The challenge of having multiple audiences

We often have partners come to us with the predicament of designing a website that speaks to and resonates with more than one audience.

They ask: “How do I speak to multiple audiences on one website? I have two (or more) completely different offerings, messages, FAQs, and conversion pages, and it feels like we need to build a different website for each audience.”

Specifically within the startup world, we see a lot of companies developing products that are marketed towards both B2B and B2C audiences, and another common audience grouping are products marketed towards patients and caregivers. We fully understand that one message isn’t going to resonate with these vastly different demographics, and yet, we’re also big fans of keeping things simple – as in, all on one website.

Why you don’t need multiple websites

From a resource perspective, it’s going to cost a lot more time and money to design, build, and eventually manage two sites instead of one. If that alone doesn’t deter you, then think about if it will really create clarity for your users to not be able to see the full picture of what you do and who you serve, all in one place. Oftentimes, seeing multiple websites for one brand creates more confusion, making the user ask the question, “Which one is for me?”

Honing your unique messages

The first step in working with our marketing team is to identify the unique audiences you serve – who they are, their demographics, what they value, etc. This lays the groundwork for us to develop unique value props (aka, the jumping off point for your messaging) that resonate with each group.

Site map setup

Once your value props are finalized, we’ll take a look at how we can re-organize your website’s structure to make space for all of the unique messaging and more specifically, how we can set up your header navigation to quickly and clearly help the user find the information that pertains to them.

We’ll start with a big picture overview of your current site structure and map out our recommendations via an updated site map. When designing a website for multiple audiences, the approach we often take is to create separate landing pages for each audience, creating a dedicated space for the audience’s unique messaging, product information, FAQs, and call-to-actions.

When it comes to your navigation menu, we can format your menu to immediately direct users with navigation items like, “For Patients” and “For Caregivers” or we can create a parent label, titled “Who We Serve” and provide links to each audience page via a dropdown menu.

Speaking to multiple audiences via your homepage

Your homepage is a neutral zone. It’s where you can expect all of your audience types to land in pursuit of finding out more about who your company is and what you offer. Understanding that, you want to give a general introduction into who you are and what you offer, and then very clearly guide each audience away from the homepage to their respective landing pages for any audience-specific information.

Hot tip: Shy away from providing too many audience-specific details on the homepage and embrace providing content that will appeal to multiple audiences (think: testimonials, as seen in logos, a how it works section, a meet the team section, and of course – small snippet sections for each audience.)

By incorporating a wireframe design into your UX design process, you’ll be able to road map a balanced approach to giving a general overview of the value your brand provides, while seamlessly guiding users to get the information that’s unique to them.

Examples of companies that are doing this right

Oura Ring: ouraring.com
The Oura Ring brand has two audiences: B2B and B2C. The way they have their site setup is to speak to mostly consumers via their homepage and then they direct all B2B clients to their “For Business” page, which is clearly labeled in their header navigation. Scroll down for example.

Pilot: pilot.com
Pilot uses the audience-specific landing page approach and easily directs their user to each page via an “Industries” label in the main navigation menu. The dropdowns indicate their unique audiences: Startups, Consumer Goods & Retail and Professional Services.

Empathy: empathy.com
Empathy is for multiple organization-type audiences as well as individuals. The way their main navigation menu sets the users up to easily flow to their appropriate landing pages is really well-done.

Maven: mavenclinic.com
Maven is an excellent example of a company with multiple truly unique audiences. In other words, it wouldn’t make sense for them to bundle Employers, Health Plans and Consultants under a “Business” label, so they’ve listed each of their 4 audiences out in their main navigation menu – and it works. Scroll down for example.

Prioritizing meaningful connections

In addressing the challenge of reaching different audiences on one website, the key is to keep things simple and clear. While creating separate websites might seem like a solution in the beginning, it can be expensive and confusing for users (and those managing the sites!). By crafting messages for each group and organizing the site well, brands can create a website that speaks to all their audiences, making meaningful connections with each one.

The post How to Speak to Multiple Audiences with One Website appeared first on Tuff.

Humans are inherently social creatures. We’ve survived and thrived for centuries, relying on one another to navigate the complexities of social interactions and decision-making.

Take online reviews–we’ve all used them to guide our decisions, whether we’re choosing a new restaurant, booking a hotel, or purchasing a product. In fact, nearly 90% of all consumers say reviews influence their purchase decisions. 

As marketers, we can harness the power of social influence to engage our audiences in new and authentic ways. In this blog, we’ll review the concept of social proof and its various forms, explore social proof examples, and discuss practical strategies for using them to build trust and boost conversions.

Let’s dive in. 🚀

What is social proof? 

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in which individuals look to the actions, opinions, and behaviors of others to guide their own decisions, especially in uncertain or unfamiliar situations. This modern-day “herd mentality” creates a sense of reassurance and safety, aligning people with the collective choices and behaviors of the group.  

How do marketers use social proof? 

Social proof is an age-old marketing tactic. For decades, marketers have tapped into our natural inclination to trust and follow others to create highly effective marketing campaigns. 

Source: Collector Weekly

Today, marketers continue to use social proof examples to influence consumer behavior and build trust. We often think of social proof as customer reviews or testimonials, but it can be found in nearly every area of our lives.

• When you’re shopping for hotels and see a banner declaring a particular hotel as “Guests’ Top Choice,” that’s social proof. 
• When you’re searching for a new CRM and notice that a well-respected brand already uses the tool, that’s social proof. 
• When you’re looking for a growth marketing agency with proven results and land on their case studies page, that’s social proof. 

With consumer trust in short supply, marketers are turning to a new currency–the voice of the customer–to earn and keep the trust of their discerning audience.

How social proof impacts the buyer’s journey

Consumers rely heavily on social cues to make informed purchasing decisions. From the moment they become aware of a new product or service, all the way to the final purchase, social proof exerts its influence. When planned carefully, social proof can impact every marketing funnel stage. Here’s how:

• Awareness/Prospecting Stage: Introduces potential customers to your product or brand, increases visibility, and drives awareness—examples: UGC content, positive reviews, and endorsements. 

• Consideration Stage: Builds trust and credibility while encouraging exploration—examples: testimonials, trust icons, and case studies. 

• Intent Stage: Validates decisions and instills confidence in the choice—examples: testimonials and purchase data.

• Purchase/Loyalty Stage: Reinforces and deepens trust, often through advocacy–examples: endorsements, social media content, and testimonials. 

Types of social proof

Marketers can embed social proof into virtually every channel, platform, or product page. Below, we’ll review social proof examples and the five most common (and most effective) forms.

• Reviews & Testimonials: A customer review or testimonial is the essence of social proof. It is a customer’s specific, authentic feedback about their experience with a product, service, or business. When featured on product pages, customer reviews can lead to 3.5 times more conversions.

• Case Studies: Case studies are real-life stories that detail how a product or service solves a specific challenge for a customer. Typically used in B2B settings, case studies help establish credibility, address pain points, and push buyers from consideration to conversion.

• Trust Icons: A trust icon is a visual symbol or badge displayed on a website or in marketing materials to convey trustworthiness and security. Trust icons alleviate natural skepticism and increase buyers’ confidence in a brand. Examples include certifications, recognizable brand logos, and security seals. 

Source: Sabio

• Data: Data quantifies and supports the legitimacy of a product or service. Data can include purchase data, results, number of followers, etc. This numerical evidence reinforces value and impact, further bolstering consumer trust. 

Source: Pathstream

• Endorsements: Endorsements are a tried-and-true persuasion tactic. Endorsements are praise or approval from celebrities, industry experts, or influencers. Today, a commonly used format is user-generated content, with many brands using influencers to create videos that feel authentic and relatable to their target market.

Source: Paintbox

Social Proof and Conversion Rate Optimization

Social proof and conversion rate optimization go hand in hand. Think of conversion rate optimization as the roadmap, with tactics like social proof fueling the success of your online experience and bottom line. 

What is conversion rate optimization? 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of fine-tuning your marketing funnel to get a visitor to take a desired action–whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a free trial, or filling out a contact form. The primary objective of CRO is to maximize the effectiveness of your online presence by delivering a seamless and relevant user experience from start to finish. 

What levers can you use to optimize your website? 

To achieve this, CRO experts deploy tried-and-true tactics to convert existing website traffic into revenue. From compelling copy to intuitive landing pages and funnel set-up, there are several levers you can pull to optimize websites and increase conversion potential. 

One of those levers is social proof. Social proof validates claims, enhances user confidence, and humanizes your marketing efforts. Paired with a solid testing framework, you can implement different forms of social proof on your website to drive more users toward an end goal.

How CRO impacts your bottom line

CRO is critical to any long-term growth strategy. At its core, it is laser-focused on revenue. It is the meticulous, data-led process of identifying leaks in your funnel, executing optimizations, and refining strategies to boost conversions and maximize your bottom line. 

At Tuff, our team of CRO experts has built a battle-tested process for full-funnel conversion rate optimization. We utilize a systematic approach to testing and experimentation to create highly effective landing pages, web pages, or product flow iterations. The result? Higher quality leads, lower acquisition costs, and more revenue for our partners.

Social Proof Examples in Action

Our CRO team has found success working with teams in nearly every industry. We utilize proven growth strategies to help our partners create lift and hit their conversion goals. Below are three examples of social proof as key ingredients in our conversion formula.

Xendoo

Xendoo is an online bookkeeping service and a long-time partner of Tuff. As part of a recent CRO initiative, our team set out to increase conversions by optimizing the product flow with social proof, clearer copy, and more information about add-ons. We implemented these changes on the sign-up page, plan selection page, and billing page. 

The result? After 30 days of testing, we saw a 31.74% lift in total sign-ups, validating our hypothesis that if we embed cleaner, more trustworthy copy into the sign-up flow, we would increase conversions. 

Tony’s Acoustic Challenge 

Tony’s Acoustic Challenge is an online program that helps people learn guitar with bite-sized daily lessons. During our partnership, one of our CRO initiatives was to optimize an existing ad campaign to increase webinar engagement. 

We hypothesized that if we added several forms of social proof to the webinar video, we would increase engagement and visits to the pricing page. To achieve this, we added four social proof sections throughout the video. 

The result? By adding social proof to the webinar, we were able to build more trust with the viewers and increase conversions by over 10%. 

Bit.io

Bit.io is a cloud-based data-sharing platform that partnered with Tuff to increase platform sign-ups. Our first CRO objective was to optimize the homepage. In addition to headline and color enhancements, we placed logos of well-known companies that use Bit.io and a headline that communicated the large number and types of users. 

The result? In one week, the new homepage converted at 11.84%, while the existing homepage had a conversion rate of 5.59%–a 111.8% lift with simple copy tweaks and the addition of trust icons and user testimonials. 

Activating Social Proof on Your Site 

To incorporate social proof onto your website, start by gathering customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, and any other types of user-generated feedback that will support the story you’re trying to tell. Then, work with your team to strategically place the content at various touch points in your funnel to address pain points, counter objections, and reinforce the value of your offering.

Utilize your analytics and reporting tools to optimize the types of social proof you use and where you place it. Set up testing guidelines to measure whether it’s driving the user toward your desired action and scrap it if not. Continue to follow this cadence–test, learn, optimize, repeat–to systematically and strategically drive up your conversion rates. 

Ready to activate social proof on your site to get more revenue out of the traffic you already have? Let’s chat.

The post Proven Social Proof Examples That Drive Higher Conversion Rates appeared first on Tuff.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) play a massive role in how well your website and company perform. The two frequently overlap, but SEO and UX audits can influence your success in different ways.

When you have strong SEO, you can pull in visitors from search engines to your website without paying for clicks. With organic traffic, you rely less on paid advertisements to get people to your website. 

However, SEO is a long-term play. We usually see results from SEO initiatives three to six months after publishing content. Driving qualified visitors to your website is not enough to be effective. 

Are users taking the actions you want them to take when they get to your website? For example, are they adding products to the cart and completing checkout? Are they filling out your lead generation forms? If they aren’t, then you probably have some user experience issues.

You need to have a strong user experience to keep users on the page, clicking around your website, and completing the actions that you want them to take.

In this article, we’ll go over the exact steps you can take to improve your SEO and UX to rank higher in search engines and convert more website visitors into customers. We’ll also show you how to conduct a quick SEO and UX audit of your site to find opportunities and quick wins.

How to conduct an SEO Audit

An SEO audit usually involves looking at your technical SEO, everything on your website that impacts your search engine rankings, as well as user experience. Examples of common technical SEO issues that we see include:

Duplicate content

Many times ecommerce product pages have duplicate versions. It confuses Google because it doesnt know which version to index in search results. You’ll also get flagged for duplicate content if you have large chunks of identical text that appear on multiple pages. 

How to fix it: The solution for duplicate content depends on the specific case, but for product pages, you’ll usually set up a canonical tag. It tells search engines which URL is the version you want them to crawl. 

Oftentimes, technical SEO issues also impact your user experience, and those are ones you should prioritize fixing. Examples of SEO and UX issues include: 

Broken links and 404 pages

Internal broken links, especially to high-traffic pages, create a poor user experience because you’re sending visitors to a page that doesn’t exist.

How to fix it: Get a list of the URLs that have broken links. You can use a Chrome extension like Broken Link Checker to help you identify them faster on the page. Then, remove the broken links or redirect 404 pages to working URLs.

Page loading speed

Page speed can greatly influence and improve your user experience as well as conversion rates. If a website doesn’t load within three seconds, over half (53%) of mobile visitors will leave. Ideally, your website should load within one second.

Research has shown that page loading speed has a direct impact on a website’s conversion rates. For example, Walmart found that when it improved page loading speed by one second it increased conversion rates by 2%. 

How to fix it: Fixing loading speed can be a lengthy process that involves multiple tactics to improve it. To start, analyze image file size and keep images under 70 KB for faster loading. Next, you’ll need to look within the code and identify areas to clean it up. We recommend working closely with a developer on page speed optimization. 

Site navigation

Shoppers want to easily browse and find products when they go into a store. Stores are organized in a way that makes it easy for people to navigate and checkout. Aisles are labeled clearly and grouped into categories. 

Your online store or website also needs to be organized, starting with the main site navigation all the way to your overall site architecture. When building a website, businesses often get caught up in the design and overlook the importance of site navigation to user experience.

How to fix it: Improving site navigation also involves many elements and can be a lengthy process. To get started you can follow these steps:

• Identify the most important pages on your website.
• Limit your top navigation to 5-7 links or fewer.
• Organize your pages into main categories that form the basis of your navigation.
• Push less important but necessary information like privacy pages to the bottom footer navigation.

Going through your website manually to find these issues would be time-consuming and ineffective. Luckily, there are several SEO tools you can use to audit your website for you.

How to run a technical audit with Semrush

Semrush and Ahrefs will crawl your site and identify issues. As of this writing, the lowest cost plans for these tools vary anywhere from $99 to $129. Semrush offers a free trial. If your website has few pages (under 100) to crawl, you can sign up and run a technical site audit with a free Semrush account.

To do this in Semrush, you’ll go to “Site Audit” under “On-Page and Tech SEO”. Then create a project by adding your website domain.

When Semrush is done crawling your website, it will look something like this:

Ideally, you want your site health, which is a measure of all your technical SEO, to be close to or above 90%. 

To view the specific technical SEO issues on your website, go to the tab that says “Issues”. Semrush tries to prioritize issues as: 

• Errors: Usually the most impactful, biggest issues to fix.
• Warnings: Issues you should fix but may take more time.
• Notices: Issues that are recommended but aren’t urgent.

However, keep in mind that these are only tools. They can identify issues, but you’ll need to resolve them on your own or hire an SEO agency to resolve them for you. 

Also, they aren’t foolproof. Sometimes, auditing tools miss errors and aren’t great at prioritizing them. It helps to have an expert manually verify errors and implement fixes from the highest priority, quick wins to low priority.

How to do a website UX audit 

There are many ways to approach a UX audit. One of them is a heuristic website analysis or evaluation. If you have a limited UX budget and time to do user research, a heuristic evaluation is a scrappy way to identify quick wins and opportunities on your site. User research is still important but this will help you get started.

It’s a quick way to gauge the user-friendliness of a website. Instead of testing with users, which can be expensive and time-consuming, experts review your website. 

Heuristic website analysis

There are many methods of heuristic analysis. Each tests the usability of your website to identify areas that you can improve.

A common method is to look at Jakob Nielsen’s 10 principles. Another method is the seven-level conversion framework. There are several variations of this, but they all evaluate website design by how well it facilitates user conversions. 

You’ll go through your website’s most important user flows and assess how well it does for each level. For example, let’s say you want someone to search for a product in your online store, add it to their cart, and complete the checkout process. You’d go through that process and evaluate it using the framework. 

The levels of the conversion framework include: 

• Relevance: When users land on this page, is it right for them? 
• Trust: Does the page include reviews, social proof, and other elements that evoke trust?
• Orientation: Is it easy for users to navigate and find what they want? 
• Stimulation: Are you giving them a compelling reason to buy your product or service?
• Security: Do you feel safe to share information with or purchase from this website?  
• Convenience: Is it easy and quick to use the website and purchase?
• Confirmation: Do users feel good about their decision after buying or taking action? 

Go through each level, identify issues, and then brainstorm solutions. Ultimately, you want to eliminate user pain points or areas that cause friction as quickly as possible.

SEO and UX audit checklist

SEO and UX have many moving parts. Although this audit checklist isn’t exhaustive, it can help you identify the biggest areas of opportunity.

☑️  Technical SEO

• Check indexing: Ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website’s pages.
• Sitemap: Verify that an XML sitemap is created and submitted to search engines.
• Robots.txt: Most websites have a robots.txt file that looks like this: https://www.patagonia.com/robots.txt. Go to yours and make sure you’re only blocking or disallowing pages you don’t want search engines to crawl. 
• Page speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights to test the speed of your mobile and desktop experience.
• HTTPS: Make sure your website is using a secure SSL certificate (https://).
• Canonical URLs: Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues.
• URL structure: Make sure URLs are descriptive, user-friendly, and include relevant keywords.
• Broken links: Check for internal and external broken links. Redirect them to relevant pages or remove broken external links.
• Schema markup: Implement structured data to enhance search result appearances.
• Duplicate content: Check for and address any duplicate content issues.

☑️  On-Page SEO

• Title tags: Each page should have a unique, descriptive, and keyword-rich title. For some pages you may be able to no-index so you don’t need to update every page.
• Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions appear in the preview of search results. Improving them could lead to better click-through rates.
• Headings: Use appropriate heading tags (H1, H2, H3). The H1 tag is the page title and there should only be one per page. The rest should be H2 and so on. 
• Image optimization: Use descriptive alt text and compress images for faster loading.
• Keyword optimization: Identify keywords you need to rank for and opportunities to create or improve content to rank in search results.
• Content quality: Review the content on your site to make sure it is SEO-optimized. It should match search intent and show your expertise. 

☑️  User Experience (UX)

• Site navigation: Review your navigation to assess if it’s easy to follow and find your most important pages.
• Responsive design: Test the site’s performance and layout on desktop, mobile, and tablets.
• Visual hierarchy: Can users easily identify the most important messages or actions on the page?
• Call-to-action (CTA): Do your main pages include one primary call-to-action and is it designed in a way that encourages users to click?
• Forms: Are your forms easy to complete and collect only the most critical information?
• Site search: Can visitors easily search and filter search functions?
• Font and typography: Is your font easy to read with the right sizes and high contrast?
• Accessibility: Does your website meet accessibility guidelines (WCAG)?

Once you audit your site, you should regularly monitor performance and make adjustments. SEO and UX audits are ongoing. If you’re looking for ways to improve your website’s SEO, user experience, or conversions, you can also reach out to Tuff and book a strategy call. We’re here to help.

The post SEO and UX Design: How to Create User-Friendly Websites That Rank and Convert appeared first on Tuff.

In today’s market, growth marketing teams are under the double duty of streamlining budgets while reeling in a steady stream of qualified leads. In the midst of the hustle, there’s a strategic haven waiting to be explored—the conversion funnel. This isn’t just about growth; it’s about supercharging evergreen success that keeps your bottom line steady and thriving. Welcome to the world of conversion rate optimization.

Organic channels like content marketing, SEO, and CRO are necessary areas to focus on so that in the event your company needs to pull back on paid efforts, you’ll have something to fall back on and keep the leads flowing.

In this blog, we’re diving into Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). It’s like giving your website and marketing machine a power boost. We’ll zoom in on the spots where conversions need a lift, and you’ll discover how to make your ROI shine, find hidden opportunities, and fuel steady ROI growth.

Understanding Conversion Funnel Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization is a data-driven process that revolves around understanding your customer journey and optimizing it for maximum results. It’s about creating a seamless experience for your potential customers, guiding them through the funnel, and enhancing the chances of conversion.

A simple exercise you can do to ensure each page has its purpose within the funnel is to take stock of the most important pages on your website. Map the following:

• The purpose of the page for the user
• The intended, desired action from the user 
• The result for the user

From this exercise, you will be able to decipher what stage of the conversion funnel the page belongs to and find where there may be gaps in your funnel and the customer journey.

Where CRO Fits in Growth Marketing Strategy

In the realm of growth marketing, CRO is a critical component that complements other strategies. While traffic generation and lead acquisition are essential, CRO ensures that you capitalize on the existing traffic and nurture leads into customers. Together, it’s about taking the traffic brought in from other channels and turning it into tangible revenue. 

Why Identifying Weak Points Matters for Better ROI

Identifying weak points in your conversion process is essential to optimizing marketing efforts and allocating resources effectively. By understanding where potential customers drop off, you can craft targeted strategies to address these challenges and drive more conversions, ultimately leading to better ROI.

Understanding the Conversion Funnel Stages 

The Conversion Funnel represents the path your potential customers follow before making a purchase decision. 

1. The Awareness stage. Someone becomes familiar with your brand and offerings through brand awareness campaigns or informational content marketing. 
2. The Prospecting stage. The person explores further, seeking more information about who you are and what you offer that could alleviate their challenges. Email marketing and more targeted content marketing often come into play here.
3. The Consideration stage. They develop a keen interest and consider your solution seriously while also weighing your competitors. You’ll want to ensure you serve them competitor comparison pages, transparent pricing, and provide a clear information journey on the site.
4. The Intent stage. They take the desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a trial, or contacting sales. Peppering in CRO strategies throughout each stage of the funnel ensures the customer will know what action to take and when.

Analyzing Customer Drop-Off Points

Identifying customer drop-off points is vital for optimization. By analyzing website analytics and tracking data, you can gain valuable insights into visitor behavior and understand where potential customers abandon the funnel. This data-driven approach helps uncover patterns and pain points that need attention.

Here are the metrics to pay attention to for CRO and web optimization:

• Time on Site and Pages per Session: When your audience lands on your site, these metrics indicate they are qualified and find your site relevant and informative.
• Bounce and Exit Rates: People leaving your site means unqualified traffic or poor content and experience for the user. These rates are key indicators of where drop-offs happen.
• Conversions (duh!): High traffic volume and low conversions call for an evaluation of the quality of the traffic and the quality of your website. Pay attention to what pages convert well and which ones should convert well but fall short.
  • Example: Product or Service pages are high-intent pages for conversions. If you notice you’re having trouble converting, analyze them through a critical lens to find areas of improvement.
• Qualitative data: Heatmaps and user surveys will help you understand the user’s journey and where their points of friction lie. Asking a user why they didn’t take an action can be a quick way to understand your challenges. 

Every drop-off represents a missed opportunity to convert a lead into a customer. These leaks in the funnel can hinder your conversion rates and negatively impact your ROI. Consistently paying attention to the right data can help you stay on top of drop-off points and quickly alleviate issues. 

Strategies for Fixing Drop-Off Points

To effectively tackle drop-off points and bridge these missed opportunities, consider implementing the following strategic approaches:

• User Experience (UX) Enhancements: Optimize your website design, navigation, and mobile responsiveness to deliver a seamless and user-friendly experience. Not only will this improve conversions, but you’ll also be supporting your SEO efforts.
• Targeted Content Strategies: Craft valuable, relevant, and informative content that aligns with each stage of the funnel, addressing potential customer pain points, and guiding them through the decision-making process.
• Simplified Conversion Process: Streamline the conversion process by removing unnecessary steps and reducing barriers to entry, making it easier for potential customers to take the desired action.

Test it Out: If you find areas for improvement but you’re not sure what the best fix is, run an A/B test to get hard data around the next best step. A/B testing allows you to compare different versions of your website or marketing strategies to identify which ones perform better. This data-driven testing methodology helps you make informed decisions and ensures continuous improvement in your conversion rates.

Measuring and Monitoring Success 

As you implement improvements to your website or A/B test your hypotheses, always start by setting a goal. This means defining what success looks like for your company. Refer back to the main metrics we look at to define success within the conversion funnel to set an achievable goal that fits your strategy. 

Here are some examples:

• We’re adding more conversion entry points on a page → Conversion goal
• We’re improving our internal linking strategy to keep users on the site and through the funnel → Time on Site and/or Pages per Session
• We’re testing out the keywords we’re targeting in paid ads → Click-through rate (CTR)

By incorporating thorough data analysis and diligent performance tracking, you’ll see the long-term effects of your efforts. This knowledge means you can make informed decisions and align with evolving trends and customer preferences over time.

Harnessing the Power of Conversion Funnel Optimization

Conversion funnel optimization is a strategic endeavor that can revolutionize your growth trajectory. By focusing on identifying and fixing weak points in the conversion process, you can drive better ROI and increase conversions.

CRO is not a one-time fix, it’s a process of continuous improvement. To achieve sustainable growth, it’s crucial to have a long-term vision for CRO success. Regularly analyze data, seek customer feedback, and stay on top of industry trends. By evolving with your customers’ needs, you can build lasting relationships and maintain a competitive edge.

At Tuff, we’re dedicated to helping you achieve sustainable growth through strategic CRO. By implementing these data-driven and customer-focused approaches, you can unlock your business’s full potential.

For tailored strategies and expert guidance, drop us your info!

The post Conversion Funnel Optimization: Identifying and Fixing Drop-off Points for Improved ROI appeared first on Tuff.

For marketers, psychology plays a vital role in both website optimization and conversion rate optimization (CRO). By integrating a few psychological principles into the design, content, and the user experience (UX) of your website, you can directly impact visitor behavior, drive desired actions on your website, and ultimately fuel business growth. 

Why psychology matters when optimizing a website for conversions

Decision making is driven by a multitude of psychological factors, such as cognitive biases, emotional connections, and social or environmental influences. By leveraging these three factors correctly, businesses can optimize their website to align with visitors’ preferences and desires. 

For example, utilizing principles like social proof can help build trust and credibility by showcasing customer testimonials or user reviews. Picture this: a potential customer lands on your e-commerce website and BAM! They’re greeted with amazing testimonials from happy customers who LOVE your product. Those testimonials act like a trust boost, making the visitor feel more confident in your brand and nudging them toward hitting that CTA button. It’s all about using social proof to create a sense of reassurance and safety. Effective communication through the content on your website is key to driving conversions. Use that emotional connection to craft compelling and persuasive messaging that converts! 

User experience (UX) is also a critical component in the success of any website, and psychology plays a pivotal role in shaping overall UX. Websites that are intuitive, visually appealing, and designed using psychological principles such as cognitive load reduction and visual hierarchy can boost user satisfaction and engagement. By minimizing distractions, simplifying navigation, and strategically placing important elements, psychological principles inform the creation of seamless and enjoyable user experiences. When visitors feel effortlessly guided through a website, their trust and confidence in the brand increase, leading to improved conversions and even long-term loyalty.

Below we’ll walk through psychology principles used in design, UX, and copywriting that can help guide a user to the action you want them to take and ultimately push them to convert. 

The psychology behind your website’s content

When it comes to content and psychology, there are endless principles we could discuss, but we’ll focus on some favorites at Tuff. Before we dive in, I want to clarify that these principles can be tactics of persuasion–but a common theme you’ll notice is clarity and simplicity– which take precedence over tricks and “hacks”. Humans bring their past experiences to all situations, and in the era of endless media consumption, it’s hard to fool most people. Stick to being clear and concise around who you are, what you stand for, and what you’re offering the user. 

Let’s dive in. 

The Focusing Effect

According to the Focusing Effect, people tend to base their decisions on the most pronounced or obvious information, neglecting other equally significant information that may be less prominent in their cognitive processing. In other words: Out of sight, out of mind.

Take a look at your homepage. Is your value proposition prominently placed to be the user’s first introduction to your site and your offerings? Is there enough strategically placed information next to your CTA to entice a user to convert? Wait… is there even a CTA?! 😱

When writing content for your website, make sure your core offerings or value propositions are prominently placed for the user to process as the most important information on that page. Along those same lines, remember to keep CTAs consistently and strategically placed next to the right information. In short, follow these guidelines for your homepage hierarchy:

• Feature your core offerings or value propositions prominently.
• Place CTAs strategically next to relevant information.
• Use a clear headline to communicate what makes your product/service different from competitors.
• Highlight key benefits and features concisely.
• Include visually appealing images.
• Showcase customer testimonials and other social proof.
• Ensure intuitive navigation and menus.
• Make contact information easily accessible.

Following these guidelines will help create a user-friendly homepage that maximizes conversions and engagement.

The Cognitive Fluency Effect

Remember the mention of clarity and simplicity taking precedence over tricks and hacks? Well, the Cognitive Fluency Effect suggests the easier a piece of information is to process, the more likely our brains will perceive it as honest and reliable. This concept revolves around the notion that our brains, in their limited capacity, tend to quickly move past information that is familiar or similar to what we have previously encountered.

Knowing this, make sure you’re cutting down on the noise in your content. Leverage simple, descriptive headings throughout a page for quicker processing of the right information by the user. 

Example: Imagine you’re a B2B tech company offering cloud computing solutions. To leverage the Cognitive Fluency Effect and enhance UX on your website, instead of using complex technical jargon in your headings, opt for simplified and descriptive titles that resonate with your target audience. For example, instead of “Advanced Cloud Infrastructure Services,” consider a heading like “Seamless Cloud Solutions for Scalable Business Operations.”

By using straightforward and relatable language, you help users quickly process and understand the value your company provides. This approach not only improves the cognitive fluency of your website, but also enhances trust and credibility among potential clients in the B2B tech space. It’s a win-win.

The Priming Effect

The Priming Effect describes how exposure to a previous experience can impact how we react to the next experience, even without awareness of the influence the past experience had on us. 

For example, throughout a product page, you’ll want to take every opportunity to show a user why they need or want your product. Leveraging emotional language to relate to their problems will influence whether or not they convert. 

Similarly, in CRO, a best practice is to use your main CTA repeatedly and to stay consistent with the language. This allows the user to always know what the ultimate action is throughout their journey, priming them (see what I did there 😉) for when they’re ready to convert. 

Even looking at the intro of this blog, I made sure to prime my readers for what they can expect to process throughout the page! Remember priming when you write content for your website. Stay consistent, connect emotionally, and make sure users always know what to expect next. 

The Illusory Truth Effect

The Illusory Effect, or the Illusion of Truth, suggests people are more likely to perceive information as true when they encounter it repeatedly. Leveraging the Illusory Effect in website content writing means writers can enhance the credibility and persuasiveness of the information presented. By employing repetition, consistency in brand messaging, social proof, and visual reinforcement (infographics, charts, etc.), the content becomes more memorable, engaging, and trustworthy for readers, leading to increased user engagement and conversions. Try it out on your website using some of these tactics:

• Brand Messaging Consistency: Use key messages, slogans, and brand values throughout the website to create familiarity and reinforce credibility.
• Repetition of Benefits: Highlight key benefits repeatedly to reinforce their importance and aid in user recall.
• Consistent Design Elements: Use consistent design elements (color schemes, fonts, layouts) to create a sense of familiarity and credibility.
• Statistics and Data: Present relevant statistics and data points througout your site to increase credibility.
• Call-to-Action (CTA) Repetition: Use consistent and clear CTAs to encourage desired actions and reinforce the message.

By strategically incorporating repetition and reinforcement, writers can influence the perception of the content, increase trust, and boost engagement and conversions on your site.

Social Proof

Humans are social and tend to look to others for guidance when making decisions. By showcasing social proof on your website, such as displaying the number of satisfied customers or the popularity of products, brands can tap into the psychological phenomenon of conformity. When visitors see that others have made a particular decision, they are more inclined to follow suit, ultimately leading to increased conversions and even more happy customers (and brand evangelists).

See how Tuff uses customer testimonials to hype up social proof on our homepage.

Overall, social proof provides a powerful persuasive tool to influence website visitors and improve conversions. By showcasing real customer experiences, endorsements from reputable sources, and relevant statistics, websites can build trust, influence decision-making, reduce objections, and establish credibility, leading to higher conversion rates and increased business!

Using psychology in website design and usability

When designing a website, it makes sense to focus on the psychology of the visitors you’re targeting. Every choice a designer makes should be intentional and hyper-focused on the goal of the website: buy this thing, sign up for this platform, watch our videos, and more. 

Just like with content, people bring their past experiences from other websites and use that to judge yours. Let’s take a look at some of the key principles used to move the user to the desired action. 

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect says people perceive designs with great aesthetics as easier to use. A visually appealing design elicits a favorable response in individuals’ minds, leading them to perceive the design as more effective. 

When a product or service has an aesthetically pleasing design, people tend to be more forgiving of minor usability problems. Along the same lines, a visually appealing design can hide usability issues, making them less likely to be identified during usability testing.

For example, with SaaS companies, designers will use pieces of the software with added visual effects instead of actual screenshots of the software because the screenshots aren’t as visually appealing.

Basically, if someone in your organization requests that something looks “prettier,” they’re not wrong!

Familiarity Bias

Familiarity Bias is leveraged in website design by incorporating elements and patterns with which users are already familiar. When users encounter familiar design elements, they feel a sense of comfort and ease, which can positively influence their perception of a website. Here are a few ways Familiarity Bias is utilized in website design:

1. Interface Design: Websites use common design conventions, such as placing the navigation at the top or right side of the page, with standard icons for common actions like a magnifying glass for search, or a shopping cart symbol on e-commerce sites. By incorporating these familiar design patterns, users can quickly understand and navigate the website without confusion.
   
2. Visual Hierarchy: Familiarity Bias is also utilized in establishing a clear visual hierarchy on a website. By following established design principles, such as placing important information prominently or using font sizes and colors to guide attention (see the red Tuff CTA?), users can easily locate and focus on the most important elements. This familiarity with visual hierarchy allows users to navigate and interact with the website more intuitively.
3. Content Formatting: Websites often follow familiar content formatting techniques to improve readability and user comprehension. For example, using headings, subheadings, and bullet points are common practices that facilitate scanning and understanding of the content (like I’m using here!) By leveraging familiar content formatting, websites can smooth out their user experience, remove friction, and encourage users to engage with the content more effectively.

Overall, leveraging Familiarity Bias in website design helps create a user-friendly experience by aligning with users’ expectations and existing mental models. Websites can then enhance usability, engagement, and overall user happiness.

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law, also known as the Hick-Hyman Law, is a psychological principle that states the time it takes for a person to make a decision increases with the number of choices presented to them. 

In the context of website design, Hick’s Law suggests that reducing the number of choices or options available to users can lead to faster decision making AKA conversions.💰

Website designers leverage Hick’s Law in the following ways:

1. Simplifying Navigation: By limiting the number of options in the navigation, designers can help users quickly find what they are looking for. Streamlining the navigation and organizing content into logical categories reduces conversion friction and enhances usability.
2. Minimizing Form Fields: When designing forms, adhering to the principle of Hick’s Law means keeping the number of input fields to a minimum. Reducing the cognitive load associated with filling out forms improves completion rates and reduces user frustration.
3. Providing Clear Calls-to-Action: Effective use of Hick’s Law in website design involves presenting clear and focused calls-to-action (CTAs). By reducing the number of CTAs and making them visually distinct, users can make decisions more efficiently and take the desired action without confusion.
4. Implementing Progressive Disclosure: Progressive disclosure is a technique that involves revealing information or options gradually as users interact with the website. By presenting information in bite-sized portions and progressively revealing additional details, designers can prevent overwhelming users with excessive choices to facilitate quick decision-making.

Overall, Hick’s Law emphasizes the importance of simplicity and reducing cognitive load in website design. By minimizing choices, simplifying navigation, optimizing form design, and implementing progressive disclosure techniques, designers can make users happy–happy enough to convert!

Law of Proximity

The Law of Proximity, also known as the Gestalt Principle of Proximity, states that elements that are close to each other in proximity are perceived as belonging together or forming a group. 

In website design, the Law of Proximity is used to visually organize and group related content, enhancing user comprehension and creating a more organized and intuitive user experience.

Here’s how website designers use the Law of Proximity:

1. Grouping Related Elements: By placing related elements in close proximity to each other, such as grouping navigation links or related product features, designers can visually communicate their connection. This makes it easier for users to understand relationships and find relevant information quickly.
   
   
2. Organizing Content: Grouping similar content blocks, such as testimonials, product descriptions, or pricing plans, helps users perceive them as coherent units and simplifies information processing.
3. Creating Visual Hierarchy: By placing elements that are meant to be perceived together closer to each other, designers can guide users’ attention and highlight the most important or relevant information.
4. Improving Scannability: Users can quickly scan a webpage and identify clusters of related content, enabling them to locate specific information more efficiently.

By applying the Law of Proximity, designers can improve the user experience by visually communicating relationships between elements, organizing content effectively, establishing a clear visual hierarchy, and improving the scannability of a page. This aids users in understanding the structure and organization of the website, making it easier for them to navigate, locate desired information, and engage with the content. All the necessary ingredients for delicious conversions!

Honorable mention: Color psychology in marketing

Color psychology plays a significant role in marketing. You can harness the power of colors to evoke emotions, shape perceptions, and influence consumer behavior in ways you may not expect. Let’s explore how color psychology is utilized in various marketing strategies and campaigns.

Branding & Advertising

Brands carefully select colors to convey their unique personality and values. In ads, colors are often leveraged to capture consumers’ attention and evoke particular emotions. Check out some common colors used and examples of the major brands that we associate with these colors:

• Red 🔴 is often associated with energy, passion, and excitement, making it suitable for brands in the entertainment industry. (Netflix)
• Blue 🔵 symbolizes trust, reliability, and professionalism, making it a common choice for financial institutions and technology companies. (Facebook)
• Green 🟢 represents nature, growth, and sustainability, frequently used by brands that want to be associated with eco-friendliness or being organic. (Whole Foods)
• Yellow 🟡 is known to stimulate optimism and joy, making it ideal for creating cheerful and eye-catching ads. (McDonald’s)
• Black ⚫ is associated with sophistication, luxury, and exclusivity, making it a popular choice for high-end brands. (Chanel)
• Orange 🟠 combines the energy of red and the warmth of yellow, often used to create a sense of excitement and enthusiasm. (Fanta)

Source: The Logo Company

Website Design:

Websites strategically use colors to enhance user experience and guide user behavior. Consider the following examples:

• Calls-to-action (CTAs) are often highlighted in contrasting colors to draw attention and prompt user actions. (e.g., “Buy Now” buttons in red or orange)
• Trust and credibility can be established through the use of blue tones for important elements such as navigation menus or testimonials. (e.g., corporate websites)
• E-commerce websites frequently utilize warm colors like red or orange to create a sense of urgency during sales or limited-time offers. (e.g., countdown timers, “Limited Stock” notifications)

By understanding and leveraging color psychology, marketers and designers can effectively communicate messages, connect with target audiences, and create memorable brand experiences. Since colors hold significant power over human emotions, make sure you consider the cultural and personal meanings attached to different colors to ensure the chosen hues resonate positively with the target audience.

Psychology beyond psychologists

As you can see, psychological principles are used in everyday practices for the things we interact with the most. When you’re creating something for the average user, understanding what makes them tick is an important step in your research phase that gets overlooked all too often.

At Tuff, intentionality behind every choice from your website hierarchy to the headers on a page and the colors you choose for your brand is second nature to us. If it seems a little overwhelming to you, we’ve got your back. 💪

The post The Psychology of Website Visitors: How We Use It to Improve Conversions appeared first on Tuff.

An image focusing on a laptop with a video editing program open, representing the technical side of crafting engaging content for video marketing campaigns.

A great inbound strategy revolves around one central component: creating an experience where prospects’ can have all their questions answered quickly. If video is not part of your inbound strategy, consider this: 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2023. 

Video is no longer a supplement to your marketing mix, it’s part of the table stakes. It allows businesses to communicate their message quickly, effectively and in a way that captures the attention of their target audience. 

Let’s take a deeper look at why video is so effective for your growth marketing strategy and what you can do to enhance your video usage quickly. 

Video helps users understand your offering faster

Videos offer speed in a way that other forms of content simply cannot. I’m not talking about loading speeds of a particular webpage, but rather the speed at which your prospects truly understand the essence of your offering. 

Let’s face it, people do not have the time or patience to read through every bit of text on your website. While you should still take care of your blogs and be very intentional with copywriting, you need content that quickly gets to your brand’s core. 

Video content is a highly effective way to convey your message quickly and in a way that is easily digestible. In fact, 96% of people have watched an explainer video to understand a product or service. By creating short and informative videos, you can convey your brand’s message in a way that is easy to understand, informative, and engaging. Best of all, it accomplishes all this quickly. 

Video marketing for technical services and products

This becomes all the more important if you have a technical or niche offering. Can you really rely on new users to read your 5,000 word blog explaining your product? Probably not. Can you rely on them to watch a 15 second intro video? Now we’re thinking more realistically. 

Here’s an example from one of our partners, Hustle. Hustle is a platform that allows mission-driven organizations to send text messaging campaigns out to their audiences. They offer a technical product with a ton of features, and needed a way to quickly and effectively explain why their features stood out amongst competitors.

We all know that a slow loading homepage destroys a website’s conversion rate. Think of your prospects’ brains as an extension of this “loading time”. The faster and more frictionless the “loading time”, the greater your likelihood of success. 

The shareability of video marketing

Regardless of your industry or vertical, peer-to-peer sharing plays a crucial role in growing your business’ reach. Whether you need your messaging relayed to a key decision maker, or simply need a larger digital footprint, you need content that is highly shareable. Videos are just that. 

Users are far more likely to share a brand with their peers if it includes a video. In fact, videos are far more shareable than static posts, blogs, or any other form of content. By creating engaging and shareable videos, you can increase your brand’s reach and awareness.

The video below is a great example of Tuff using video marketing for our own marketing strategies. In this video, a PPC expert on our team, Adli, talks about performance max. Sure, we could have posted a blog link or a graphic. But we knew that a video would be a more effective way to explain a semi-complicated topic, and it would be more shareable online.

If you’re thinking that video is simply too costly to produce, it’s really not. There are lots of ways to produce inexpensive video content that can bolster your inbound strategy. 

Using video to build credibility

Adding credibility or social proof to your site is important for gaining traction with users who have never heard of your brand. But the secret is out about reviews and users have grown skeptical of 5-star reviews from aggregator sites they’ve never heard of. And a written testimonial from some random person doesn’t always inspire a ton of confidence. 

Video testimonials are a much more powerful way to demonstrate your brand’s credibility. They provide social proof that your products or services are reliable and trustworthy. In fact, 79% of people say that watching a video convinced them to buy a software or app. By showcasing customer experiences, you can build trust and credibility with potential customers. 

We do this ourselves here at Tuff! Look how much more powerful a video testimonial is at giving a real authentic look at our offerings, compared to a random 5-star icon that could easily have been written by a bot.

Humanize your brand

We get it, chatGPT is everywhere. It is exciting, intimidating, and all anyone wants to talk about. But let’s take stock of what people are doing with it and what impacts AI is currently having on marketing.

With chatbots, anyone can quickly (and cheaply!) increase their blog output by a hundredfold. Regardless of the quality of that content, the fact is there’s about to be a lot more noise in the form of blogs. Blogs used to be a space where experts could directly convey their findings to a broader audience. With chatbots part of the marketing equation, the barrier to entry for creating decent blog content went from low to non-existent. There’s not really much time left for blogs to allow you to really stand out as a business.

While blogs are becoming increasingly easy to produce with the help of chatbots, videos still require a human touch. Sure, AI can produce videos now too, but a well-crafted explainer video, testimonial, demo, etc. still requires a human touch with extensive expertise of a brand’s offerings. 

A well-produced video gives your brand a more authentic experience rather than pages and pages of copy that’s just AI-generated. By creating authentic and engaging videos, you can connect with your target audience on a more personal level.

Video content is highly effective and important for inbound marketing. It is a powerful tool that can communicate your brand’s message quickly, effectively and in a way that captures the attention of your target audience. By leveraging the benefits of video content, you can increase your brand’s reach, credibility and ultimately, your revenue. Stay ahead of the curve and start putting your video content to the test. 

The post Why Video Marketing Should Be the Centerpiece of Your Inbound Strategy appeared first on Tuff.

It’s always important to make sure you’re investing every marketing dollar in channels that yield the best return. But during periods of economic uncertainty, efficiency becomes more important than ever. To do that well, marketers are asked to leave no stone unturned when analyzing their marketing strategies. This often includes finding ways to make the traffic you are sending to your site convert at a higher rate with conversion rate optimization strategies. 

How you approach website testing is often referred to as conversion rate optimization (CRO). This methodology helps make sure you aren’t leaving potential revenue on the table when you are investing in new customer acquisition. 

If you’re spending time, money and resources driving traffic to your site, you want to make sure they convert when they get there. A nicely sharpened CRO strategy can help improve your return on ad spend. In this post, we’ll explore different methods for website testing to maximize your media dollars. First, let’s dive into what website A/B testing is. 

What is conversion rate optimization? 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is essentially a marketing experiment that involves splitting your audience into at least 2 or more variations to see which campaign or website change performs better. Many businesses turn to A/B testing when they are looking for ways to maximize conversions like revenue, transactions, leads, and more. 

There are several ways to set up a conversion rate optimization test for your site, and we really get into the nitty gritty details in this post. You can use tools like Optimizely to construct true A/B and multivariate tests, or you could lean on A/B experiment features that are native to almost every ad channel. The way that you logistically build your test is unique to each scenario. What you want to learn, the variables you can control (and the ones you can’t), and the amount of traffic you get to your site are all common factors that help determine how you’ll set up your A/B test.

No matter the tool or how you build a conversion rate optimization test, three things should remain top of mind: 

1. Start with a hypothesis. To build a strong experiment, go back to your 3rd grade science fair project and start with a hypothesis. “If I change X on my website, I think that X more users will sign up for a free demo.” Orienting your CRO plan in an hypothesis will help make sure that your experiment is structured around a problem, the solution, and the intended result.
2. Always have a control in every experiment. You need a baseline to compare test results to, and you do that by testing one variable at a time against the control – which is usually a page or website element that’s been in use for at least 3 months and has seen a significant amount of traffic already. 
3. Minimize the amount of variables that could cause any change in data. If you test too many things at once, you’ll never know which change caused the biggest lift. It’s important to make sure that you’re focusing on one or two variables at a time to know what really works. This includes keeping your traffic mix similar across tests. If you were to suddenly invest 3x in paid search campaigns, you’d see a higher proportion of your traffic coming from a high-intent channel, which would likely skew on-site behavior metrics and conversion rates. 

What are the benefits of conversion rate optimization (CRO) testing? 

There are several reasons why brands should consistently adopt a testing-first mentality. We’re going to dive into some of the most important benefits, specifically when it comes to CRO testing on your site.

First, it helps you minimize risk. Instead of designing and developing a significant change to your website and implementing it across 100% of your site, you get to test it with a smaller portion of your traffic. Rolling out a new change to all users without knowing how it will impact them is swimming in dangerous waters. 

In fact, publishing a new website experience on your site without testing it could hurt your ROI. Let’s say you’re redesigning the form flow on a webinar sign up landing page. If this change DIDN’T work and you changed the landing page so that 100% of traffic saw the new version, you could have tanked cost per sign up.

With data-backed A/B testing, you only show a small number of users a CRO experience change. Once this runs for a few weeks and reaches statistical significance, you’ll know whether or not you should go ahead and add those changes for all users. Without sacrificing results while you test.

Common website testing misconceptions

One conversion rate optimization misconception is that you need lots of traffic. That doesn’t always have to be the case. There are methods for testing on low-traffic websites where you can still obtain valuable results. You shouldn’t be discouraged from testing just because you overall site traffic is low.

Another misconception is that everything on your site should be tested. If you take that approach, you’ll muddy any key learnings. It’s critical to know your business needs, and prioritize pages and website elements that will help improve your main objective. Do you want to increase purchases? Focus on the product pages and checkout funnel. Are you trying to increase qualified leads that sign up for a product demo? Prioritize CTAs on your homepage, pricing page, and other high-intent pages on your site. 

Prioritizing conversion rate optimizations based on impact to revenue

When you have limited resources and are focused on driving efficiency across all of your marketing touch points, it can be overwhelming to decide what to focus on. That’s where a prioritization framework comes in. 

First, outline your main goal. Then, define the website elements you want to test. There may be many places on your site to test that can help increase your main goal, so which one should you start with first? The one that will have the most impact on revenue, and with the fewest resources. If most of your new customer acquisition strategies rely on paid media, we recommend optimizing those landing pages first to eliminate wasted spend. Then, we focus on top direct and organic pages. 

How we use the ICE prioritization model

Here at Tuff, we use the ICE prioritization model to build a CRO testing plan. Let’s say you’ve identified an opportunity on a paid landing page. You saw that it wasn’t bringing in many qualified lead gen form submissions, so you decided to test a different CTA copy on the form and change the hero image. Which of these should be tested first? 

Let’s use ICE model to answer this question. ICE stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. For each experiment, you rate each of those three elements on a scale of 1-5 based on how confident you are on the potential impact of the experience, and how much effort it will take to build.

You rate each test and add the sum up. The test with the highest score should go first. Now that we have defined it, let’s answer the question of which one should we test first. 

Based on this example, the CTA copy change is the first test that should be implemented because it has a higher score. This is because the impact on the main goal, lead gen form submissions, is much higher than changing the hero image. 

Beyond incremental CRO tests: user flow experiments that nurture users

Not all users are ready to take that high-intent action like reaching out to sales, attending a demo, and purchasing that product or service. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find ways to capture their information to nurture them through the funnel. That’s when adding new funnel entry points should be a larger part of your website strategy.

Take Slido for example. You can find five different entry points. You have a contact sales entry point, a signup entry point, a join-a-meeting entry point, a get started for free entry point and a schedule a demo entry point.  These entry points benefit Slido as it opens up more opportunities to get leads. They may lead users in different directions but the objective is the same: obtain leads. The approach Slido takes is very subtle and not overbearing with the same CTA or CTA copy. 

To build out a lead gen website like Slido’s you have to start by analyzing your user flow. 

What is currently working and what is stopping users from moving forward?  Answering these questions with data can help you come up with the perfect testing strategy.  Let’s analyze two user flow types: eCommerce and lead generation. 

Typical eCommerce User Flow

An eCommerce user flow usually begins on the homepage. Does your homepage push users to where you want them to go like a product collection page? The homepage’s only purpose is to push users to other pages so if you’re not contributing to the visibility of your products, you are already negatively impacting your conversions. 

eCommerce Homepage

Let’s take a look at Prime Shrimp as an example. On the homepage, there is a section after the value props that categorizes their product based on diet. This is unique because most e-commerce sites categorize by product types/flavors.

eCommerce Product Pages

Once a user visits your site and navigates to the right products, the next action is to add a product to their cart. Based on the content on the product pages, are you convincing users enough to add that product to their cart? Are you explaining why you’re different than competitors? Why should the user buy your product over someone else’s? 

This is when you should lean on audience research to understand buyer motivations, and find ways to incorporate those reasons to buy in your product pages. Are there positive reviews that can motivate the user?  Are CTAs clearly visible? 

With Prime Shrimp, we saw that including reviews (4.7★ in this case), improves the add to cart rate on product pages. 

We also tested adding different product guarantees to quickly illustrate other important value props that help differentiate from competitors, like: 

• 100% satisfaction guaranteed
• No need to thaw before cooking
• No antibiotics ever

Add to Cart ➡️ Checkout

Once a user adds a product to their cart, are you making it clear that you want them to checkout? When a user is checking out, are you making it easier for them to move to the next step or actually pay? Is it easy for the user to add their information on any device they might be on?

 Are there exit opportunities, like a navigation bar that can prevent a user from completing their purchase?  These are all example user behaviors that you can construct CRO tests around.

Common Lead Gen User Flows

Every lead gen flow is different. Some are longer than others but the goal is the same: obtain leads. There are many ways to optimize your lead generation flow. You have to first look at the page or set of pages that take users to fill out the form. Does it give users the proper amount of information that they need to convert? How about the form itself? Does it contain unnecessary fields that can be removed? 

Remember, the more fields a form has, the higher the chance that a user bounces. Does the CTA outline what’s happening next or is it very broad like “submit”? 

One of Tuff’s partners, Tony’s Acoustic Challenge (TAC), does very well in showing the proper amount of information, keeping their form short with only two fields, and having a clear CTA outlining what’s going to happen next. 

You can test your entire user flow at once or start page by page to obtain page-specific results. This can help you optimize your site from the homepage all the way to the thank you page. 

4 additional CRO tests that drive meaningful results

There are some experiences that, across multiple industries and business models, tend to have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. We’ll dive into some of our go-to conversion rate optimization experiences to test in the first 3 months of a new partnership, all of which can be applied to an e-commerce or a lead generation funnel. 

1. Test social proof or security measures in visible areas and throughout the user funnel. 

Social proof has always done well on websites, but do you have them located in the right place? The most common place one can find social proof is at the bottom of the homepage where visibility is less than 30%.  You want to place it where you want a user to take action whether it is close to an add-to-cart CTA or the submit button of a lead gen form.

After you have placed social proof in a visible area near the main action, test multiple social proof types throughout your funnel. For example, if your lead gen form is multiple pages long, test videos, reviews, ratings, and featured in logos throughout that funnel. This will help strengthen a user’s trust in the brand. If this is an e-commerce site, show a featured section on the homepage hero, add reviews on the product pages or product category pages, and in the cart, show the number of users who have purchased a product or show a very positive review. 

Continuous display of social proof will encourage a user to convert. Xendoo for example has a lead gen form that is several pages long. Throughout it, there is social proof and security measures communicated. These are used to strengthen trust in the brand. 

2. Set expectations for the next steps in CTA

If your landing page is from an ad, it’s important to make the entire user journey is cohesive. A way you can do that is to make sure the CTA copy that was on the ad is the same on the landing page. For example, let’s say you are doing lead gen and the ad’s CTA  says “book a 10min call” and when the user clicks on the ad, the landing page’s form CTA says “submit”. This copy doesn’t match up with the ad and it may confuse users about what will happen next. If you use the same copy, you are setting expectations for the user and you are helping them establish trust with you. They came to book a 10min call and they expect that to happen when they add in their information 

CTA best practices

Even if you are not running any ads, this still applies. It’s important to be as clear as possible about what will happen when a user clicks on any CTA. Will they be contacted soon? Are they booking a call? Will they get a callback? Or start a free trial? Using CTA copy like “next” “submit” or “contact us” is too vague and doesn’t tell a user what will happen next when they submit a form. For eCommerce CTA copy is usually clear like “add to cart”, view products”,  or “checkout”. There are, however, opportunities to make this kind of copy clearer. 

Overall, your CTAs should have three things: be specific, convey benefit, and contain a trigger word. We want our CTA to be specific meaning define what will happen after a user clicks the button. It should also convey benefits. How will clicking on the CTA benefit the user?  Lastly, it should contain a trigger word, one that will push a user into clicking. A great example is Slang who advertised a 10 minute call on their ads. Their landing page contained the same objective and this helped increase form submissions by triple digits. 

3. Test fewer form fields and autofill

Interested in having more users purchase or lead form submissions? Try reducing your form fields. If there are optional fields of information you don’t need, then try removing them. This is the easiest and most impactful change as each form fill removed will reduce friction. Remember to always test this best practice as sometimes, reducing form fields can have a negative effect on the form itself. It may be considered “spammy” or less legitimate. 

Another best practice that goes hand in hand with reducing the form fills is offering autofill the fields that allow it. For example, most addresses can be fully filled by just typing part of it. Doing so encourages the user to continue and brings them closer to submitting the form whether it’s lead gen or a purchase. Using TAC as an example again, we see that they only need two things: a name and an email address. This helps reduce hesitation and increases the likelihood that the user will submit the form. 

4. Offer an incentive to encourage users to complete the main goal

Do you want users to sign up for your email, purchase, or fill out a form? If so, you should know that users are usually hesitant to fill out a form or purchase to begin with but if you offer something in return, you increase the possibility of them completing it. 

This can either be a discount on a product for an eCommerce site or offering a free download for a lead gen form. Offering an incentive helps answer a user’s “what’s in it for me” question and goes hand in hand with reducing exit and bounce rates. A great example is StyleMe who offered a discount when a user tried to leave the checkout. You ask them for their email address and in return, they receive a personalized discount. 

Interested in learning more about how a growth marketing agency like Tuff can help strategize conversion rate optimization opportunities on your website? Hit us up! 

The post Cracking the Code to Conversion Rate Optimization: A/B Testing Strategies to Maximize Revenue appeared first on Tuff.

As marketers know all too well, one of the hardest parts of the job is measuring success in your campaigns. Digital marketing was supposed to be different though. It promised the ability to measure all of the touchpoints that your individual advert had with customers so that you could quickly and definitively tell if your marketing was working.

But it hasn’t played out quite that way. 

As the profession has matured and the placements have expanded, it has become harder than ever to measure the impact of your marketing dollars. Every platform tells an ostensibly different story than the next, and none of them seem to capture the full story. 

That’s because of that dirty little A word, Attribution. Every channel leverages its own attribution models to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Marketers struggle to tell the story as many default to last-touch or first-touch. Some get crafty and leverage more complex attribution models like U-shape or even Time Decay attribution.

This has been exacerbated by Apple and their App Tracking Transparency that was ushered onto us with iOS 14 in 2021. Suddenly, tracking the user journey became more complicated.

Many growth marketing agencies and brands have turned to multi-touch attribution and market mix models to justify their spending at the top of the funnel. They know that investment in awareness is critical, but can they tell that story with data?

Fortunately, there is a framework available that can help shape that story by tying in dark impact. Read on to learn more.

What is a dark impact campaign and why are they important? 

There used to be an old rule of thumb that circulated through marketing textbooks that said a person needs to see or hear your ad 7 times before they’re ready to buy your product. While this number is constantly debated, the underlying logic is that people need time to warm up to you before they trust you enough to make a purchase.

This is increasingly true for B2B marketing. Buying cycles are getting longer, and this is being exaggerated by slowing market conditions. There are more stakeholders and decision influencers than ever before. So there are more people that need to be comfortable with you and your product or service before they’re ready to even schedule a demo or take a call.

But relying only on last-click metrics can be costly. That is where Dark Impact comes in.

Dark Impact, Dark Funnel, and Dark Social are all concepts that describe the activities inside of the buyer’s journey that you can’t measure or account for. Specifically for the context of this blog, we’re describing how viewing an ad on Facebook then turns into a Google Search or a TikTok purchase.

Some examples of Dark Social activities are: 

• An exchange in the comment section of a Facebook post
• Asking your friend or colleague on LinkedIn for their opinion on an agency or analytics tool
• Doing a Google search after seeing an ad 
• Scrolling through TikTok product videos to learn more

These dark funnel activities don’t show up in analytics, yet they influence decisions constantly.

How to get “dark impact” data into your analytics tools

Dark Intent Metrics

When it comes to measuring dark impact, by definition, these metrics are a bit more elusive. They’re not readily available inside of a single analytics tool.

Still, there are a few metrics that you can look at to get an idea of how dark activities are impacting your marketing performance.

Branded Queries in Google Search Console

First, using Google Search Console you can visibly see awareness being created. Looking at the performance report, you can get an idea of what queries your website is showing up for organically. 

To get an idea of the dark impact on your website’s traffic, what you’ll want to do is benchmark how many impressions you were getting on branded queries prior to starting campaigns or making campaign changes.

From there, you can compare the number of impressions that you’ve received since the campaign went live. This will help you to see that more people are turning to Google to learn more about your brand.

Note: This is far from a perfect solution. It shows you the cumulative lift or decline but it doesn’t help you identify which channel or campaign specifically led to the change. There are ways you can isolate variables when using this particular measurement method to prove the effectiveness of top of funnel campaigns. 

When combined with more data though, the picture begins to gain some more fidelity.

GA4 Conversion Path

Another useful way to get an idea of the dark funnel your customers are following is to use the Conversion Path report in GA4. This report is also available in Universal Analytics but since Google is deprecating Universal Analytics in favor of GA4, we’ll focus on that.

Inside GA4, if you click the advertising tab on the left-hand side, you’ll arrive at an advertising snapshot. Underneath Attribution on the left, you can click conversion paths to see all of the touchpoints that are being used on the way to conversions on your website.

To get the “Dark Utility” from this report, you have to read between the lines a bit. This is a starting point for the exploration and not the destination.

I recommend changing your filtering from Default Channel Grouping to Campaign. This will allow you to identify how many campaigns users are touching before they’re ready to convert. Maybe the users visited 3 of your traffic campaigns and 1 Google Display before finally clicking a Google Search ad. 

If most of the converters happen from a single campaign touched, then congratulations you have an all-star. 

If though, most conversions happen from multiple touch points across multiple channels, this is an invitation to dive deeper. This signals that it took more coaxing before they were ready to convert, and there’s no reason to suspect that there wasn’t more influence here.

Meta “Go To Google” Metrics

One of the challenges of reporting with Meta and other DSPs is that each platform uses its own model for attribution. Many of these platforms include view-through conversions that don’t appear inside of Google Analytics. 

The most common attribution view in Meta is “7-day click or 1-day view”. This means that Meta measures conversions that happen within 7 days after a click on an ad or 1 day after you view it. 

This presents a challenge for marketing managers and directors that need to reconcile the data in their primary analytics tool with what their media buyers are reporting within the ad accounts.

Fortunately, the Meta Pixel collects all website traffic, not just traffic coming from Meta ads. This means that we can build custom audiences and filter where the traffic came from using both referring domains or UTMs contained in the individual URLs.

What are Meta “Go To Google” Metrics?

Using custom conversions inside of Facebook’s ads manager, we can build micro conversions that capture the number of people that view your Facebook ad, don’t click, and travel to your site via another channel.

As we’ve covered, tools like Google Analytics are really good at measuring Bottom Funnel campaigns because they are typically more measurable and direct. Where they leave a lot on the table, though, is in evaluating how ad impressions on one channel affect performance on another lower funnel channel.

There may be instances where a campaign doesn’t drive a high volume of clicks or last-click revenue, but that campaign is excellent at generating awareness and getting people to do a  Google search. 

Using more traditional methods of tracking saddles you with this blindspot. Using the “Go To Google” Metrics helps you see things that were previously hidden.

How to Track Facebook Impressions to High-Intent Google Searches

It’s actually pretty simple to build custom conversions in ads manager to measure the impact of dark social campaigns on Meta. It essentially entails two steps:

• Create custom conversions Inside of Facebook to Measure Traffic From other web sources
• Setup Your Facebook Columns so that you can see the results

Watch the video tutorial below to see how you build these custom conversions and bring the data into your Facebook columns to see results.

Translating dark social impact to leadership

What gets measured gets managed. The presumed certainty that derives from being able to see a clear and direct link between ad spend and revenue can be alluring for c-suite executives and board members. 

That’s why it is imperative that you understand the story so that you can paint the picture clearly for important stakeholders. The gift and the curse of performance marketing and demand generation efforts is that we have tidy metrics that make us feel like we can confidently tell a story. The problem is that that story is devoid of context without examining the impact of ad impressions and other hard-to-measure activities.

The ability to not only recognize the dark impact ,but also to be able to explain it, allows you to unlock control of a deeper more meaningful narrative. 

It allows you to justify continued investment in channels and campaigns that might not look as strong in Google Analytics. 

It helps to illustrate how one channel affects another one in your brand’s marketing ecosystem. 

It is for this reason that as you evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns across stages of the marketing funnel, you spend some time looking at blended metrics like CPAs and CAC. Combining blended metrics, with dark funnel measurement will seat you in a position to make more intentional decisions.

The post How to Measure and Invest in “Dark Social” Campaigns appeared first on Tuff.

There’s been a lot of talk about an economic downturn—and what that means for marketing budgets. In a recent survey, 75% of global brands said signals of a recession influenced their media budgets for 2023. 

Some have already seen their budgets shrink. While others are keeping or increasing their marketing budgets, but taking a much closer look at the return on investment (ROI). 

The challenge many marketers face now is how to do more with less money.

Regardless of the state of the economy, there are two main priorities you can focus on to make the most of your marketing dollars: 

• Spend smarter on paid media channels – Analyze data on your audience targeting, media channels, creative, and landing page performance to reveal where to put your money and what you need to improve. 
• Invest in owned media channels – A strong content strategy drives inbound traffic, leads, conversions, and revenue.  

As a growth marketing and content strategy agency, Tuff helps brand partners with paid and owned channels. However, in this article, we’ll focus on owned channels—in particular, your website, content, and search engine optimization (SEO). 

We’ll show you how to build a content strategy that helps reduce your paid marketing spend and contributes to customer acquisition, sales, and revenue. 

Table of contents 

• Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023
• How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy
• Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023

When marketing budgets are tight, organic marketing shines. The main reason for this seems obvious—money. Here are the main reasons that investing in content marketing can save you money (and help you make more) in the long run. 

1. Get nearly free traffic

SEO is one of the few remaining ways to raise brand awareness and reach potential customers without paying for every click.

Unlike paid channels, you don’t pay for every click and sale that you get. You may pay upfront for the cost to create content. But, once you publish it, you don’t pay anything. If you’re on the first page of Google search results, you could drive hundreds to thousands of visitors from it every month for free. 

2. Attract higher-quality inbound leads

Instead of going to leads (outbound marketing), you get them to come to you (inbound marketing). Content is a core component to build an inbound marketing strategy. It helps you attract and convert new visitors and leads. Around 76% of marketers use content to generate leads.

According to Hubspot’s 2022 report, SEO is the second most effective channel for acquiring new customers, behind social media. 

When prospects and potential customers find your content organically and reach out to you, you’re more likely to make a sale. For over 60% of marketers, inbound marketing—SEO, blogs, and so on—is their highest quality lead source. 

3. Build brand awareness and educate customers

Content Marketing Institute’s (CMIs) 2022 report found that the top five goals marketers achieve through content marketing are:

• Raising brand awareness
• Building trust 
• Educating their audience   
• Building loyalty with clients and customers
• Generating leads and demand

If you only focus on ads, your brand can feel too transactional. Organic content tends to be more educational. 

For example, you might create content that answers a common question or pain point for customers. This type of content provides value without outright asking for anything in return, which builds trust and affinity. 

When customers are ready to buy, they might click on an ad or go directly to your website. However, there’s a significant chance they entered the funnel by consuming your content first.

How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy

All the benefits above might sound great, but they also rely on having a strong content strategy. Here’s how to build one like a pro. 

1. Outline clear, measurable goals

Every marketing strategy starts with goal-setting, but it’s even more important for content. Goals vary widely and tracking is challenging, so be as clear as possible. To set goals for content marketing, begin by answering these questions: 

• How does your marketing goal contribute to your bottom line? 
• To be successful, what milestones do you need to reach?
• How will you measure success? 
• When do you need to reach your goal? 

Some examples of content marketing goals could be to:

• Grow organic website traffic by at least 30% month-over-month (MoM)
• Attract at least 250 organic leads monthly 
• Increase organic revenue by 25% in six months

Once you’ve set a clear direction, then you can begin planning your content strategy. 

2. Choose content topics based on data

The biggest mistake that I see some brands make when planning content is choosing topics without data. 

Instead, they brainstorm themes and generate ideas that are based on assumptions. For example, let’s say a brand sells products and services to women business owners. The brand creates a week’s worth of content around Mother’s Day, including a listicle of Mother’s Day gift ideas. 

But, is that really what the audience wants? Simply because your audience is made up of women, it doesn’t mean they’re mothers. Plus, how does that topic relate to the service or solution you provide? 

When you base your content strategy on assumptions, at best, you’ll have little to no results. At worst, you could end up offending and losing your audience. 

When money is tight, the last thing you want to do is invest in creating content based on assumptions. So, what do you do instead? Use data to inform your content decisions. Here are two types of data you’ll need: 

• Audience data – this is where you uncover customer pain points, motivations, hesitations, and more factors that influence buying decisions. 
• Keyword data – this is the traditional SEO approach to building a content strategy, by looking at monthly keyword search volume and difficulty to rank. 

The best content strategies include both types of research. In the next two steps, we’ll walk you through how to do both—audience and keyword research—to create content strategies that consistently deliver results. 

3. Conduct audience research and create personas

Most audience research starts with basic demographic information—age, location, income, education, and so on. You can pull this information from: 

• Your current marketing channels (email, social media)
• Google Analytics and other attribution software
• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools 

However, this is only a start. True audience research goes beyond demographics and digs into qualitative data including: 

• Pain points
• Aspirations (desired outcomes)
• Motivations
• Hesitations
• Perceived value
• Other influences on buying decisions

There are many ways to collect qualitative audience data, but we recommend starting with two—message-mining and customer interviews or surveys. 

Message-mining example

Message-mining, also called review-mining, is when you pull feedback from your customer reviews on your website, Google, and sites like Trustpilot or G2. You can compile the reviews into a simple spreadsheet like this one. 

The process often reveals:

• Features and benefits your customers love
• Products and services you need to improve 
• Your unique value proposition

You can also message-mine competitor reviews. Positive reviews will show you where competitors are winning. Mixed and negative reviews reveal opportunities—they show you where you can beat competitors. 

The key is to look for patterns and de-prioritize outliers. What benefits or drawbacks appear the most? 

Example customer interview questions 

If you’re conducting interviews or surveys, here are sample questions to ask and which data point they reveal:

• Pain points – What problems does this product/service solve for you? 
• Aspirations – What do you hope to achieve by using this product/service? 
• Motivations – When did you realize you needed this product/service? 
• Hesitations – Was there anything about this product/service that you had questions or hesitations about? 
• Perceived value – What made you choose this product/service over other competitors?

We could devote an entire blog to audience research, and it still wouldn’t cover everything. If you have limited resources though, this will help you get the most important audience data. 

With all this data, you should have a better understanding of your audience to create personas. Audience personas should include demographics as well as qualitative research like pain points.

4. Perform keyword research 

How will you get your content in front of your audience? Most people won’t navigate directly to your website and go to your blog, so you need a way to distribute your content. 

For most businesses, that means SEO. First, you need to identify which searches your audience is putting in Google, and which you want to show up for—these are your keywords. 

To find them, you’ll conduct keyword research with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. 

At the start of keyword research, it’s okay to have a lot of ideas. Later on, you’ll trim your list and prioritize keywords that will have the most impact on your bottom line. Now that you’ve done audience research, it’s easier to put yourself in your audience’s shoes too.

How to identify keywords

To identify keywords, begin by looking at your: 

• Paid keywords – Are there keywords in paid campaigns that you could rank for organically?
• Current rankings – What is your site ranking for currently? Which pieces of content could rank in a higher position if you refresh the content? 
• Competitors – What keywords and pieces of content drive organic traffic to your competitors’ sites?
• Audience and intent – Does the person searching this keyword align with your audience? How likely are they to convert to a lead or customer?

Paid keywords you can find in your Google Ads and Analytics account. 

Current rankings you can find in Google Search Console. You can also use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. If you’re using Ahrefs, you’ll go to Site Explorer and drop in your website URL. Then, click on organic keywords from the left menu. 

If you’re using Semrush, you’ll go to Domain Overview, add your website URL, and hit Search.

Then, scroll down to Top Organic Keywords and click View details. For SEO research, you’ll want to exclude branded keywords. This is usually your company name, so it wouldn’t be a keyword that you target with content. 

For example, this is what it looks like if you put REI’s website into Semrush and filter out branded terms. Three of the top keywords that drive non-branded traffic to the site are: hiking shoes, paddle board, and sleeping bag. 

To find what keywords your competitors are ranking for, follow the same process or do a keyword gap analysis. 

For audience and intent, refer back to your audience research. You can also bring in data from sales and customer service teams to identify questions and pain points that arise after your initial research. 

Keyword research is only one part of SEO. To rank in search results, you’ll need to structure your content and website intentionally with best practices. You may need technical SEO experts to optimize your website too. 

Also, you may create content without SEO. But, that means you’ll need a budget for paid content distribution to get content in front of your target audience. 

5. Prioritize topics that relate to your products and services 

To make the most of your marketing dollars, you’ll narrow down your content strategy to focus on the most impactful topics.  

To do this, start with a map of your customer journey and ask:  

• What questions do potential customers have as they learn about your business? 
• How can you help answer those questions with content? 

Then, narrow down your choices further by asking: 

• What pain points does this content address and do I actually have a product or service that helps solve them? 

Every topic you choose should originate from data—either keyword or audience data. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t leave a small percentage open for experimentation. However, when marketing budgets are small, it’s harder to take those risks. 

You’ll also want to select topics that map back to a core product or service and include an internal link to those landing pages.  

6. Measure results and adjust 

How you measure success will ultimately depend on the goals you set at the start. For SEO content, the typical metrics for success focus on the quantity and quality of organic traffic. 

Here’s some examples of ways to measure results for content and SEO.  

SEO tends to take longer to see results than paid because you aren’t paying for a spot at the top of search results. Typically, we start to see results after three to six months. 

Now you have a solid plan, here’s how to execute it with high-quality content. 

Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Part of the challenge of building a content strategy is deciding what types of content to create. There are so many options that it can lead to decision paralysis. 

We’ve created many types of content for B2C and B2B brands. Here are some types of content we recommend to drive inbound marketing efforts and focus on more traffic and conversions. 

1. Comparison content

For this, you create in-depth comparisons of you vs. your competitors. There are two main reasons to create comparison content. First, if you don’t have a lot of brand recognition, you could possibly steal some from your competitors that do. 

Second, it’s ideal content that sits at the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Your prospects and customers are already researching your brand. They can either get the information from a third-party or even your competitors or hear it straight from you. 

Many companies from project management tools to bookkeeping software create comparison content. Gusto, for example, has an entire pillar page of comparison content. 

Each page features a comparison chart and an overview of the most important differences. ClickUp is another company that leans into comparison content. Comparison pages have easy to understand charts with key features. 

2. Articles about pricing  

If your company is being mindful of spending, your customers may be too. Be upfront about pricing, because it’s one of the first and most important factors that buyers look for on your website. 

You could also drive organic traffic and qualified leads to your website with content around pricing. There may be keywords that follow one of these formats: 

• How much does (your product or service) cost? 
• (Your product or service) pricing 
• (Your product or service) cost

For example, let’s say you search “how much does a mattress cost”. According to Semrush, there are over 6,600 monthly searches, and it’s possible to rank for the term. 

It could be a great keyword for a mattress company like Casper or Nectar to rank for organically. (Even though they are paying for paid shopping spots.)

On the other hand, Enterprise ranks in the number one spot for a pricing question: how much does it cost to rent a car? With over 6,600 monthly searches, it likely drives a large chunk of qualified traffic every month for free.

By the time someone searches for pricing, they’re close to buying. As a company, you want to show up when they are ready to buy. Prioritizing pricing content is one way to do that. 

3. Video content

Video is the top content type for marketers, followed by blogs and images, according to HubSpot’s latest marketing report. 

You can use all those types of content together and repurpose them on channels outside of your website like YouTube. 

Combining and repurposing content has two benefits. You save money by stretching how you use your creative assets, and you increase your content effectiveness. 

For example, on average, blogs with videos get 70% more organic traffic. 

Here are some examples of videos to include in your content strategy:

• Product demos 
• Short-form videos
• Tutorials

4. Templates and interactive content

Interactive content gets almost 53% more engagement than traditional static content. Examples of interactive content include: 

• Quizzes
• Calculators
• Webinars
• Video 
• Templates 
• Forms

Another perk that comes with creating interactive content is that you can use it for lead generation. For example, when potential customers take a quiz, they may provide their email along with information about themselves that helps you get to know them. 

These are only a few examples of content to get started. Along the way, you may add other types of content that are inspired by customer and audience research. 

Investing in a strong content strategy will help you spend smarter. But, remember to base your content decisions on data, like you would with any other marketing campaign.

Interested in working with Tuff on a content strategy for your business? Let’s talk!

The post Building an Inbound Content Strategy to Acquire Customers appeared first on Tuff.

Attention, growth minded marketing leaders! As you look for ways to automate processes, increase campaign effectiveness, and scale your business, AI marketing tools should be at the top of your list. 

Why? AI tools supercharge efficiency. 

With AI, tedious and time-intensive tasks are automated or greatly sped up. The result? Teams have room to focus on strategy and big-picture tasks instead of being bogged down. 

Don’t just take our word for it. As Gartner CMO predictions hint, “ By 2025, organizations that use AI across the marketing function will shift 75% of their staff’s operations from production to more strategic activities. 

As a growth marketing agency, There’s a lot to be gained from integrating AI marketing tools into your marketing efforts. So scroll on to get acquainted with some of the top tools CMOs should know about. 

How Marketers Should Evaluate and Select AI Tools

We’ll dive into the helpful (and potentially game-changing) AI tools shortly. But, allow us a moment to discuss proper tool selection. After all, there’s no shortage of AI tools on the market. And with the arrival of ChatGPT and the ensuing buzz among marketers, the tool options are only growing. 

How do you sift through the noise? 

Use these steps to find tools that align with business goals, budget, and team structure. 

Establish Clear Goals

Before stepping foot into the vast marketplace of AI marketing tools, define your business goal. Are you hoping to:

• Improve customer engagement?
• Optimize a process?
• Increase content output?
• Automate repetitive tasks?

Once you know exactly what problem you need solved, the range of options shrinks from overwhelming to more manageable. For example, say a head of growth wants to increase content production efficiency and sets a goal of reducing the time it takes to create and publish content by 30%. In light of this, turning to tools that center on: 

• Content editing 
• Content scheduling 
• Content optimization

While knowing the goal is crucial,  there’s still more to consider. 

Research Available  Integrations

AI tools should make your life easier. So it’s crucial to evaluate one based on how it would fit into You deserve an AI tool that plays well with others 🤝. 

If there are certain tools your team uses and relies on heavily,  ensure your potential AI marketing tools can integrate with them. For example, if you already rely on a marketing automation platform like Marketo, you could start your search by looking for tools that have direct integrations with Marekto. Ask things like: 

• Are there costs attached to integrating the tool with our systems? 
• Are there APIs or webhooks available for custom integrations?
• How well does the tool’s API integrate with our current tools?

Ease of integration is another metric you can use when evaluating tools. White some tools are out of the box integrations, others may demand technical work to fully integrate. So determine what resources your team can set aside for integration and decide accordingly. 

Consider The Learning Curve

A lot of AI marketing tools boast ease of use and intuitive platforms. But it’s still essential to determine how steep the learning curve for the tool will be. Look to the tool to see if onboarding materials are provided and whether there is a support system for troubleshooting in case problems arise 🤖. 

Here are a few handy questions to keep in mind when evaluating AI tools: 

• Can this AI tool be used by marketers without extensive technical knowledge? 
• What type of technical support is offered and how quickly can issues be resolved?
• How much time is required to integrate the tool into existing workflows?
  

Evaluate Scalability 

Your business (and your tech stack) will continue to evolve. For this reason, keep an eye on the future 🔮as you evaluate AI marketing tools. Consider the tools in light of long-term plans and decide whether they are built to scale. Ask questions like:

• Is this tool built to handle large amounts of data as our customer base grows?
• Does the tool offer enough flexibility to work with new channels we’re planning to integrate with in the future? 
• Are there customization options and features that can change as our business needs change?

10 AI Marketing Tools For Growth Minded Marketers

What time is it? Tool time!

Whether you want to create hyper-personalized customer experiences, turn tedious tasks into automated ones, help scale content production, or all of the above, the AI tools on this list can help. 

AI Marketing Tools for Personalization

Dynamic Yield 

It’s no secret that data is a marketer’s best friend. Dynamic Yield analyzes it in real-time using machine learning algorithms and then serves up personalized customer experiences. 

What it is: A self-training AI-powered system that determines buyer intent from customer data. It delivers tailored experiences across channels including web, mobile, and mobile apps. So based on their past behavior, preferences, and purchase history, a customer will receive specific content and product recommendations.  

Noteworthy feature: In addition to delivering hyper-personalized content, Dynamic Yield offers ReccomendML. This feature utilizes a deep-learning model to rapidly analyze large amounts of data and recommend ideal products to users. 

Integrations:  Dynamic Yield labels itself as platform agnostic, promising to integrate easily with your existing tech stack. The open API makes for seamless integrations with popular tools including GoogleAds, Klaviyo, Magento, and Mailchimp. 

Nosto

Designed with e-commerce companies in mind, Nosto puts machine learning algorithms to use, drilling into customer behavior to provide personalized digital experiences. The platform makes launching integrated experiences both quick and easy, no drawn out implementation needed.

What it is: An AI tool that optimizes that allows marketing teams to quickly segment audiences, A/B test for optimizations, and curate personalized shopping journeys based on actionable data. Unlike Dynamic Yield, it’s specifically designed for ecommerce and is known for its ease of use. 

Noteworthy feature: Nosto offers omnichannel integration so brands can deliver tailored experiences via email, mobile and even in-store. Users enjoy the platform’s dynamic bundles feature which is designed to make upsell and cross sell actions seamless, increasing AOV. 

Integrations: Integration headaches? Not with Nosto. It integrates well with a large list of e-commerce tools: BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify to name a few. Plus,  the tool prides itself on  “ easy migration, risk-free deployment and fast time-to-market”. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tools 

Drift

For a chatbot that doesn’t feel like a bot, look to Drift. The custom chatbot software offers engaging messages to site visitors and works to qualify leads, moving them along the pipeline. 

What it is: Drift is a conversational AI chatbot that can understand and interact with customers in real time. It utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to deliver custom responses and understand user intent. The result is more tailored conversations and better user experiences. 

Noteworthy feature: When it comes to this AI chatbot, use cases abound for sales and marketing teams. The ABM campaign capabilities, for instance,  allow marketing teams to target important accounts and decision makers with well-timed and specific content. Generic messages, be damned. The tool also offers granular reporting so CMOs can track key metrics. 

Integrations: There are multiple ways to integrate your tech stack with Drift. The platform’s integration directory involves the usual suspects  like Salesforce, Clearbit, and Salesloft. But Drift 🤝Zapier work hand in hand, allowing users to connect with thousands of apps.

MonkeyLearn

Making sense of unstructured data just got easier. MonkeyLearn can take in large amounts of customer feedback then analyze and classify it to provide insights into customer sentiment, highlight trends, and more. 

What it is: MonkeyLearn is an NLP tool that automates text analysis processes with the help of machine learning models. It offers all in one text analysis of customer reviews, social media comments, and other feedback. You upload the data, MonkeyLearn provides the visualizations and actionable insights.  

Noteworthy feature: Users can view customer feedback in one central location and have access to pre-built machine learning models for fast analysis. Want a more custom approach? MonkeyLearn offers a no code option for building and training custom machine learning models.

Integrations: MonkeyLearn integrates with many tools from customer service tools like Zendesk and HelpScot to survey platforms like Typeform and Qualtrics. If you don’t see your preferred tool in the integration library, don’t worry. MonkeyLearn offers more through Zapier. 

Marketing Automation

Gong

What if you could glean more value from customer communications while reducing manual tasks? Gong automates the process of capturing and analyzing sales conversations. It then offers up valuable insights to improve the sales process. 

What it is: Gong is a self-proclaimed “revenue intelligence platform” that takes in communication data (phone calls, emails, CRM information, etc) and produces actionable insights for sales and marketing teams. This close up visibility into the sales process allows for targeted message creation and enhances cross functional communication between sales and marketing teams.

Noteworthy feature: Gong’s competitive intelligence feature delivers a look into how your brand is performing against industry benchmarks. Armed with actionable insights and a deeper understanding of the competitive landscape, marketers can optimize strategies with confidence, 

Integrations: For workflow automation, Gong integrates with Momentum, Zapier, Workato, and more. The NLP AI tool also integrates with more common tech stack staples like Hubspot Office 365.

Optimove

On the lookout for AI-powered email marketing assistance? Optimove can lend a (machine-learning informed) hand. From email data segmentation to campaign management, this tool automates a range of tasks and provides helpful insights to boot. 

What it is: A customer-retention focused email personalization tool that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to anticipate customer intent. It then tailors messages, offers optimization recommendations, and can send automatic, tailored emails to customers at the ideal time. 

Noteworthy feature: Optimove users enjoy the increased email relevance that has led to results like lower acquisition costs and increased revenue. With this AI email marketing tool, marketers have the ability to set up automatic trigger-based campaigns that are tied to specific customer actions like site visits or email opens. 

Integrations: Optimove’s partner directory includes a range of well-known marketing tools like Salesforce, Magento, and Domo. The robust integration options make it simple for teams to sync data across multiple channels. 

Customer Segmentation

CustomerLabs

If your AI marketing tool box is lacking a customer profiling tool, take a look at CustomerLabs. The tool promises to “collect, unify, segment and activate customer data across different marketing tools” , all on a no-code platform designed with SMBs in mind. 

What it is: CustomerLabs is a customer data platform that offers segmentation and personalization capabilities for more targeted messaging. It allows marketers to segment audiences based on various parameters such as demographics, behavior, interests, and preferences. The tool offers solutions for e-commerce, SaaS, B2B and B2C firms, allowing marketers to access and combine data into unified customer profiles

Noteworthy feature: CustomerLabs places a large focus on unifying data for a single source of truth. The CDP can consolidate customer data from multiple sources and then craft niche segments for optimized targeting.

Integrations: Because CustomerLabs emphasizes syncing data from multiple marketing tools, they offer a healthy array of integrations. These include Salesforce, Pipedrive, Google Analytics, and Intercom, among others. 

Blueshift

To create targeted messaging that resonates with your audience, accurate segmentation is a must. Blueshift is a cross-channel customer data platform that creates easily accessible customer segments. Marketing teams can reap the benefits of this AI-powered platform  in the form of increased CTRs and conversion rates.  

What it is: Blueshift is a powerhouse of an AI marketing tool that analyzes customer behavior and segments users accordingly. Then, the platform offers data around the needs and preferences of unique segments. Marketers can utilize this data to create well-tailored campaigns for specific segments. 

Noteworthy feature: Accuracy and speed combine in Blueshift’s segmentation capabilities. That’s due to the fact that segments automatically update based on new inflows of data. The tool then “indexes the data about your customer to enable complex segments to run really fast”. In short, predictive segmentation is engrained in the tool so marketing teams can leverage it continuously. 

Integrations: There’s no shortage of integrations in Blueshift’s partner directory. The directory splits available integrations into categories based on functions like advertising, audience management, and analytics. GoogleAds, Magento, Shopify, Slack and a myriad of other tools are available.

Content Production 

If having a streamlined content workflow all in one place sounds like a dream come true, check out Narratto. This speed-enhancing AI marketing tool is built to enhance quality as well as improve efficiency.  That way,  teams can scale content without sacrificing quality.  

Anyword 

Creating high-performing copy for blogs, landing pages, and emails is no easy feat. And doing it at scale adds another challenge. Anyword is an AI marketing tool that content teams can use to quickly compose content that aligns with goals, no guesswork needed,

What it is: A data-driven AI writing assistant that both generates and optimizes content. How? By utilizing data from customer interactions and past marketing campaigns, Anyword can create copy that resonates with the intended audience. The end result is content that converts. 

Noteworthy feature: Anyword levels up content creation along the ideation, writing, and editing phases. In the writing process, the tool offers real-time assistance focused on meeting content goals specified by the team. For optimization, it analyzes past content performance to make data-informed recommendations for improving new pieces of content. 

Integrations: Unlike many AI marketing tools that include integration directories, Anyword doesn’t offer much in the way of information on this front. If you’re looking into the platform, be sure to research specific integration options for tools that matter most to your team. 

Naratto 

What it is: There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to quality content creation. Naratto is an AI-powered platform that brings all the steps together in one place to optimize content production for teams big and small. The built in AI content assistant generates ideas and outlines while the 

Noteworthy feature: Seamless project management and collaboration are helpful facets of this AI tool. The overall draw is the comprehensive nature of the platform. From content strategy to brief creation to publishing, users can leverage Naratto every step of the way.

Integrations: Unlike many AI tools, Naratto doesn’t showcase integration capabilities on its site. However, Zapier does showcase Naratto integrations featuring an array of common tech stack tools. 

Level Up Your Marketing Efforts with AI

There you have it! Ten AI-powered platforms built with marketers in mind. Now that you’ve got the low-down on some stellar AI marketing tools, it’s time to harness their power. Use them to supercharge efficiency and free up your team to focus on meaningful moves that push your business forward.

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