My name's Matt Read and I head up the Digital Marketing team at Jellyfish Connect. I will be discussing with you, all about turning search into subscriptions. What I mean by that is we've seen a bit of a gap with this, not just with uOpen as a brand and an opportunity in the marketplace, but also in terms of the audience out there, and turning more of this audience into people who want to buy subscription boxes. I'm going to go through where that gap is, where we feel we fit in, where our marketing is going to work and to hopefully work alongside with what you guys are already doing.

To start with, I'm assuming everyone in this room is here because they either work on, or have, a very awesome box. So it might be that you've created something that makes life a little bit more convenient, or it might be that you've created something that's just kind of like a personal gift, something that's a bit more of an indulgence. Or it might be that you just think moss is f****** awesome, and everyone should have more moss in their lives because, I mean, there's not enough moss out there. So, it might just be that you think that's really great, you know? And we joke, but you know, 10,000 positive reviews say that moss is very popular. So, whatever it is, you're all here because you've created something like that, which is fantastic. Having spoken to a lot of you already, you're all very passionate about your boxes and all really believe in them, which is great to hear. What we've also heard from Brandwatch and Hitwise and from Carola is that the industry from a consumer point of view is also growing really rapidly. So this is just some searched data from Google showing that over the last five years, more and more people are searching for subscription boxes.

So, the situation we're in is, you guys have created really great boxes, more and more people are searching for them, everyone's winning, which is fantastic. Except there's only one problem and it's that age old myth in marketing, which is if you build it they will come - we know this doesn't work with marketing. You might have built an absolutely amazing box, you might have built a fantastic website, but simply doing that doesn't mean people arrive to it. It worked for Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams," but it doesn't really work for us - and that's where marketing comes in.

Although there are more and more people searching, and just to put it into context, currently 1.3 billion websites are actively online right now. Aside from just the active ones, think of all the ones that have been built that aren't being used. You've got to build it, market it, create something great and you've got to stand out from the noise of all the other websites doing the same thing- a difficult task but it can be done.

Now, what a lot of you might be thinking, I'm sure, is that you already have an amazing marketing plan and loads of you do. The marketing for some of your subscription boxes are fantastic, and by no means are you guys doing a bad job of it, but, what I would like to talk about is the gap that we're seeing in that marketing which is where we feel uOpen can fit in, where we can help enhance your marketing and help you get more subscriptions - that's the idea and the dream.

I would like to start by talking about the way we look at digital marketing - how people go from just regular user online to being a subscriber. Someone who buys your products go through these four steps: awareness, interest, desire, and action. To put into context with a subscription box, I use beer (because I'm Northern and it's what I know), we start with the awareness stage, where there is someone online who just likes trying unique beers. The idea behind that is, I'm not saying this person is going to try and buy beers online, it's just we've profiled this user. All of their demographic signals, their search behavior, all of their history shows us that they're the kind of person who likes trying unique beers - and so, they might be the kind of person who would be interested in a subscription box if they knew what one was. However, they may have never even heard of a subscription box, they may have never thought about buying unique beers online, they simply like unique beers.

Moving to the interest stage, is where someone is saying/thinking, "Okay, so how can I sample a range of different beers online?" Maybe they have seen some kind of advertisements offline or online and they want to try different beers. The top two stages, people are in that mindset of, "I like beers and maybe I want to try them." Whereas, when we move into the stages of desire and action, desire is more, "So what are the different buying options?" and at this point, they know they want to buy beers.

When they get into action, that's when they know what they want and it's just about getting it. For example, "Now I know I want a subscription to beers, so now I just need to know where I can get it and which one is the best one for me personally." What we want to do in terms of digital marketing is to be there when people get to these stages. Once people know they want to buy a subscription, you're there, and the marketplace is.

To show this as an example, when a person searches for a beer subscription box, or coffee subscription box, or makeup box, they know they want some type of subscription but they're not yet committed to a brand, the search results page becomes flooded with ads. It's flooded with Google shopping and there are loads of high-ranking SEO sites on there as well. Once the person goes straight to the action stage and they actually want to commit; for example they search specifically for a brand like "Graze Box" or "Hello Fresh," again you will see loads of ads appear, strong SEO presence and even competitors trying to get in on the action as well. Finally when the person gets here and they already know what a subscription box is and know that they want to get one, we're hitting them really well.

However, the problem are these people, these ones are being ignored when it comes to online search and they're just as valuable. If we can teach more of these people up here what a subscription box is and what the benefits of it are, then we will get more people down to this bottom end. To put that into context, if we search for things like, "sample different beers," or "coffees from around the world," "discovering new makeup," "how does a food subscription box work?," or "what is a subscription box?" The key thing with all of those landscapes is that there are no ads, at all, not a single one. All of the listings that are default on all of those landscapes, are either news articles from the likes of "The Telegraph" and "The Independent," or they're Wikipedia pages. In each one of the screenshots here, there is not a single subscription box above the fold, which is mad. These are the people that are searching for this stuff and who can definitely turn into subscriptions box customers - they're in the awareness and interest stage and we need to move them into the action stage.

Now you might be thinking, "Okay, but does anyone actually search for stuff like that?" Well, what Google will also show us is that for every kind of person searching for the terms "subscription" or "box", there are just as many people, if not more, searching for different beers, different coffees etc. There are as many people online searching for all of those key terms where no one is even paying attention to them or showing them any ads or SEO rankings.

What we know from all the research that we work alongside, is that 81% of shoppers conduct product research online before purchasing. So, 81% of all those sales that are happening online are going through the research stage online as well - they are definitely starting at the top of that funnel.

What we also know is that 61% percent of people will read a product review before making a purchase and today consumers will use an average of six touchpoints in their online journey. In other words, they're hitting six different points online before going through to make that purchase. Which might look like going on Facebook, reading a blog, looking at a review or comparing different boxes, before they actually go through and convert - that awareness/interest stage is really important.

The way we look at it is, we make sure we are there and advertising to them through all four of these stages. We start at the top with the awareness stage, and do big broad display campaigns, big broad generic keyword campaigns, as well as social campaigns. It is at this point where we're profiling users online and trying to find the people we think we might be able to force down that funnel and to turn them into consumers - our brand is put in their mindset early on. When they get into the interest stage, we make sure we follow them there, and we start using specific keywords that they're looking for, and those intent keywords, and make sure we're in those landscapes as well. Now, because we do that, it means that by the time we get to this desire and action stage, we're in a much stronger position. A lot of the ads I showed at the beginning are kind of hitting people when they're already at that stage. So the user’s already decided, "I wanted this subscription box," and that's the point we're saying, "Right, let's start advertising to them." But it's a lot easier to be in their mindset and advertise to them here if you were already in this step up here. Because you already know loads about them, you've already had that touchpoint, you can collect loads of data on them.

So, to put it into a real life example, I'd love to show you one with you uOpen, but obviously we're not live yet. This is for magazine.co.uk, and if we start with someone who maybe goes to Google and searches for "gardening tips", so very much in that awareness, interest, top of the funnel stage, they're not looking to buy a magazine yet, they're just looking for gardening tips. You'll see on Google that the top ad is magazine.co.uk, and the top SEO listing is us as well, and at that point we're just getting there in their awareness stage. So that when they come back through in the interest stage, or the desire, and they start looking for subscriptions, still not specific, they've still not said "magazine", they've still not said exactly what they want, but then we appear there again. Which means that when they get down to the point of saying, "Right, now I know exactly what I want," we already know loads about them and we can make sure we're there in that moment.

Now, what we do alongside this is we make sure that we serve them the right content at each of these moments. So when they're in the awareness stage we don't obviously say to them, "Buy our magazine now," because they're looking for gardening tips and they don't want to spend any money yet. So, we send them to a nice blog that makes sure we talk about different gardening tips and the like. And then when they go through into that middle stage where they're unsure of what they want, but they know they want something, we make sure we show them a range of products. So we don't just force them down to one, because at that point they haven't yet committed, they're looking around, and make sure we show them all reviews and the like as well. So that when they do do that final search, what they actually want, we've got all this information backing it up so we can send them to the right place and help them over the line. And, again, the point of all that is if we're here in these moments at the top, we can take all their signals, all their statements [SP], and we can guide them through. They'll have the brand recognition of us having been there the whole time, and we'll have all the data signals from them to make sure we can get them over the line effectively, and also at a cost that suits as well. And if we do all that at, all four of those stages, then we will be winning. And that's it.