Grow Your Conversion Rate by 241%

Digital

A few weeks ago we released our latest ebook, A Marketer’s Guide to Content Promotion. By the time the next day rolled around we saw an increase in our website’s unique visitors of more than 70%. And what was really great was that the trend continued with our web traffic outperforming in every measurable way – month-over-month and year-over year.

It’s always great to see your web traffic up and to the right, but when it’s a consistent trend and not just a random occurrence once a month it usually means you’ve stumbled onto doing something right. What did we do to make this happen?

The short answer: we utilized a converged strategy for our ebook so we were able to engage a larger segment of our audience than usual, while at the same time expanding our audience into new industries, cities, and channels. This led to more conversions from people downloading our ebook, which in turn allows us to create new business opportunities for ourselves with companies that need help with their marketing, but didn’t know we existed. So, long story short: we accomplished our Q3 MQLs goal.

Still here? Good. Now I’m going to walk you through the long version to help guide you in creating a converged promotion strategy for your next great product, service, or piece of content.

In The Beginning

Earlier this summer Element Three’s leadership team came together and decided it was time to refresh our company’s branding because, like any other company, we had evolved and it no longer truly reflected our increased level of talent and capabilities. And it was old, especially the website.

To go along with the obvious things that coincide with updating branding like a new website, business cards, and cool swag, we needed to create a content strategy to go along with our new look and feel that was representative of who we are as a company. And so was born the idea for A Marketer’s Guide to Content Promotion…and this blog post.

We felt the topic was relevant, especially to us, because a pain point we hear often from clients is that after they go through the process of overhauling their website and creating amazing marketing materials, they don’t know how to get the word out and engage with their audience. And the answer really is a converged strategy where you are harnessing several different owned, paid, and earned media channels to touch your audience in multiple contact points.

So as the ebook was being written, our team went to work putting together what the promotion strategy would look like. We threw out a lot of ideas, some good, many bad, like paid advertising through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, working with our contacts at other agencies and media outlets to contribute and republish the post on their channels, and creating a quiz for people who have downloaded and read the ebook.

In the end, we decided to experiment with a few different methods in each of the three core areas of a converged strategy which, if you haven’t read the ebook yet, are Paid, Owned, and Earned media.

Executing Owned, Paid, Earned Media

For owned media, the decisions were pretty obvious and didn’t require a lot of strategic thinking. We would publish to all of our social channels, send out a tailored promotional email to our contacts who had downloaded one of our past ebooks, and send a more general promotional email to the rest of our email distribution list. To supplement these two channels, we wrote a blog post summarizing the ebook and made the ebook available for download on our new website’s resources page (duh).

Our decisions for earned media weren’t that difficult either. We worked with Found Search Marketing and Bohlsen Public Relations to write the eBook, so a logical next step was to have them share the eBook on their social media channels, which they were more than happy to do. We worked with influencers we thought would be interested in the eBook. They, in turn, shared our blog post introducing the eBook through various social outlets. Here is a guest blog post on Marketing Tech Blog Dustin wrote that drilled deeper into calls to action– an aspect he touched on in the original eBook.

Paid media is where things got tricky. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to develop and execute a paid promotion strategy, it was more that we had never really done it this extensively for ourselves. This meant that we didn’t have any historical data to use in making informed, strategic decisions. But, it also made it fun. It meant we could explore, test, and test again.

We felt confident that Twitter and LinkedIn would be good channels for us to leverage with paid promotion, but that’s where the picture got foggy. Waiting for your school bus in the morning, wishing school was canceled foggy.

Start with Brainstorming

After a lot of brainstorming, we felt like we had a few good ideas, but one of the best was to partner with MarketingProfs to spotlight the eBook. If you’re unfamiliar, MarketingProfs is essentially an educational website with resources for marketers to learn about the latest trends and best practices in any type of marketing – an ideal audience for such a content offering. We wanted to reach marketers and MarketingProfs’ entire audience is made up of marketing professionals or people who are looking for help with their marketing. But like any great thing, it cost money. More than we were willing to spend for the eBook – so unfortunately we had to scratch this idea. For now.

We had a few other ideas of how to expand our reach with the eBook, but the two that we landed on were Outbrain and Facebook. Facebook might seem like an obvious option, but it’s really not because of how it’s come to be used. Remember, we are trying to reach professional marketers who are willing to engage with our content, and while the majority of them probably have a Facebook account they tend to keep it as their non-professional social network and aren’t looking or willing to engage with this type of content when they engage with the platform like they are with Twitter or LinkedIn.

Outbrain was one of our left field options. We had no idea what to expect. It’s a content discovery platform that a lot of large brands and news outlets use to advertise their products, services and stories on a wide variety of websites. The best way to think of it is if you’ve ever finished reading an article on a website and clicked a link to another article you thought would be interesting, but were redirected to another site (ie: Ancestry.com, who always seems to target me), then you’ve just been advertised to through a tool like Outbrain. Unfortunately, your ability to target your audience is very limited in Outbrain. Casting such a dramatically wide net didn’t make much sense for us – but we really wanted to test the platform.

I’m not going to break it down in specific detail – that’s why we wrote an eBook – but before and during the process of writing copy for our ads we did a lot of research to help inform our targeting and how we would divide our budget for the ads. We dug through years of analytics in Hubspot to determine things like which geographic regions our contacts were most likely to come from and which traffic source they were most likely to make their first point of contact from.

This is a critical step of putting together a content promotion strategy that involves multiple channels and segments within those channels.While you don’t want to overpay for engagements, you don’t want to underbid either. If you do, you will either get limited to no engagement for your ads, or you’ll get served a lower quality of lead. And you definitely want the best quality lead possible.

After looking at the numbers we decided to start our budget broken out as 35% for Twitter, 30% for LinkedIn, 10% for Facebook, and 25% for Outbrain. We decided to test the ads for a week then use that data to determine how we would breakout the budget for the remainder of the campaign. Fingers crossed.

The campaign started out great. We woke up a lot of old contacts through promotional emails and received a lot of positive feedback early on. Our LinkedIn ads were driving new contacts into our database. But that was about all that was happening. What gives?

Monitor, Analyze, Refine

Outbrain was turning out to be a bust really quickly. We were getting a massive number of impressions (like 500,000 in 48 hours) but we weren’t receiving any engagements. And it was impossible to tell what we could do to correct the problem because of the limited targeting options available. Outbrain was earning its way out of the paid segment of our converged campaign.

Facebook was turning out as we predicted. A solid amount of impressions and clicks. But, no conversions. We had some hopes of unlocking the potential the channel has to offer so we changed up the targeting and decided to give it more time. After all, patience is a virtue.

Analytics from Twitter were showing some strong numbers. We were building our following in the channel, people were sharing the piece, and we were getting a great number of impressions for the amount we were spending. While impressions are great, they’re less great when people are scrolling 0 to 88mph towards the top of their news feed (it’s never too late for a Back to the Future reference!) and they’re not what we were going for. We needed downloads. But were were confident that if we tweaked our targeting and copy we’d get a stronger stream than the 1-2 downloads per day we were getting from Twitter.

When the next week came around we were still seeing dead air from Outbrain, so we decided the channel wasn’t the best for what we were trying to accomplish and reallocated the budget to LinkedIn and Twitter. We didn’t move it over to Facebook because we were still seeing a lack of engagement from the channel and had only received a single new contact from it.

LinkedIn was performing great and we were getting new contact downloads from the channel every day, but because the space we were trying to advertise in is so competitive we were paying $5-$10 per click so they were coming at a steep price. And Twitter had improved. Changing up our targeting increased the amount of new contacts we were converting by 35%. Great! But  we still thought we could do better. Outside of iterating our targeting, creative, and messaging, we had an idea.

Geofeedia had just come to our office to give us a demo on what their application, a location-based social media monitor, was capable of. While I’ve worked with a variety of tools like Viral Heat and uberVU that are capable of social listening, I had always used them as a reactive way to get a better picture of audience sentiment and for keyword research.

We decided to use Geofeedia to build a contact list of people who had recently attended content marketing conferences and promote the eBook directly to these contacts through Twitter.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. We saw an increase of 257% in new lead conversions from Twitter. This number is incredible. Remember, we had already optimized our Twitter ads and targeting multiple times and while we saw consistent increases in conversions, we never saw anything like this.

We started the campaign with an ambitious conversion goal. A lot of us thought it was ridiculous and unrealistic, chiefly me. But, with a converged strategy we crushed it. In a little over six weeks we outperformed our goal by 348%. That’s insane. And in case you’re saying, “yeah, but you had to spend a lot of money to get those leads and we can’t afford that.” Nope. Our cost per lead for the campaign was $22. Think about that for a second and imagine the return on investment you’d get from a similarly well-thought out converged content promotion strategy. It’s amazing, really.

Have questions? Great! We love questions and you should send them to us via the contact form or email us directly at [email protected].

As the Senior Director of Strategy at Element Three, Dustin is dedicated to helping businesses grow, crafting demand generation strategies that stand above the rest and create true business impact. His background in journalism, digital communication, and ecommerce positions him as a unique voice in the cluttered digital marketing industry. When he's not writing about the forefront of digital marketing, you can find him jamming with a guitar or at home with his wife and two children.

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