3.3x Your conversion rates with Zest Content Boost
We’re stoked to announce the release of Zest’s first revenue channel, Content Boost.
Our community was an integral part of the whole process. Some 67 members alpha & beta tested it, hundreds were involved in the layout and design processes, and now we’re ready to share it with the world.
The model was built in a way that benefits both our 12,000 weekly active members and the tier-1 marketing brands who’d like to give a lot of extra exposure to their [still manually-approved] content on Zest.
Brand trust, ARPU, and tons of added value — How we came up with our biz model
It was a week after we launched Zest with a full out Product Hunt campaign when Sumo.com reached out to us, asking if there were any sponsorship opportunities on Zest.
Although my reply was something along the lines of “Of course we have :)”, Idan and I felt that this was a turning point for Zest.
I mean, the question was, what should we charge clients for? And who should be our paying clients? After all, we have full control over the execution of these two strategic questions.
“No banners!!”
“No way we are adding banners to the full-of-added-value marketing content feed we built on Zest”. I vividly remember how Idan shouted it from his desk.
It’s not just that he was so on-point, more than that, our feed is not really, well… Ours. It belongs to our Tribe (community) and the work of the multi-level, human-based content moderation process we built with our Tribe.
It was clear to us that the business model we choose must provide the same added value we are currently generating, only this time, it should also generate added value (or in this case — benefits), to our potential clients.
Now that we agreed on that, we asked ourselves: “Who are our paying members?”.
As a premium product with a cool growth pace and super high-profile members, we understood that our paying clients must be tier-1 marketing brands.
Tier-1 brands have many advantages:
- They understand the high-engagement, high-conversion funnel that Marketing Content generates
- They appreciate our demographics (69% are CEOs, CMOs, VPs of marketing)
- They appreciate our premium solution and product
- They are more open to trying new stuff
- They have significant budgets
But something was still missing — what will actually be our revenue model? And should we have only one revenue channel?
A couple of beers later, a SaaS pricing expert sent us this Brian Balfour video “Get Out of the ARPU-CAC Danger Zone with Channel Model Fit”. And this screenshot caused us to stop for a second as it felt SO right:
It shows how LinkedIn has structured their revenue channels based on their members’ ARPU.
Why did we identify with it? Because we also cater to a professional audience.
And just like LinkedIn, we have members with different potential ARPUs.
We then Zestified it:
Introducing Zest Content Boost
At Zest, we use a hyper-multi-touch validation process when it comes to new features and products we release.
We have Alpha testers, Beta testers, professional advisers, a Member Advisory Board, and a couple of other good people from various digital professions who stop us from making dumb mistakes.
All in all, dozens of professionals were involved in this validation process, some of them as actual paying clients.
What is Content Boost
Content Boost gives extra exposure to approved, featured content. This extra exposure will generate 10x times more clicks compared to regular organic content that was approved and published on Zest.
Make no mistake: We are still approving only ~1% of the suggested content on Zest and the same goes with Content Boost articles.
This extra exposure generates cool lookin’ peeks of traffic on your GA, like shown in this mighty GIF:
BUT our main points of pride are the conversion ratios created by the traffic generated through Zest, and the potential of our high-profile community members.
Because our secret ingredient is generating traffic that converts better, we are more focused on the potential of those who clicked and the way they engage with the content we are sending them to
So what does our Tribe’s demographics look like? Glad you asked. :)
CMOs, VPs, and marketing managers compose 92% of the Zest community
All these nice words and assumptions wouldn’t make it here without backing it all up with data:
We ran several campaigns with the super cool guys at AdEspresso (Massimo Chieruzzi and Tim Chard, I’m talking about you guys 🙏). They were kind enough to share with us some stats about their eBook Content Boost campaign on Zest
And Massimo sent us this testimonial:
One of the smartest, most prominent blogs in our marketing-sphere is Smart Insights. I literally grew on their data-backed articles and remember that they never failed to provide me with relevant professional knowledge, no matter the stage of my career.
One day, I saw that Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights’ founder, suggested an article on Zest. I was shocked.
A few emails later, he wrote to me that the whole marketing team at Smart Insights is using Zest.
After I pulled myself together, I asked them for some data about our generated traffic. Carolanne Mangles, Smart Insights’ Digital Marketing Executive, immediately replied with a screenshot that I can’t share with you, but some of the stats that were shown in it, I sure can:
- Avg, Time on Site: 83.33% higher with visitors from Zest than overall site average
- Bounce Rate: 24.49% lower with visitors from Zest than overall site average
Cool, right?
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By the way, Content Boost articles will carry a ribbon that will clearly state that this is a featured piece of content. It looks like this:
Why we’re waitlisting Content Boost
You don’t want all the articles on the Zest feed to be featured.
Neither do the brands who will boost their content.
Neither do we.
To keep it as clean as possible, we developed an algorithm that will keep us from featuring more than one piece of content at a time.
Another step we took was setting our MRR goals to understand how many Content Boost campaigns we need each month in order to keep growing so fast.
Combining the prevention algorithm with our business goals, we concluded that we can feature only 4 partners each week and not more than that.
We already have a pipeline of 11 mega brands who are waiting for their Content Boost campaigns to be approved and launched and we are definitely not heading in a self-serve direction. Hence, we need to control the brands’ flow and continue handpicking our partners.
The Content Boost page is not a pricing page, but a landing page of this massive new feature we call “Content Boost”. It means that you will not see any Pricing plans on it as we need to have more data from each potential paying client before sending them pricing options.
It means that we will be hand-tailoring the plans and prices according to the characteristic and requirements of each potential paying client.
“We are just starting” isn’t reflecting even 2% of what’s going to happen next
Wrapping up, I want you to share with us your opinion on the Content Boost landing page. Share it here on Medium or send me an email at yam@zest.is.
Next up in our Revenue Model journey
Members with the lowest ARPU (end-users)
Imagine seeing stats on your suggested articles. Imagine getting audio summaries of your must-read articles. Imagine takeaways and action item taken right from an article you read to your Zest account. Imagine Zest on steroids.
We will introduce Premium Features like these by Q2 2018.
Members with the highest ARPU (enterprises)
Imagine Zest as an internal content discovery and sharing platform for huge organizations. With the same Tribe hierarchy model.
Imagine whitelabeling Zest for another vertical. Finance? Cryptocurrency? Gaming? We already have two potential firms who want to whitelabel Zest for their own verticals.
This model is still in closed beta but fully functioning.
To the lemons and beyond,
Yam & the Zesteam
