ShareIf you want to increase conversions – be it leads or eCommerce sales – the easiest way is to pour more money into the budget. However, there are other ways to drive incremental sales without increasing your media spend.
In my role as a Senior Account Manager, I oversee the delivery of marketing strategies for several key clients – but as an agency, we manage digital for even more. The upside of this is that each client receives the benefit of learning from all our experts when we collaborate as a group.
In this blog, I share 9 techniques that we use regularly to maximise the return on marketing spend for our clients.
#1 – Improve Site Speed
“1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load”
Source: Econsultancy
Site speed is not just about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Slow loading times mean a higher bounce rate, which wastes the marketing spend for the users who leave before a page finishes loading. So, improving your site speed can benefit all channels, as it will increase the number of users who actually interact with your site, and potentially convert.
It also directly impacts the performance of marketing channels, such as paid search or paid social media. Nowadays, the algorithms measure as a key metric, meaning they favour websites with a better UI, driving greater campaign efficiency.
Google’s Core Web Vitals set their benchmark for page loading speeds as 2 seconds on a mobile device, so that would be a good number to aim for. If you want help with site speed, you can reach out to our SEO team.
#2 – Optimising existing marketing activity
One thing I often see when clients run a channel in-house is that the approach can be a little one-dimensional. They can spend time creating an asset, deciding on a particular message and targeting their audience, and it will either sink or swim.
The key difference when we run an activity for clients is that we start with multiple assets, ad formats, audiences and messaging, rather than just backing one horse. We test and learn so we can see which combinations are performing best and move the budget around and maximise the impact.
What’s more, on some platforms there are opportunities to create dynamic ads that allow for multiple combinations of assets, headlines and descriptions. The platform’s AI delivers the best combinations to suit each audience, so the content ultimately produces better results.
#3 – Understanding your audience better
Our digital strategy team has undertaken research projects for some of the world’s biggest brands, to help identify their marketing personas and discover the most effective way to reach them.
For example, we work with a leading sugar brand and although we know we want to reach bakers, it’s not always that simple. This broad group also has many sub-segments, such as bakers who only bake on special occasions, or families whose needs differ from more advanced bakers. Understanding this divide means we can tweak our marketing activity to speak to our audiences more effectively.
Sticking with the topic of cost-effective ways to make a marketing budget go further, there are some quick and simple ways to better understand the audience. For example, we can observe audience segments in Google Ads to see if certain groups convert better than others or view your “in-market segments” in Google Analytics. By knowing your best-performing audience, you can redirect spend and find new ways of reaching them.
#4 – Conversion Rate Optimisation
An effective marketing strategy can drive the right audience to your website, but how do we make sure that we make the absolute most of them? Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is a discipline we use, applying changes to page layouts or elements of a page to measure any uplift with a simple AB split test.
This allows us to make data-driven decisions that ensure we get the most out of our existing traffic. For example, changing the colour of a call-to-action button can make it stand out more because certain colours perform better than others. Colours have different psychological implications so these can influence the actions that a user will make. We have a blog on colours in design which you may want to read more on.
For one charity we work with, a priority of their marketing activity is to support individuals who are either directly affected by (or have a loved one who has been diagnosed with) a genetic condition by sharing information. However, ultimately, they still need to fund this by attracting donations.
By changing the colour of their “donate now” button on the homepage, we saw an increase in overall donations. What’s more, adding more emotive messaging and images drove an uplift in event sign-ups and the revenue that was generated.
#5 – Create landing pages
When we launch a new channel, it can be quite common to send new traffic to an existing page, but those pages are often created to serve a different purpose that doesn’t necessarily fit. For example, new users navigating from the homepage will require more information before they enquire, compared to users who may have already watched a short video on YouTube.
The content on key service pages will likely have been written with organic search front of mind, so a certain word count will have to be met. This can mean the pages will be quite content-heavy and less effective than a landing page designed purely to drive enquires. Creating landing pages where the sole purpose is funnelling a warm audience to a contact form can be an effective way of increasing conversion rates and generating more leads.
#6 – In-platform lead gen
Rather than sending traffic to a landing page, removing that step entirely can harvest even greater results. How do we do this? We use in-platform lead generation which allows users to make an enquiry without leaving the site. It often includes pre-populated forms, which will increase conversions due to it being much easier to use.
This is available on social platforms like Facebook & LinkedIn, but Google also offers something similar.
#7 – Collecting data and remarketing
In a world where 3rd party data is becoming more difficult to capture in a GDPR-compliant way, it’s important that businesses take control and capture 1st party data, such as sign-ups to newsletter subscriptions. By doing this, it doesn’t just allow us to market again to this group via email, but it also allows us to upload the data to platforms such as Facebook & Google to either remarket via their sites (if your data policy doesn’t limit you to email communications) or even create “lookalike audiences”.
Creating lookalikes means that the platform will identify users with similar characteristics to those that we know have already converted and aim to reach them rather than a broader audience – ultimately driving campaign efficiency.
#8 – Lead nurturing and email automation
In a B2B marketing strategy, businesses will normally generate their highest quality leads via an enquiry form. They may also offer high-quality downloadable content or a newsletter, both of which allow for data capture.
When we use this type of strategy, businesses need to keep communicating to nurture the lead and make sure they are still first in mind when the time is right. A welcome series for a newsletter, according to data from Omnisend, can have an average conversion rate of 52.9% compared to 14.5% when one is not used.
Aside from a welcome series, we set up well-thought-out email automation setting reminders during key periods or triggering when a certain action takes place, such as a content download encouraging them to get in touch.
#9 – Create more content
Lastly, content is still king! Creating more high-quality content can open up new conversations, it is also advantageous to Google’s algorithm which ranks fresh content higher, and it can also help to expand keyword visibility.
Our experts use several techniques to identify content gaps on subjects that competitors are already talking about and research shows your audience have a desire to explore.
Content strategies can be complex. So, if you would like to talk to our content team to help identify new opportunities or if you would like to discuss any of the above with our team of experts, get in touch today.
