How I Failed to Get Traction Selling Calculators

Idea: Using Interactive Content to drive Lead Conversions

Intro and Goal:

Working in the world of content marketing as an engineer, I felt one of the most underutilized pieces of marketing is using the interactive content. Interactive content traditionally requires utilizing engineering resources or simply put engineering-as-marketing. As a techie, I believe I can create tools to minimize this challenge and empower marketers to interact with our audience. Project Pascal’s vision is changing how mini-tools can affect content readers.

Interactive Content, done right, can be so effective in content marketing however it requires one of the highest cost and investment. Most brands have yet to figure out what’s this ROI.

Problem

Leads coming from Content:

71% of B2B tech marketers cite lead generation as their top content marketing goal. Simply put, companies want to create content that converts readers from opportunities to MQLs.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are prospects who express much deeper interest, metaphorically ‘raising a hand’ to be contacted. This is often based on the quantity and types of content they have consumed, or actions they have taken such as watching a recorded product demo, viewing your pricing page, and/or offering their small quantity of data such as Twitter Authentication.

According to Marketo’s research, current content marketing solution yields very low lead conversation rate. Here are their results:

• Inbound strategies, including onsite and offsite SEO and blogging, yielded an average conversion rate of 3.82%.
• Paid marketing, or online advertising such as search pay-per-click campaigns, resulted in a 2.98% conversion rate on average.
• Social media clocked in at 1.95%.

Solution

• 70% of marketers say interactive content is effective at engaging visitors/buyers.
• 88% marketers say interactive content is effective at differentiating their brand.
• 93% marketers rate interactive content as effective at educating the buyer.

How can we get readers that resonate with our message to “raise their hand” and ask for assistance? How can we get readers to engage with our content? How can we make the right investment in content that taps into converting readers to leads?

Hypothesis

Project Pascal set out to explore Calculators as the first experiment for content-reader interaction. Calculator offers end-users the ability to insert their own personalized company variables and the trigger areas that are affecting them. On the other side, as content creators, our job is to educate readers and highlighting a new area of growth and opportunities. With calculator formulation, end-users can discover what’s the best solution for they can customize.

Market

AdWord searches

Competitors & Great Examples

1. https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/how-much-house-can-i-afford/calculate-affordability
2. http://ad-spend-calculator.qwilr.com/
3. https://inbound.org/discuss/churn-the-no-bs-guide-and-calculator-every-startup-needs
4. http://www.snapapp.com/interactive-content
5. Competitors: https://www.evernote.com/l/AQWBSkhhj0tKmrIrJPkdrGoGMBj2pOXhw0k
6. Competitors: http://kuia.com/
7. *** https://www.evernote.com/l/AQW7NVJ3bdFFnYfi8QKNVuKo_MUoaoDaTBA

Product Management

TO DO

1. Create landing page
2. Draw prototype
3. Marketing message
4. Writing contents
5. Find influencers / creators of the market
6. Find potential customer what they need
7. What are the solutions out there

What are the aha! Moments for the Buyer?

1. One button click to embed and publish
2. First Like or Retweet of the buyer’s Landing Page after sharing on social media
3. ** First email captured after its publish
4. When would that happen? Result varies depending on distribution.
5. Monthly report of number of leads collected by this widget
6. What if it’s 0 in the future, they will not pay?
7. Need to tell them to continue to distribute and build a new calculator ?
8. How is this answered for calculators?
9. When do you retire a calculator?
10. Why create multiple calculators?
11. Collect information for multiple reasons

Minimum Viable Calculator

1. End-user should be able to see the formula
2. End-user should be able to see the calculation changes
3. End-user should view “Recommended Actions” after entering their values

Premium Use Cases

Case: Capture data, pay to unlock leads info

Case: Each visitor have required customize offering

What are the reasons someone do not buy?

• Buyers do not know for sure if they need it
• Buyers do not have a formula for their company niche
• End-users are not sure about their data, and thus they cannot offer it

Buyer FAQ:

• Is it easy to setup?
• How much value can I receive?

You pay only if it worked.

• Where should I put it on?

Embed or landing page

• How do I add it into my website easily without being a techie?
• Do I need to distribute it?

Interactive content are not SEO optimized. You will need to pair it with a blog article.

• When do I know it will work?

When you receive leads emailed to you.

• What if users do not have value for the input?

Admin should set default for these values.

Ad, Copy, and Website

Email Sales Template

The problem I am tackling is: According to Hubspot, 96% of visitors, on average, will leave your site without becoming a lead. And if you create interactive content, it will generate 2x more conversions than passive content. Your company is getting traffic, BUT not enough sign-up conversions.

A must-have for SaaS digital marketers, with Software-as-a-Service, your goal is to demonstrate:

1. Money your customer can gain

2. Money your customer can save

3. Time you customer can save

By building an interactive calculator, you are letting your visitors educate and qualify themselves. They can either understand their current operations efficiency or what your product can do for them.

Twitter One-Liner Pitch

• “What Unbounce did for landing pages, Pascal is doing for calculators.” Leverage engineering-as-marketing as a channel today. Love to hear any feedback and calculator ideas.
• Pascal helps you quickly create interactive content and get qualified leads with just a few clicks.

Website Tagline

• Interactive Content Generates 2x More Conversions Than Passive Content.
• Get 10x more Qualified Leads
• Create an Interactive Calculator and Supercharge your Content Marketing

Landing Page

I created an Average Lead Value calculator for my Pascal Homepage. I want to demonstrate the investment needed to get a qualified lead for SaaS marketers. The recommendation action for high cost per lead is to sign up for Pascal.

Benefits

Eat My Own Dog Food:

Every calculator I create and repurpose is a piece of content marketing. However interactive content do not get indexed, so it would need to be accompany by a blog post or a landing page.

Why did Pascal not worked?

Selling before Building:

I did not explored deeply enough. My objective is to have pre-paying customers before committing to hire engineers to build out the calculator editor. If Pascal did not generate enough demand, then it would not be wise to invest in building it. So far, it did not resonate, thus I believe I made the right decision to discontinue.

User Friction:

Pascal is a editor that replace traditional engineering resources. However, this left a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the buyer-marketer, to have to design a formula in place for their company, add recommended actions, and then amplify their completed calculator landing page. The difficulty is coming up with the formula that fits with the calculator editor.

Distribution Strategy:

To drive organic traffic back to my Pascal site, I want to give my calculators for free. Each formula is inspired by SaaS and business logic that experts have written up. My plan was to ask if these experts wanted embed this free interactive calculator.

Cost

I want to service a small volume of customers but still cover very good profit. However, folks who were interested knew the cost of creating a calculator tool can be cheaper via freelancers.

However I believe each calculator created would be successful, thus the monthly pricing model justifies the inbound cost per lead.

Public Announcement:

I was unable to gain traction on my announcement on communities — ProductHunt, GrowthHacker, Slack, and Inbound. This require more effort in nurturing the network, interacting with active members, and creating buzz before launch.

If I were to do it again, I would create a bigger audience and following befor launching.

Product-Market-Fit

Calculator is just one solution. Not all B2B SaaS company value props are created equal, so calculators might not be the right answer. Complex SaaS formulas would require graphing and spreadsheet to calculate.

Conclusion

Interactive calculators are a very promising tool to get readers to engage and voluntarily insert information otherwise publishers would have never known. With interactive content we can educate readers by personalizing the data that are important to them, and create Call-to-Action to follow up on.

However, I am destined to tackle another content challenge, and I leave the interactive content dilemma to another.

Gary-Yau Chan is a SaaS entrepreneur and currently lives in Brooklyn NY. You can also message him on Twitter @garyyauchan. Or catch him at The Startup Chat Facebook Group.