 16-hour days on a talk, how many hours goes into a talk for you?
Oli: It’s ridiculous. A lot. I mean we have a giant white board at work and I’ll fill that thing, like 50 feet of concepts, I’ll do that in an hour. Then I’ll take a photo and I’ll start all over again. This just goes on and on. I’m a little OCD. I like to call it OCG, because those are my initials. Yeah, I can go down some giant rabbit holes sometimes and it gets me into trouble, because I’ll just spend too long. I’m very fortunate that I get to spend this much time on a presentation. Most people don’t have afforded that amount of time. In terms of creativity, most of my inspiration usually comes after a bottle of red wine.
Tyler: Like many of us.
Randy: Nice.
Oli: I do … A lot of my best work I do in airport bars and hotel bars. That’s my kind of … The noise and chaos of that situation, it actually instead of distracting me, it focuses me. I’m very good in that kind of situation and I can … That’s where a lot of my thinking tends to come from.
Randy: How do you polish some of those ideas? I mean I think a lot of this is any piece of content we’re creating we should be testing, right? That’s the point you’ve been making here, right? Is just don’t go and do it. Make sure it’s working. Before you go out on the road and take a new keynote with you, who’s your audience that you’re testing some of those … Is it your wife, or your fiancee rather, or is it … Who’s your benchmark?
Oli: Typically it’s no one, because I’m very much an ambivert, which is like the middle of the road for extrovert and introvert. On stage I’m an extrovert. In real life, unless I know everybody in the room, I’m quite an introvert. I don’t like small crowds for a talk, especially one person. I like to deliver it the first time on the stage, not in front of a few people. It just makes me feel awkward, but I get a lot of practice.
A couple of times … It usually goes great, but a couple of times recently with this talk, my first go at doing this was in Sweden about six weeks ago, and it was hell. I finished my deck at three … What I considered finished at that point, still a massive work in progress, I finished that at 3:00 am, got up at 6:00 am for a sound check, spoke at 9:00 am, and it was chaos. There’s too much in it and I had to speak way too fast. Sometimes that’s your testing. You do that and you listen. When are people laughing? When are they taking their phone out to take a picture of the screen? What are they tweeting about? That’s your experimentation and that’s how you learn what works and what doesn’t, so you can amplify the things that are working and then strip out everything that’s not.
It’s very interesting. I did something very risky for the start of this talk. I wrote a medium post a couple of years ago … Can I swear on this? I can bleep myself if not?
Randy: Yeah, it’s all good. We’re cool with that.
Oli: It was called Fuck Data. It was just like a moment of anger, this internal dialogue about we spend a lot of money and time creating and explaining a video and we put it on the site and it did nothing. It was just an absolute waste of time and money. It had no impact and it was just an embarrassing piece of creative. It just made you think of those times where someone is like, “Well I don’t care if it doesn’t perform well or makes it worse. I want it on there anyway.” It was this internal struggle.
So I open my talk right now with essentially that. I have an audio recording, single slide, so I can’t click through, in my inner voice. I come on stage and it starts talking to me and then I’m having to talk back to it, so I’m basically acting out this thing on stage live. Really risky, but it’s a lot of fun.
Randy: Let me ask you … There’s one other campaign that you’ve done that I think is brilliant and it’s probably worthwhile for the folks listening to this to check out, and it’s on that same vein of seeing pages or things that aren’t working. It’s called the Landing Page Sessions. I think for all of you listening, you can Google Landing Page Sessions, Oli Gardner, and you’ll find it on the Unbounce site.
What I love about it, it was a video series. It looks like there’s about 12 episodes up there now, where in each episode you actually go and dissect somebody’s landing page or certain web pages and talk about your perspective on how it could be improved or what didn’t work or what worked, which I think is a very simple idea, but the way that you executed on it seemed really effective. Could you share, knowing that that’s been a high performing campaign for you guys, where did that come from and what did you learn? What really worked in that to make it such a success for you guys?
Oli: Yeah, it was a great project, and hopefully we’ll do a second season soon. It all started … Years ago we had this show called Page Fights, which was me and Pat Bly from ConversionXL. We were kind of the judges. We’d have guest judges on there, and we would … It was a little bit off brand and we just kicked the crap out of landing pages. It was very unfiltered, swearing, all kinds of stuff, and it was a lot of fun. But the problem was … And we had some crazy fans. They’d get together in a meeting room for lunch, have a pizza party and watch the show.
It was an amazing concept, but people hated it for the same reason that they loved it. They either loved the way we did it, or they were turned off by it, so we couldn’t really grow it. So Patrick jumped on GrowthHackers some time and wrote a post. He said, “Hey, we’re having some trouble growing this. What would you do to grow this show and to make it more successful?” The struggle was we couldn’t … There was no ROI.
Interestingly, fast forward, Nicole … Kind of the way that Nicole and I actually met, she saw me on Page Fights years ago and then she came to a conference and met me there and one thing led to another and now we’re engaged.
Randy: That’s conversion optimization right there my friend.
Oli: At which point Pat said to me, “There’s the ROI of Page Fights,” which I thought was brilliant. But anyway, so we canned that because we couldn’t grow it, and that’s where Landing Page Sessions came from. So instead of it being this longer hour thing where we’d beat up lots of things, It was single campaign focused … So it would be landing pages, it would be emails or ad, whatever they did, so it was more context. You were looking at more than just the page. Yeah, I dig really deep into that. It’s just 15 or 20 minutes.
The reason it was so successful though is because we had the product in it, which we never did before. We were always very kind of soft sell, and this is too, but … So whatever the topic I’m explaining, the concepts I’m explaining as I critique the page, I then go into the Unbounce builder and I work on the page to make the improvements I’m talking about, so it’s very relevant to what I’m talking about. It doesn’t come across as salesy. It just comes across as useful. That’s why it’s been our best performing campaign ever, I think for that reason. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.
Randy: That’s awesome. Oli, one of the things we like to do as we wrap up here, is we like to get to know our guests so that people tuning in know how to follow you, how to meet you at a session, how to maybe get engaged to you in the process. You’ve done a good job already, but … So I’ve been trying to find some good questions you haven’t hit on as we go through. I’ve got a few that I’m curious to ask, so one is OCG. What’s the C. stand for?
Oli: Oh-
Randy: Yeah, I know. Listen, you dropped it, man, you dropped it.
Oli: It’s Charles.
Randy: You could either tell us … Okay. I was going to say you could either tell us that or whether it’s true that you once almost legally changed your name to fill in the blank.
Oli: Landing Page. That is a true story. I actually researched it, because when I started marketing I did so many guests posts back then and I figured that if I changed my name to Landing Page, when I put it on the bio at the bottom of these blog posts it would … The term Landing Page would link to unbounce.com. I thought it was the best link building strategy in the world. I did all the research and it’s not that hard to change. It’s just really hard to change back.
You have to go in front of a judge to kind of explain why you doing this, and you can just imagine a judge in some kind of court saying, “You know what? You’re going to have to suffer through with that name for another year. I’m not granting this. You’re an idiot Mr. Landing Page. You just deal with that.”
Randy: That’s an amazing story. Oli, this has been so much fun to have you on here. I’ll do a shameless drop, which is that you’re actually going to be speaking at the conference that I do at Uberflip this summer in Toronto, August 22nd and 23rd. So if people have enjoyed listening to Oli, come to the Content Experience and check out everything going on there.
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, again there’s so much great content that we have at contentprospodcast.com, all the other back episodes I’d encourage you to tune in and check out, as well as just check out Convince and Convert, as well as the content marketing classic, contentmarketingclass.com, which we spoke about earlier. Jay Baer is really leading in new ways in terms of how we think about strategically approaching content.
I hope that this podcast has been helpful in that same way. If you’ve enjoyed it, check it out on iTunes, on Stitcher. Leave us your review as you go to download it and let us know what we can do to keep making this engaging. Until next time, on behalf of Tyler Lessard of Vidyard, I’m Randy Frisch Uberflip. Oli, thanks so much for joining us today.

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