Lessons on Marketing SEO & Conversion | Scaling Your Startup S2 E6

Top Takeaways

• Sales and marketing funnels need to be built holistically. Yes, focusing on a specific channel improves effectiveness, but only concentrating on one activity along the funnel is a waste of money.
• More than half the companies in every industry do not understand how to do conversions right. In nearly every industry, the average conversion rate is double the median.

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How to optimize your conversion funnels — and how not to break them

Marketing and conversion funnels

• Marketing funnels are the process from when someone first learns about your business, all the way through their life as a customer. Some people will drop off at each stage, forming a funnel shape.
• Conversion rate = percentage of people exposed to your marketing content that complete a desired goal (example: buy your product)
• Conversion rates are not standardized. Marketing activities have indirect impacts on your conversion rates, it is not simply optimizing ads.
• The optimization of the funnel itself is just as important as how many people enter the top of it.
• At every step, there are actions you can take to optimize the funnel.

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Optimizing the steps of your funnel

Brand Building – People need to be able to find you and know who you are and what your brand stands for. A strong brand can also reduce customer churn.

• Research (know your competitors, have a target person, etc.)
• Branding
• Strategy

First contact – Your first real interaction with the prospective customer (prospect). 

• Advertising
• PR & Events
• SEO

“Things happen” – The nebulous stage of multiple interactions that may be required before a conversion. These steps nurture the prospect by providing them value.

• Video
• Audio
• Content (blog, how-to guides, product updates)

Conversion – When the prospect takes the action you want.

• Website (optimized for conversion)
• Email (newsletters, offers)

Onboarding

• Product
• Sales

• You can waste a lot of money by not understanding the entire funnel. (For example: spending your budget on FB ads that get a lot of reaches, that doesn’t convert, or it just creates users that churn shortly after converted)
• You need to focus on specific channels but not just a specific activity. Find the funnel that works for you.
• More than half the companies in every industry do not understand how to do conversions right. In nearly every industry, the average conversion rate is double the median.

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Misconceptions about conversion

Misconception #1

It doesn’t matter if my website or logo isn’t pretty. As long as my product is good, customers will convert.

Reality: You need to build trust with your potential customers so they are more likely to convert and stay using my product.

• Elon once said, “Tesla doesn’t do marketing.” What he actually meant was Tesla doesn’t do paid TV advertising like other car companies.
• Ads are just one marketing activity. Marketing encompasses the full buying experience (Elon’s Twitter, TV interviews, Tesla on SpaceX, Tesla Showrooms, etc.)
• At first contact, 73% are not ready to buy 
• Remember, the whole conversion funnel happens before customers even experienced your product. You need to build trust before they use your product.
• Provide value throughout the conversion funnel process.
• Create many opportunities for them to interact with you.
• Marketing is like building a friendship, strong bonds are formed from multiple interactions over time.

Misconception #2

A flashy article in the press, a pushy online ad, and tons of social media followers will trigger FOMO and make them come.

• The Clubhouse effect: Everyone was talking about it, and it had huge momentum. Part of the reason for the drop-off was that there was no funnel for users to know what to do to further engage with the app.
• PR stunts can create a lot of reaches but can create negative effects without a reason for customers/ users to stay. These same users may leave and have a negative impact on your future acquisitions. (Example: Friend 1 “Have you tried X?” Friend 2 “Oh yeah, I checked it out but didn’t really stick around, it wasn’t for me.”

Misconception #3

Once my customer is converted, I won!

• Companies focus a lot on acquisition because it looks good for the next board meeting or for investors to raise more capital.
• Churn wastes free marketing potential; once you have a customer, you can upsell, cross-sell or use them for referrals.
• Superhuman is really good at onboarding. They have an onboarding specialist set you up for success and serve as a future point of contact.

Actions to take to improve conversion

Assess what assets & skill you have across your company

• Research
• Strategy
• Branding
• Video
• Photo
• Content
• Website
• Outreach
• Social

Build funnels and conversion goals

• Example for B2C Mobile App: Ad campaign> Video Podcast> Landing Pages> Free Trial > Inside App Suggestions
• B2B SaaS: Influencer campaign > Virtual Events> Email Marketing > Website Signup> Demo Call

Create a timeline and budget (LTV > CAC)

• Non-marketers tend to underestimate time and cost
• Need a realistic timeline to assess what activities are worth investing in
• Increase conversion before increasing reach

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 Outlaw Soaps Co-Founder and CEO Danielle Vincent will cover the importance of SEO and how small fixes can bring big results.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO Fundamentals

• SEO provides incredible value for free (only upfront cost)
• SEO is not paid Search Engine Marketing (buying ads on Google)
• Google is the dominant search engine and what you are optimizing for.
• Google delivers what people are looking for by looking for relevance cues.

How Search engines work

• You must think in “code” understand what elements of your site google uses to assess the relevance.
• Google uses robots to crawl the web and create a massive index of every webpage everywhere.
• Update your site often because google will check more often.

Making the most of keywords

• Keywords are the most important words that searchers would use to find your product.
• Focus on specific keywords to begin, something that others are not focusing on. Once you have more traffic, you can expand to more competitive keywords.
• Google determines the hierarchy of your site with heading tags. Only have an H1 tag on every page. H2 is used for subheaders.
• Use Trends.google.com to find what people are searching for
• Sometimes there are arbitrage opportunities (Example: there are lots of searches for “Jobsearch” and about half as many for “find a job,” but no one has pages optimized for “find a job” this might be a big opportunity to create a page to rank)
• Do a search in google for your keyword and write down related searches. This becomes your content calendar.

Blogging for SEO success

• Blogs update your home page, causing Google to revisit it.
• A blog creates cross-linking between pages, link to other pages on your site.
• Content takes time to write but a lot less than you think.
• Don’t duplicate the same text across your site, it will confuse Google and it may penalize you.
• Keep a high keyword density on your blog. 

Building backlinks across the web

• Links boost a page’s credibility.
• Your “about page” will have a higher authority than other pages on your site. Links from one of your pages to another are free SEO.
• When other sites link you, this boosts your site’s credibility. (this is hard and can cost money)
• Linking to other sites helps too (but the least).

Q&A

Do you need to have a dedicated SEO person? 

• Your content writer should be well versed in SEO.
• It’s better to pay up ($300-400) for a high-quality article with SEO than to just buy an article at whatever price you can.

What should the cadence be for content marketing?

• Outlaw posts almost every day.
• Twice a week is a good target for B2B.

Is there too much content? Can you repost content in multiple places? 

• Reposting the exact same content across the web (medium, company blog, etc) can hurt your SEO.
• It is better to reword and summarize content appropriately to fit the medium.

Does quality matter? How do you know if the content is low quality?

• On average it’s better to post more often. 
• Posting low quality is worse than posting nothing

Do the platforms matter? (TikTok vs. Instagram vs. LinkedIn)

• There is no magic recipe.
• Go where your customers are.
• Think about what the platform rewards, for example, Instagram is great for beautiful products and packaging.
• Outlaw excels at community-based marketing, which Facebook does better.