{"id":16483,"date":"2019-07-17T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T08:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/directiveconsulting.com\/ca\/?p=16483"},"modified":"2024-05-23T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T11:42:13","slug":"content-marketing-funnel-tactics-increase-your-bofu-conversions-by-20-percent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/directiveconsulting.com\/ca\/blog\/content-marketing-funnel-tactics-increase-your-bofu-conversions-by-20-percent\/","title":{"rendered":"Content Marketing Funnel Tactics: Increase Your BOFU Conversions by 20 Percent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s say you\u2019re spending a lot of resources on SEO and PPC services. Your traffic is improving month-over-month by 10 percent; however, conversions are flat. What do you do?<\/p>\n

This was a struggle for one of our clients that creates construction project management software. Traffic was improving, but no one was signing up for their demos.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when we shifted our focus to conversion optimization. Blog posts earned the most traffic, so we felt this was a smart place to start. We decided to prioritize content marketing<\/a> funnel tactics.<\/p>\n

For our client, most conversions came in January and February (late winter\/early spring). By the end of this campaign, we increased conversions by 10 percent in May<\/em>\u00a0compared to February\u2014typically their busiest month.<\/p>\n

We also saw a 50 percent increase in year-over-year conversions for Q2.<\/p>\n

In this post, I\u2019ll walk you through our entire CRO<\/a> project and review how you can utilize strategic design to build more revenue for your company but utilizing the content marketing funnel.<\/p>\n

I’ll cover:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Finding the right areas to optimize<\/li>\n
  2. Determining actionable goals<\/li>\n
  3. Crafting calls to action<\/li>\n
  4. Placing buttons strategically<\/li>\n
  5. Running smart tests<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ultimately, a few small optimizations to blogs and resources were enough to turn the historical conversion nadir into the highest-performing month of the year.<\/p>\n

    Step 1: Finding the Right Areas to Optimize<\/h2>\n

    To start, my team started by reviewing pages with numbers of unique visitors.<\/p>\n

    Why?<\/p>\n

    More visitors meant shorter testing cycles and quicker results. We ran tests on the homepage and demo sign pages. Then we got to thinking and realized blog posts and resource pages had the most<\/em>\u00a0unique visitors, but no calls to action to send users to the next step of the funnel.<\/p>\n

    We hypothesized that if we added call-to-action<\/a> banners to view demo videos, that could increase the likelihood of visitors requesting a demo.<\/p>\n

    So, we added these banners through WordPress at key break-points in the articles. We didn\u2019t think blog visitors would be ready for a demo yet. However, they would be prepared to watch a video that didn\u2019t require interaction with another person.<\/p>\n

    Many of these posts focused on construction management and accounting. People landing on these posts likely had an established construction business and were actively trying to solve for a known management problem.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    The starting point was finding pages with quality content and a high number of unique visitors. A page with only 27 unique monthly visitors wasn\u2019t going to get enough button clicks to test our hypothesis.<\/p>\n

    We compiled a list of the top ten pages and focused on a couple of posts that lived in the middle of the funnel.<\/p>\n

    Step 2: Determining Actionable Goals<\/h2>\n

    The goal we set with the client for this project was a 20 percent increase in conversions, opportunities, and deals. So, the best way for us to start tracking this was to tie our efforts to the very last goal in the sales funnel trackable via the website: demo sign-ups.<\/p>\n

    Once someone requests a demo, the sales team can reach out to the potential customer from there.<\/p>\n

    The most beneficial tactic we could track was the last step before the lead turned into an opportunity.<\/p>\n

    See below:<\/p>\n

    \"Screenshot<\/p>\n

    To do this, we set up a demo sign-up conversion for anyone who reached the demo sign-up thank you page.<\/p>\n

    Step 3: Crafting Calls to Action<\/h2>\n

    After finding the pages to start with, we created call-to-action (CTA<\/a>) banners.<\/p>\n

    For more top-of-funnel posts, we focused on a banner offering a demo video. This button led to a landing page<\/a> that housed the demo video. On the thank-you page<\/a>\u00a0of this demo video, we would provide an option to get a live demo.<\/p>\n

    This was an effective way to lead blog visitors through the sales\/content marketing funnel meaning:<\/p>\n