Ryan Deiss - Digital Marketing For Dummies

We call acquisition offers that lead with value entry point offers, or EPOs. An EPO in a dating relationship equates to offering to buy someone a cup of coffee. This coffee offer, which has begun many healthy dating relationships, is a relatively risk-free proposition that provides value upfront. When your goal is to acquire a customer (and not a spouse), the EPO is a way of allowing large amounts of prospective customers to get to know, like, and trust your business without much risk.

There are three types of EPOs:

Ungated: You usually present this type of offer in the form of a blog post, video, or podcast, and it does not require contact information or a purchase to get value.

Gated: A gated offer requires contact information (name, email address, and so on) to get value.

Deep discount: This offer requires a purchase but at an extreme discount, usually 50 percent or greater.

It pays to provide tremendous value to your prospective customers when you’re trying to gain their trust. This idea can seem counterintuitive to some people because they don’t see the immediate return on this investment.

The goal of your marketing is to transform people from being completely unaware of your products or services to being raving fans who promote your products and services to anyone who will listen. The foundation of the relationships you build with your customers is built on offers that provide value in advance of the purchase.

Offers that require no risk on the part of prospective customers are the most powerful way to begin to cultivate strong relationships with customers. An ungated offer such as an informative article, video, or podcast gives value without asking for contact information or a purchase. That said, these are still offers. You are offering value to prospects in exchange for their time. And for many people, no other resource is more precious than time.

The value provided by the business is generally made available to prospects using content such as blog posts, social media updates, or videos. Successful digital marketers make free content available that provides one of the following values:

Entertainment: People pay a lot of money to be entertained, and content that makes a person laugh is content that is likely to be remembered. It’s why commercials try to make you laugh (think the gecko from Geico or Flo from Progressive); they have only 30 to 60 seconds to cut through all the noise and get you to remember their product or service. Video advertisements from Poo-Pourri and Old Spice on YouTube are prime examples of marketers providing entertaining content that gets their message across.

Inspiration: People are highly moved by content that makes them feel something. The sports and fitness industry taps into this sentiment with taglines like “Just do it,” by Nike, or Fitbit campaigns showing everyday people (as opposed to celebrities and professional athletes) achieving their goals using Fitbit. Weight-loss businesses also use inspirational content by using successful customer testimonials and “before” and “after” images.

Education: Ever go to YouTube to watch a how-to video? From DIY projects to “how to rebuild a car engine,” you can easily find educational content online. People want knowledge, and providing it helps build trust. Entire blogs, sites, YouTube channels, and businesses are built around educating people, to great success. That’s why Wikipedia gets over 9 billion page views a month.

The first two value propositions (entertainment and inspiration) can be difficult to execute. But the third is within the grasp of every company. In Chapters 4and 5, we go into more detail about the form and function of the various types of ungated content that can be produced.

The production of content by brands is at an all-time high. An absolute glut of content is produced on blogs, YouTube channels, and social media sites every day. That said, an insatiable demand still exists for great ungated content. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because this content is free, it does not deserve the time and energy of your other offers. An ungated offer is, in many cases, the first transaction that a prospective customer will have with your company, and you should make it a successful one.

To graduate someone from the stage of prospect to lead, you need a gated offer that requires prospects to submit their contact information to receive value. A gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange for the prospects’ contact information. That contact information is typically an email address, at a minimum. Returning to the dating relationship analogy earlier in the chapter, a gated offer is the equivalent of a first date. A gated offer might take the form of a white paper, a case study, or a webinar. For example, Figure 3-1 shows how HubSpot makes valuable information available in the form of a white paper that requires contact information such as name, email address, and a phone number.

Source: https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing

FIGURE 3-1:HubSpot asks for contact info in exchange for this yearly report.

A gated offer is an exchange in value. No money changes hands; instead, you provide your new lead something of value in exchange for the right to contact the lead in the future. Gated offers are free, and a common notion among digital marketers is that because they’re giving the gated offer away for free, the product or service offered doesn’t have to be of high quality. That’s a mistake. Free does not mean low quality. When someone exchanges his contact information and gives you permission to follow up with him, he has given you value, and a transaction has taken place. This prospect has given you something that’s typically private, as well as some of his time and attention. You need to return that value if you hope to build the relationship that is required for lifelong customers. The end goal of a gated offer is to gain leads so that you can nurture them into customers over time.

Revisit the definition of a gated offer (“a gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange for prospects’ contact information”) — and pay particular attention to the “specific” parts. Specificity is the key to a successful gated offer because it makes your offer more relevant to your audience. A lead form that simply states “Subscribe to our newsletter” is not a gated offer that will get you high conversions because it does not solve a specific problem. In the next section of this chapter, we discuss how to make your gated offer convert prospects by making it specific in terms of problem-solving, which will make your gated offer more relevant to your audience.