We can all agree that COVID-19 has changed our lives pretty dramatically in one way or another. With the disruption of our daily routines – from online learning for kids to wearing masks in public – we’re living in uncertain times. The same goes for our work lives; unfortunately, many businesses have felt the negative effects of our forced changes in behavior.
Rest assured, things will eventually return to normal – even if it’s a new normal. In the meantime, now is an excellent time to improve your company’s visibility in search engines so new customers can find you. On April 21st, 2020, the Bubbli crew hosted a 75-minute webinar aimed at showing you how to do just that, called Digital Marketing: The Game Changer for Businesses in a Post COVID-19 Economy. We discussed:
- Digital Storytelling and Omnichannel Content Strategy
- Conversational Funnels
- SEO
- Design, User Experience Design (UX) & Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The team shared a ton of great information on digital marketing. To cover all the topics in one blog post would be quite a challenge (not to say, it would be very long), so we’ll cover some highlights in this blog post. We encourage you to watch the webinar to learn more.
Digital Storytelling: Turn Visitors into Delighted Customers
Did you know that you’re 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it’s been wrapped in a story? Stories are engaging and memorable, and trigger emotions and connection. And, telling stories makes you real. So how can you apply storytelling to your marketing efforts?
Instead of throwing facts, statistics and testimonials at your audience, focus on making your brand thoughtful, memorable and real. Here are some ideas for what kind of stories you can share:
- Mistakes and lessons learned
- Case studies
- Questions from your customers
- Industry stories such as trends
- An expert story
- A data-backed story
You have many opportunities along the sales funnel—the stages a customer goes through leading up to their purchase—to engage your customers. Take a look at a snapshot of the top (awareness), middle (evaluation) and bottom of the sales funnel:
When you create content for these different stages of the funnel, you have the opportunity to tell a story. Here are some examples of the types of content you can develop:
Whether you’re developing content for a video, website copy or an email promotion, the story and message should be engaging and thoughtful, like you’re having a conversation with your audience. A conversational style has a far more personal tone and voice. People want to be talked to—not at. Without a conversation in these different stages, you’ll have a harder time converting customers.
SEO: Help Google Find You
With trillions of web pages in existence, you need to help Google find you above all the rest. How do you do that? Let’s take a look at how Google’s algorithm works. Google has 200-250 main ranking signals and potentially thousands of sub-ranking signals. Google crawls your pages and gives you a “digital marketing score,” which is like a credit score, based on how you meet these ranking signals. The better you address all of these ranking signals, the higher your marketing score, and your ranking, will be.
One of the potentially low-hanging fruits is to make sure that your website is technically optimized, meaning things like your pages are indexable and mobile-friendly. It also means having a good design and conversion rate. Another major activity is to make sure your web pages and any additional company content, such as LinkedIn pages, are optimized for the appropriate keywords.
Here’s an example of how this can work. When we started working with a health e-commerce company, they were hidden on pages 3 and 4 of Google, which basically means that no one was going to find them. We optimized their website, including fixing some technical issues that they had as well as identifying and implementing keywords in their content. As a result, we were able to increase their organic search traffic by 250% within four months, resulting in more organic traffic and sales.
Now, it does take time for SEO to work—it’s not a quick fix. However, in time, you’ll see the results, as we did here with our client.
Convert Your Customers: Conversion Rate Optimization
SEO efforts get your potential customers in the door of your website—that’s one step in your digital marketing journey. Once they’re on your website, you want to keep them there engaged with your content, and ultimately, converting into a customer. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of raising your conversion rate by compelling visitors to your website to take specific actions like buying a product, downloading a PDF or subscribing to a newsletter.
Let’s take a look at an example of how this works. Here’s some data for an existing website:
- 10,000 visitors a month
- The bounce rate is 60%
- Of the 4000 that stay on the site, 40 are leads
- The CRO is 1%
Once the site is optimized:
- 10,000 visitors a month
- The bounce rate is 50%
- Of the 5000 that stay on the site, 75 are leads
- The CRO is 1.5%
If you didn’t optimize the site, you’d need to obtain 19,000 visitors a month, which is almost double the current visitors, to get 75 leads. Improving the CRO can make a big difference in the number of leads.
So how do you improve the CRO? To be very brief, essentially you look at the problem by pulling data from Google Analytics or another tool. Where are the highest bounce rates? From there, determine your goals. Do you want to focus on getting visitors to convert or engage at this point? Finally, create hypotheses and run tests to determine what works better.
Ultimately, SEO and CRO go hand in hand. Improving CRO should be part of your SEO package.
Need Any Help?
As a creative content marketing agency with locations in the UK and the US, we’re here to help you with any of the strategies that we outlined in this blog post and more. We encourage you to listen in to our webinar recording to learn more, and please reach out if you have any questions.
