Content, SEO, and Facebook/YouTube Marketing: 3 case studies to help you guide traffic to conversion

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

“The marketer cannot drive traffic, we can only coax it,” Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute, said in the below FastClass video excerpt:

To help you attract more customers to your brand, we bring you three stories from your marketing peers.

First, a printing service helps its target demographic by creating a free template and ultimately draws more then 550,000 new visitors to its website. Then, a wholesaler massively increases its conversion rate by attracting more of the right people to its website with a new keyword strategy. And finally, an energy company determines the impact of coaxing customers through its entire funnel by adding awareness ads before its conversion-focused advertising.

Quick Case Study #1: Printing service creates templates to fill gap for key demographic, attracts 550,000+ new visitors to its website

“I started Company Folders, Inc. in 2003 and grew it into one of Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America for three consecutive years,” said Vladimir Gendelman, Founder & CEO, Company Folders.

To attain that growth, a major challenge the company had to overcome was marketing its presentation folder products online.

To gain traction in a relatively dull market, the team identified the primary needs of its target demographics. They found that graphic designers were spending a lot of time creating realistic mockups of their folder designs because there were not many good mockup templates available – paid or free.

These mockup templates are common for business cards, flyers, and brochures. They let graphic designers quickly and easily demonstrate to a client or employer what their design will look like once it’s printed and folded into shape.

The team created a mockup template as a test and shared it in a prominent graphic design community. “The prominent community is Behance and the prominence is based on high traffic, tons of users, and the fact that they are owned by Adobe,” Gendelman said.

Creative Sample #1: Free presentation folder mockup Photoshop template in prominent graphic design community

It quickly generated tens of thousands of views and hundreds of engagements. Today, it has 122,000 views and 6,300 likes.

Creative Sample #2: Popularity of free presentation folder mockup Photoshop template

Based on this success, the printing service decided to scale – creating 17 mockups and offering them as free downloads on the company’s website.

Creative Sample #3: Category page for free presentation folder mockup Photoshop templates on printing service’s website

Each template’s product page includes stats for that mockup, with number of views, likes (“thumbs up”), and downloads.

Creative Sample #4: Product page for free folder mockup Photoshop template on printing service’s website

By offering this free resource to graphic designers, the company gained valuable exposure to a primary demographic for its product. These mockups have attracted 569,777 new visitors to the website, where the company also offers more than 200 custom printed folder products. Visitors view multiple pages (2.21 pages per session) and spend more than two-and-a-half minutes on the site. Bounce rate is 31.28%.  They’ve also generated dozens of quote requests (leads) for the company’s products.

Creative Sample #5: Analytics for printing service’s landing pages

Furthermore, hundreds of designers have used the free folder mockups in their online portfolios and even competitors have used these mockups to create images for their website’s product pages. “Using a search engine to search images for our product keywords, it’s satisfying to see all the images people have created from our mockups,” Gendleman said.

The team also implemented a survey, which is available in a text file when users download the mockup templates. This quick survey has been completed 1,862 times and lets the team collect data to analyze where users are in the sales funnel and how likely they are to buy.

Creative Sample #6: Results for survey question “When are you likely to make your next folder purchase?”

Creative Sample #7: Results for survey question “After receiving this mockup template, how likely are you to buy from us?”

Quick Case Study #2: Wholesaler changes keyword focus, increases conversion rate to 23%

Bennett’s Grain exports and imports grain. The company was getting only 0.6% of its website traffic to convert into sales. “Our company, which specializes in wholesale and bulk sales, tried many different ways to convert traffic to sales, but since we don't sell direct to consumers, we had all the random people who found us via Google search leave the website,” said Arthur Morgan, Marketing Manager, Bennett's Grain.

The website was primarily focused on keywords like “Canadian whole red lentils” or “buying lentils online,” which resulted in attracting visitors who have no interest in importing lentils.

So the team hired an SEO (search engine optimization) consultant to help focus its keyword strategy to match its ideal customer. For example, the team targeted keywords like “Wholesale exporter of Canadian whole red lentils” that is more focused on what a potential customer would search for.

The new strategy has significantly increased the website’s conversion rate. Now, 23% of website traffic results in sales.

Quick Case Study #3: Awareness ads help increase sales 45% for energy supplier

OVO Energy is an independent energy supplier in the United Kingdom (UK) focused on bringing its members on the journey to zero-carbon living.

The team wanted to determine if awareness activity could help to increase the performance of its conversion ads. Would new customers convert more easily if they first learned about the product? “Branded paid social was an area in which we wanted to determine the true value of our lower funnel conversion spend,” said Katie Bend, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, OVO Energy.

To gauge whether or not mid-funnel activity impacted lower-funnel direct response (DR) activity, the team designed a celled test strategy in which they randomly divided potential targets of each campaign by UK region. Region 1, the control group, received only conversion ads during the testing period, while Region 2, the test group, received both YouTube and Facebook awareness ads before the conversion ad was served.

Because each audience contained different regions and therefore different people, the team calibrated the variance between audiences before the test ran using a year’s worth of data from these regions to determine how “different” the groups were – the degree of variation in sales between them. They found that the average sales in the test group regions were consistently higher than the control regions, and thus weighted this factor when determining the difference between cells at the end of the test.

Other factors – like year-on-year sales growth and price changes – were considered constants because the team determined they impacted the two regions equally.

The test ran for six weeks. “We’ve used a few statistical methodologies (ANOVA, ANCOVA, etc.) [analysis of variance and analysis of covariance] to ‘prove’ out the magnitude of connection between the two,” said Jennifer Kattar, Global Director of Marketing, Realtime Agency (OVO’s digital performance media agency).

“Sales ads saw a 45% boost when the audience was primed with a traffic/educational ad first,” she said. The test resulted in 1,379 incremental sales.

Related resources

“True Blood” Vampire Fangs from the Dentist: When you’re too successful at driving the wrong traffic to your website – Podcast Episode #5

Become a Master at Creating and Optimizing High-Converting Webpages – The course is fully underwritten by MECLABS, with no monetary cost to participants

Beware the Templates of Marketing: Examples of 3 marketers that eschewed the common approach to testimonials, booking meetings, and logos

An Effective Value Proposition: What it is, why it is so important to business and marketing success, and how to use it