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.

Lead generation is vital for many of Tuff’s B2B partners. The goal: Create a customer database for future marketing and remarketing initiatives. Social platforms, like LinkedIn, offer native lead generation forms, making it a go-to choice for many brands. Leveraging LinkedIn’s credibility and network, you can attract and drive leads from relevant prospects to boost your business.

However, there’s also the tried-and-true method of driving leads/form submissions via a dedicated landing page experience. This gives you total control of what you’re showing users and the information you’re collecting from them.

As with most aspects of digital advertising, there are pros and cons of both methods. We’ve outlined what these look like below, as well as some questions to think through when deciding which strategy works best for you. Keep these quick tips in mind as you move forward with lead gen efforts.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: Pros and Cons

Let’s begin by taking a look at LinkedIn lead generation forms, which are created and hosted in the platform and appear native. These are easy to set up and don’t require any additional resources on your end to implement and execute.

🟢 The Pros

Let’s talk about what makes LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms work:

Seamless UX

• One of the biggest benefits of utilizing LinkedIn’s lead generation feature and the in-platform native lead forms is they provide a seamless and simple user experience. Since forms are integrated directly into the platform, users don’t have to navigate to a landing page and away from their current tab. This reduces any drop-offs on the form submission and, thus, increases the likelihood that the form is completed. 

Auto-populate feature in LinkedIn

• LinkedIn stands out from other social platforms for lead generation thanks to its auto-population feature. This means that when users fill out a form, it automatically fills in their name, job title, company name, and sometimes even their phone number and email address from their LinkedIn profile. This saves users from the hassle of manually entering this information, and they only need to edit the phone number and email address fields if necessary.

Credible and trustworthy platform

• Besides the fact that submitting information via a lead form is easy and doesn’t take much time or energy at all, users tend to trust LinkedIn more because it’s a credible platform that they already interact with. They may be more comfortable handing over personal info than they would on an external website. Overall, this comfort coupled with the auto-populating feature above means that lead volume (and lead quality) may be higher. Since users need to have information associated with their profile and since LinkedIn is a professional network, this means that the users submitting their information may be more reputable and genuinely relevant to your product or service. 

Efficiently and easily download your leads

• Finally, the process of collecting leads through LinkedIn is really efficient because there are so many ways to set up a landing page and, thus, so many ways to collect lead information. On LinkedIn, you will be able to download leads directly from the platform in a .csv format. Even more convenient, you can also integrate your ad account with your marketing automation or CRM system, such as HubSpot or Salesforce (but those are only two of several!) This means you can automatically send the leads you’re driving into your system so you can bake them into your existing workflows, enter them into your lead nurture campaigns, and more. 

🔴 The Cons

Sounds great, right? However, it’d be remiss of us to not mention the cons:

Inability to customize the lead form

• When using LinkedIn’s built-in lead generation forms, you’ll face certain restrictions. One significant limitation is the inability to fully customize the form to your needs. LinkedIn offers a variety of predefined form fields to choose from, but they might not always match your exact requirements. Although you can create a custom field and provide options, there’s a limit to how many options you can include. Alternatively, you can allow users to input their own information in a custom field, but this means that certain fields won’t be automatically filled out, which can add unnecessary friction to the form submission process.

Visual design limitations

• In addition to customization limitations, there are constraints on visual design. You’ll find character limits for the form’s headline and copy text. Also, the image displayed is typically your company page’s banner, and unfortunately, you can’t customize it at this time. (But that’d be really great! C’mon, LinkedIn!)

Costly objective

• Lead generation is also one of the most popular campaign objectives on the platform, meaning it can be costly. LinkedIn is already a more costly platform than the other social platforms. Your CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), and especially CPL (cost-per-lead), may be higher as you compete against a larger audience in the ad auction.

As you can see, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms offer convenience and credibility for lead generation but come with limitations and potential added costs. Now, let’s explore the implications of using a traditional landing page for lead collection from LinkedIn.

Traditional Landing Pages: The Classic Approach

A landing page is a standalone web page that’s created specifically for an advertising campaign. Its primary purpose is to offer more information tailored to the campaign’s audience and present a single clear call to action for visitors, ensuring a straightforward and focused experience.

🟢 The Pros

Let’s chat through why you might choose a landing page:

Control over the design and layout

• When driving to a landing page, you have total control over the design of the page. You can completely customize the layout of the page depending on what landing page host you’re using. Controlling the layout means you can control the journey for the user, and ultimately drive them to the conversion action you’re optimizing for. This means you can implement best practices around CRO, or conversion rate optimization, to ensure you’re keeping people on the page and steering them toward the action of submitting the form. You also have visual and functional control over the form. You can add your desired amount of text to intro the form and you can include form fields that are necessary to your business. It is important to note, however, that the fewer the form fields, the more likely people are to successfully fill out your form without abandoning it for TikTok.

Incorporate multi-channel strategies

• Landing pages also give you more opportunities to utilize multi-channel strategies, such as supporting SEO goals alongside conversion goals to bring more visibility to your site. A landing page is also a great way to get visibility to the website for people who might take a longer journey to conversion. Allowing them the chance to visit a page that’s integrated with the main website will give them the opportunity to read more and find further convincing information. It’s also a great way to improve tracking of each user’s journey to conversion allowing validation in what’s working.

🔴 The Cons

And how about those drawbacks?

Similar to LinkedIn, driving to a landing page from your advertising campaign can come with some disadvantages. 

Risk of clunky user experience and high bounce rates

• Will the page take too long to load and cause the user to exit the entire experience before filling out the form? Are they using a device like their mobile phone where the experience may not be optimal? Will the landing page include too much information that the user will become overwhelmed and back out? All of these hurdles can factor into a high bounce rate, meaning a user has left the page almost immediately after landing.

Issues if you don’t match the design and messaging between the two

• Smart marketers optimize each landing page to have the same messaging and/or design as the ads driving to it. If a user has clicked on an ad for a reason, they expect to find the same experience when they go to another page. If you’re not aligned in your strategy, people may become confused and believe your product or service is not as relevant to them as they thought. Being strategic about matching the landing page to the ad creative and copy may take more time, planning, and resources.

Choosing the Right Strategy

Now that you know the pros and cons of both strategies, it’s time to choose which one is right for you and your campaign. We recommend thinking about the following factors:

1. Your goal = Is your goal genuinely to drive as many leads as possible? Is your goal to drive them within an efficient CPL? Are you looking to remarket to the people interacting with these ads? This means you need to send them to a page you can build a retargeting audience off of.
2. Your budget = Do you have a budget that would allow you to bid competitively against the other advertisers utilizing LinkedIn lead forms? Do you have a budget (and bandwidth, for that matter) that would allow you to design a new landing page? What about optimizing an existing one for UX?
3. Your audience = Is your audience one that’s spending time on LinkedIn – enough of it that they would be taking an extra second to fill out a native lead form OR visit another page? Do they seem trusting of handing over information that’s already populated or filling it out themselves?

A Note on A/B Testing

If your answers are unclear, try out A/B testing. Set up one campaign for lead generation with ads containing a form. Set up another campaign for website conversions with ads driving to a landing page.

Right now, LinkedIn doesn’t offer self-service A/B testing like Meta. You can still target the same audience and use the same budget across two campaigns. But be careful not to spread your resources too thin, which could lead to suboptimal budgets for each campaign.

Tips for Effective Lead Generation

Depending on your chosen strategy, here are some valuable tips for achieving effective lead generation:

In-Platform Native Lead Gen Forms

• Make the form as short as possible to eliminate friction when someone is filling it out. Lean toward the fields that auto-populate with existing information from the user’s profile.
• Utilize engaging formats such as Document Ads or Conversation Ads, which provide more value to the user and increase the likelihood of them completing the form.
• Make your form’s headline and text unmistakably clear about what users will get and what follows after submission.
• Integrate your CRM with LinkedIn before you launch your campaign for quick follow up.
• Provide a strong CTA. Take advantage of the in-platform button and include it on your ad creative. Make it clear what will happen after submitting the form.

Landing Pages

• Test the page load speed before you launch your campaign to make sure this doesn’t become a bottleneck.
• Keep the design and layout simple and straightforward.
• Include only one CTA or action for clarity.
• Ensure that copy and creative on the page match what you promoted in your ad on the platform.
• Utilize the extra space you have by providing valuable content, such as social proof/testimonials, videos, FAQs, case studies, and more
• Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your page and set up precise conversion tracking. Use this to monitor and optimize your conversions effectively within the platform.
• Install various platform pixels on this page to enable remarketing on LinkedIn and beyond.

Prepare for Launch

Now that you have the info you need, it’s time to build your form or landing page. Let’s kick off your campaign! And don’t forget – you can ALWAYS A/B test anything. At Tuff, we live by this motto – test fast, learn fast, move fast 🚀

If you’re interested in getting started with a lead generation campaign but need some help, hit us up!

The post LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms vs. Traditional Landing Pages 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.

Page speed is one of the most important factors for scaleup brands’ growth in the digital era–especially SaaS brands. It not only affects your SEO rankings but also your conversion rates–which means your bottom line is, well, on the line.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how page speed impacts SEO and conversions, and share some practical tips and tools to optimize your website performance.

Understanding the Connection: Page Speed, SEO, and Conversions

Page speed is the time it takes for a web page to load and display its content. It can be measured by different metrics, known as Web Vitals, the most important web vitals being the Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals

Google defines Core Web Vitals as the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be surfaced across all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.

In other words, each Core Web Vital looks at a different part of how people use a website, and they show how well a website serves its users in the real world. The four Core Web Vitals (one soon to be replaced) are:

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a pending Core Web Vital metric that will replace First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. INP assesses responsiveness using data from the Event Timing API. When an interaction causes a page to become unresponsive, that is a poor user experience. INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page, and reports a single value which all (or nearly all) interactions were below. A low INP means the page was consistently able to respond quickly to all—or the vast majority—of user interactions. 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.

These Core Web Vitals are all ranking factors and can either help or hurt your rankings in SERPs, especially mobile searches.

How Page Speed Affects User Experience (UX)

A faster page speed can not only improve your website’s visibility and organic traffic, but can also enhance your user experience by reducing bounce rates, increasing engagement, and building trust. According to Google, 

“53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.”

Page speed also has a correlation with conversions, whether it be sign-ups, subscriptions, purchases, or downloads. A faster page speed can increase your conversions by reducing friction, improving satisfaction, and creating urgency. 

According to a study by Akamai, a 100-millisecond delay (or one-tenth of a second) in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%.

When we look at real-world examples of brands benefiting from page speed optimization, we can see just how impactful these improvements can be.

Examples of Brands Benefiting From Page Speed Optimization 

In 2015, Pinterest improved mobile website performance, increasing page speed by 60% and sign-up conversions by 40%. 

• They revamped the entire site, introducing metrics like user-perceived wait time (UPWT). 
• Optimizations encompassed the front end, network, and back end. 
• They reduced data loading for faster page rendering, adopted React for efficiency, improved their CDN, and streamlined data fetching. 
• These changes reduced user wait times by 40%, boosted search engine traffic by 15%, and increased sign-up conversions by 15%. 
• In 2016, this became Pinterest’s most significant user acquisition success.

Netflix reduced page loading time by 50% for the logged-out homepage by minimizing JavaScript usage and switching to vanilla JavaScript.

• This change also cut the JavaScript bundle size by over 200kB. 
• Netflix improved time-to-interactivity by 30% through prefetching techniques for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 
• By carefully managing JavaScript and optimizing resource loading, they enhanced the sign-up process, leading to a better user experience and increased sign-up rates. 

These improvements show the importance of performance in website design, ensuring faster loading and smoother interactions for users.

Vodafone determined that optimizing for Web Vitals generated 8% more sales.

• They ran an A/B test on a landing page (where version A was optimized for Web Vitals and had a 31% better LCP score in the field than version B), and studies have also shown the negative impact poor performance can have on business goals.

• For example, the BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

Transitioning from examples of brands benefiting from page speed optimization, let’s now explore some key tips for improving website performance and securing faster page speeds.

Optimization Tips for Faster Page Speed

There are many ways to optimize your website performance for faster page speed. Here are some of the essential tips that we’d recommend:

• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This means removing unnecessary spaces, comments, and characters from your code to reduce its size and improve efficiency.
• Compress images and videos and serve images in next-gen format. You’ll want to reduce the file size of your media without compromising its quality. You can convert your images to WebP, which are lossless images that are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. When it comes to video, you can use a tool like HandBrake to compress files.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN). This will distribute your content across multiple servers around the world to deliver it faster to your users based on their location. You can use services like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront to set up a CDN for your website.
• Enable caching. This means storing some of your website’s data on your users’ browsers or servers to reduce the number of requests and load times for subsequent visits. If you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache to enable caching.
• Optimize your fonts. Choose fonts that are web-friendly, lightweight, and compatible with different browsers and devices. You can use tools like Google Fonts or Font Squirrel to optimize your fonts.

Essential Tools for Page Speed Improvement

Image Source: PageSpeedInsights

To measure and improve page speed, utilize reliable tools that can help you analyze and identify areas for improvement. Here are some of the tools we recommend:

• Google PageSpeed Insights. This is a free tool from Google that evaluates a website’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices, providing a score out of 100. It also provides suggestions on how to optimize your website for faster page speed.
• GTmetrix. This is another free tool that analyzes your website’s performance and gives you a comprehensive report on various metrics, such as PageSpeed Score, YSlow Score, Fully Loaded Time, Total Page Size, and Requests. It also offers recommendations on how to improve your website performance.
• WebPageTest. This free tool tests your website’s performance from different locations, browsers, devices, and connection speeds. It gives you detailed information on various aspects of your website performance, such as First Byte Time, Start Render Time, Speed Index, First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Cumulative Layout Shift, etc.

The Growth Impact

Optimizing your website performance for faster page speed can have a significant impact on your brand’s growth. With better SEO rankings, you can attract more organic traffic to your website and increase your brand awareness and authority.

Improving conversion rate means generating more leads, sales, and revenue from your website, plus growing your customer base and loyalty. 

By improving your user experience, you can enhance your brand reputation and customer satisfaction and reduce your churn rate and customer acquisition cost.

According to a study by Google, a one-second improvement in mobile page speed can increase conversions by up to 27%. According to another study by Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

As you can see, prioritizing website speed optimization not only drives immediate gains in conversions but also lays a strong foundation for sustained brand growth, bolstering your online presence and setting the stage for ongoing customer loyalty.

Wrapping it Up

If you’ve made it this far, we hope one thing’s clear: page speed is your growth navigator. It’s not just about SEO rankings; it’s about multiplying your conversions.

When you fine-tune website performance and speed, you’re not tinkering; you’re scaling your online presence. Think of it as boosting visibility, engagement, and revenue–giving you that competitive edge that keeps working in the background.

If you need any help with page speed optimization or any other aspect of growth marketing, feel free to reach out. 

We are here to help you grow your brand faster and smarter. 😊

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post The Impact of Page Speed on SEO and Conversion Rates: Optimization Tips and Tools 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.

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.

For so many businesses, Paid Search Ads are one of the most profitable and reliable marketing channels to activate. This makes sense. Users tend to be high intent and ready to make a decision. You’re looking to buy a new pair of shoes? Google is one of your first stops. We are limited however, in how much search volume is out there. Ads can only serve as much as users are searching. Of course there is seemingly unlimited volume for our shoes example, but that isn’t the case for most products or services. As a growth marketing agency, we’re constantly evaluating how to use conversion rate optimization to grow the right channel mix. 

To make the most out of the search terms that are relevant to your business, there are a few things to keep an eye on. For starters, budget plays a big role. Scaling can be as simple as allocating more spend. How about additional Keyword Research? That will certainly help when you are looking to scale and create efficiencies with your ads. What Tuff has found is that the main driver of success on Google Search Ads is leaning heavily on CRO. 

When we talk about CRO, it means much more than just Conversion Rate Optimization. A/B landing page testing? Check. Ad Copy development? Definitely. Expert web design? Of course! If budgets are appropriate and keyword research is robust, CRO is your next step to success as a Google Ads agency. Let’s dive head first into what this looks like.

What is CRO? 

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is taking action to directly impact the amount of users converting on your website or within your applications. The intent is to increase the amount of users taking desired actions. 

What usually comes to mind when thinking about CRO are forms and CTA buttons but when put into practice, CRO goes well beyond this. When you’re going to launch CRO efforts, you need to start with your audience. Understanding what your audience needs and what you have to uniquely offer helps to determine the journey your website should offer and what the ultimate goal is. 

Understanding your audience and their needs

To better understand your audience, CROs leverage 4 key data points: behavior metrics, path exploration/user flow, heatmaps, and surveys. 

Behavior metrics

• Bounce rate: This number tracks the percentage of users that enter the site and don’t go beyond that one page. High bounce rate can be a key indicator of whether your site offers the right information at the right time to keep the user on your site. If you’re visible for the wrong searches or possibly serving content that doesn’t align with the answers the user needs, you will see a high bounce rate.
  *Note: Some pages may be built for higher bounce rates like a Contact Us page. Consider the intent of the page itself before determining if optimizations are needed.
• Exit rate: This is the percentage that defines how often a page is the last page in a user’s visit. Again, depending on the intent of the page, you’ll want to make a hypothesis around why a user might exit (slow loading, navigation/linking faux pas, etc.). From there you can create informed tests to keep the user there and ultimately push them to convert. 
• Time on site: The length of time a user spends on your site. This can inform you of the quality of the users coming to your site.
  *Note: Account for how much of your audience is mobile. Mobile users tend to have quicker sessions but it can also indicate mobile speed or usability issues.
• Pages per session: The amount of pages users visit per session. The more pages, the more we find a user is getting what they need and is being served an optimized user journey on your site.
• Conversions (obviously 😏): We often like to review conversion patterns, pages with high or low conversions, and what (if any) micro-goals are excelling (micro-goals = Newsletter sign-ups, webinar attendance, etc.). These things can help us determine the time a user spends in the funnel and underperforming pages to find where we should focus on a site first.

Path exploration

Above we discussed more of a birds-eye-view of your overall site data. The metrics above will lead us to individual pages that will require a more granular analysis. At page-level for data, we look at things like where the user usually enters the site and where they go next.

Looking into where the user often lands can tell us what pages have the best visibility and make the first impression with the user. 

The next pages a user visits can help us determine where a journey might be broken and give us insight into what the user really needs during their time on your site. 

Heatmapping

Leveraging a tool like Hotjar, we can get a better look into user behaviors page by page. Heatmaps can show us where users are clicking, how much of your page is actually seen, and we can even watch live recordings of a user’s journey and how they engage throughout your site. 

These 3 heatmap features allow us to determine things like page layout when we see most users drop from a page after viewing only a third of its offerings. Or, we can see points of friction during user recordings to truly pinpoint why someone may have dropped from your site without converting. 

Heatmaps are the real crystal ball. 🔮

Surveys

Surveys are given to both new, potential customers or current customers. This is something we usually recommend for brands that see a good amount of traffic and/or have a stable customer base. 

Within CRO, surveys lean more qualitative and serve open ended questions to receive honest feedback we can’t get from the data. They can be leveraged post-purchase/sign-up or when a user shows intent to exit so we can better understand the ‘why’ behind winning or losing conversions. We can even serve them according to time on site or pages per session depending on what the goal is. 

How to do CRO on low-traffic sites

Thinking about how to test on a low traffic site is tough. How can we get impactful results when there’s not a lot of traffic going to a site? Without traffic, we won’t have enough folks to split to gain true insight in an efficient timeline. But, as you now know, CRO isn’t just CTA buttons and form fills. 

Here are some strategies we recommend for low traffic sites:

• Improve the customer journey. A major part of conversion rate optimization is user research. This is the area of CRO where surveys can be introduced to a site to better understand the audience. These surveys can inspire big changes to navigation, user flow, and even language on the site. It may not be traditional testing, but it can be a big win for younger companies who haven’t had the time or resources to define their brand and its relationship to their audience.
• Include “micro-conversions” into the testing process. Define other ways your company names success in the funnel beyond form fills to chat with a sales team. Can we improve newsletter sign-ups? Can we get more engagement on a webinar? Some companies have excruciatingly long sales processes. So, highlight the success of getting folks into the funnel even if they’re not ready for the hard sell just yet!
• Create tests that make a big splash! If you don’t have a ton of traffic, a small CTA button test might not be the most lucrative. Go for a big layout change. Make sure there’s a stark difference in the control and the variant that has a major impact on the experience. 
• Focus on a match made in heaven ♥️ Paid & CRO. When Paid Media is being leveraged, it can be a big traffic booster. Focus on creating a landing page that will win big with the audience. Go into testing your CTA copy or keywords! There’s a lot you can do to improve how you serve your ads to your audience.

Leveraging conversion rate optimization efforts on Paid Search

Tuff audits accounts for incoming clients. It’s one of our first steps when working with a new business. During this process, we take a look at every level of a Google Ads account. Keyword targeting, ad copy, bid strategies, etc. Here are some findings we discovered for a prospect recently that are VERY common to come across during our Audit process: 

• 71% of ALL ads Ad Strength can be improved with additional Ad Copy.
• In the last 30 days, $43,000 was spent on keywords with 0 conversions. This is over 20% of the total budget spent during this time period.
• 30% of all active keywords have a below average Landing Page Experience

We see numbers like this all of the time, across all sorts of industries. Thousands of dollars of wasted spend for low quality ads, keywords, or landing pages. All of these things, with the right intentional effort, are fixable and will have long lasting effects on performance. Utilizing conversion rate optimization to focus on Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Landing Page Experience, will yield cheaper clicks, higher conversion rates, and many other long term benefits. Let’s dive in!

Quality Score

The ever mysterious Quality Score is first up in our assessment. This is one of the main tools Google uses to compare your ads to your competitors. Influencing everything from CPC to where you show up in search results. Here’s how it’s calculated, according to Google:

• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance + Ad Strength: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search.
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

Even though it seems fairly straightforward, improving your Quality Score is harder than it looks. There are lots of factors to consider when testing. All of which are important to focus on. 

Ad Strength

This is a metric that has become paramount in the last year where Google Ads removed extended text ads and replaced them with Responsive Search Ads. Now, all ads have the ability to include 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for Google to optimize towards. Combinations will be created based on what works best for the users. This allows for the algorithm to assign a “strength” based on the perceived quality of the ad. 

Google uses 4 areas to determine the Ad Strength:

1. 1. Add more headlines – Make sure you utilize all the options available to you. This helps with the ability for Google to test and experiment with what copy works best for your audience. 
   2. Include popular keywords in your headlines – This is the most important of the 4 variables. It is important to match your ad copy to the keywords being targeted. For example, if you are targeting the keyword, “financial advisors near me,” this phrase should be directly in one of your headlines. This gives a signal to Google that your ad is highly relevant to the user searching for that phrase. Tip: Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to automatically insert users’ search terms into your ads. 
   3. Make your headlines more unique – Unique headlines that are varied throughout will drastically improve your Ad Strength as well as the ability to test and learn what language has the best performance. Tip: Give your users value props, competitive differentiators, and all relevant information about your product or service. 
   4. Make your descriptions more unique – Similar to the above with headlines. Descriptions have a 90 character limit so you will be able to tell a more detailed story here. Tip: Utilize all 90 characters and include a CTA in this section. 

Ad Strength has 4 tiers: Poor, Average, Good, and Excellent. The aim is to have ALL ads achieve a Good or Excellent rating by implementing all of the best practices above. 

Landing Page Experience

Landing Page Experience may be the most impactful metric to look at through the lens of conversion rate optimization. As the name of the metric suggests, this is a measure of how a user experiences your webpage once landing on it through a Paid Search ad. We can see a score for this on a keyword level, which means each keyword will have a specific landing page experience. There are three scores here:

• Below Average
• Average
• Above Average

We aim to have every keyword in an account reach an Average or Above Average score here. It is one of the first things we focus on when onboarding a client. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but Paid Traffic is PAID. It is paramount to be as efficient as possible when targeting these users. You can truly affect a business’s bottom line with the right conversion rate optimization.  

Simple enough right? Well, it may seem simple on its face, but there are so many variables to keep in mind when looking at landing page experience. Here’s how Tuff utilizes our CRO team for creating highly converting landing pages for paid media traffic. 

Building landing pages for high quality keywords

When we think about scoping CRO to build new landing pages, we do this by narrowing down which keywords we want to focus on. Landing pages are resource heavy. Of course we cannot build a landing page targeting every single keyword relating to the business. So we have to prioritize. We categorize the keywords we want to focus on in two main buckets:

1. High value keywords that are converting, but have room for improvement
2. High volume keywords that historically have converted poorly, but have room to scale

Let’s start with keywords that have been converting, but have room to improve. It’s incredibly important to maximize the performance of these terms. If they work for you now, there is typically a way to supercharge them. Improvement can come through all of the quality metrics mentioned above by implementing a proper landing page. 

Since these keywords are already converting somewhat frequently, we focus on adding additional CTAs and including more copy that matches the targets. When Google deems the landing page is more relevant than your competitors, in turn impression share, CTR, and all other metrics can see a lift. 

The other keyword bucket is what we like to refer to as “tier two” keywords. These have volume, but historically have high CPAs. These may be broader in nature and tempting to go after because of the volume potential. Lots of partners run into high costs here though. This is where a CRO landing page comes into play. It is a perfect opportunity to lower costs and ultimately scale. With these keywords we focus on website copy, path exploration, and exit rates to see what may be driving traffic to leave before converting. 

Here are some general tips we recommend when aiming to improve Landing Page Experience with your CRO team:

1. Use a CRO tool like Hotjar to heatmap paid traffic → As mentioned above, this tool can help you understand the behavior of your users. Specifically for Paid traffic, use this technique to gain insight into the most compelling areas of your landing page. Paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic or direct traffic, so keep in mind the stage of funnel your paid users are coming from. For example, lower funnel traffic may be more inclined to read competitor comparison sections or value props. 
2. Conduct an in-depth path exploration → Paid traffic by nature will behave differently than other sources. A deep path exploration to follow Paid users across your site gives you valuable insight into where you can improve. For example, if paid users tend to navigate to blog content after landing on the site, this can indicate that it’s worth testing additional content links on your paid landing pages. 
3. Lean on a/b testing to properly test Landing Page Optimizations → We can use tools such as Google Optimize to 50/50 split test all sorts of variables on a new landing page. Maybe this is as simple as the color of the CTA button. It could be something more drastic like a hero section change. Regardless of the variable, a/b tests are invaluable when combining the power of CRO with Paid Traffic. Google Ads has the ability to a/b test landing pages right in the platform with their experiment function. Tuff uses this function on a weekly basis to continually optimize our paid search campaigns. 

How to measure the effectiveness of CRO efforts on Paid Media

There are multiple metrics, not just conversion rate, that are indicators of success between PPC and CRO collaboration. Of course conversion volume and conversion rate are large components of all testing, but we can go further with our evaluation. Here are some additional KPIs we track when we are making changes to landing pages, testing ad copy variations, or anything else CRO related for Paid Search. 

• Cost per Click – Seeing a decrease in CPC can be a sign that your Quality Score has improved. Google favors the most relevant ads and landing pages, so if there were changes to a landing page that made it more relevant to your users, CPC can decrease.

• Average Session Duration – This metric is one of the strongest indicators of Quality we have at our disposal. The longer a user spends on your site, the higher quality they are to your business. All CRO efforts look to improve this metric if possible, especially when looking at Paid Media. 

• Pages/Session – Similarly to Average Session Duration, this metric indicates a highly engaged audience. More relevant landing pages, optimized for conversions and SEO, will have a high likelihood of improving pages/sessions for each user. CRO testing that includes additional internal sitelinks is one way to improve this KPI.

• Bounce Rate – Another site metric that we use to measure the success of landing page content. This is calculated by looking at the people who land on your website, take no action, then leave. The lower the Bounce Rate the better. CRO efforts based on optimizing landing page copy and function help lower Bounce Rate by engaging users with more CTAs, additional content to read, and helpful internal links. 

• Click Thru Rate – Any improvement in CTR can be an indicator of a successful conversion rate optimization test test. Ads that are most relevant to your audience receive a higher expected CTR, improving Google’s Quality Score. 

1. Impression Share – This KPI is one that many marketers might not directly associate with conversion rate optimization testing, but it is very helpful at defining success for Google Ads. Conversion Rate improvements made on a website can indicate to Google’s algorithm that your business is higher quality than other competitors, therefore allocating more impression share to you when users are searching. 

When you can match the intent of the search with the right destination, not only will your CPC go down and CTR go up, but you will see engagement metrics improve along with conversion metrics. Measuring success is never linear though. That’s why Tuff looks at data using multiple forms of attribution. This gives us a holistic view of all Digital channels. Social, Organic Traffic, or direct traffic, all can see lifts from improving the quality of your paid ads. 

Supercharge Paid Media with CRO opportunities

Remember, Google, and most other advertising channels, want to serve their users the most relevant and high quality ads possible when they are searching for something or browsing the internet. Paid traffic is paid. Nowhere in your marketing mix is it more important to be as efficient as possible. This is why we keep conversion rate optimization top of mind when creating a Paid Media Strategy. Improvements in website navigation, relevant content, and calls to action have long lasting effects. Ready to accelerate your paid media budgets with CRO? Let’s talk. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Using Conversion Rate Optimization to Maximize Your Paid Media Dollars appeared first on Tuff.

What do the most successful companies have in common? They put their customer first. Companies that focus on creating products and services that solve a customer problem win. Why? Because when you’re intimately in step with your customer’s needs, you’re no longer just selling. You’re connecting.

The best and only way to create this type of value and impact is by listening to the customer. The good news? Even if you don’t have an established customer base, there are several ways you can put your ear up to the receiver and tune in to the conversation. 

In this post, we’ll guide you through how to uncover voice of customer data to create high-impact, high-value messaging that sticks. 

Let’s dive in 👂

Meet your growth marketing north star: messaging 🌟 

Your messaging guides every piece of communication you create at every touch point along the customer journey. It refers to the actual words you use and the emotions and feelings those words evoke. Messaging touches nearly every aspect of the business, including website content, social ads, emails, product descriptions, and more. 

Why does messaging matter? People consume more than 485 minutes of digital media every day. If you’re going to stand out, you need to craft scroll-stopping messaging that hits just right. Your messaging needs to bridge the gap between your product’s value and your audience’s mindset. The more effectively you can do that, the better chance you have at getting them to take action.

Strategic messaging clearly and consistently communicates two things: 

1. Your value: your elevator pitch – why you’re the best solution to the problem(s) someone is facing. 
2. Your values: your story – what you stand for and why you’re here to help. 

But here’s the real kicker: both your value and your values must be deeply rooted in the lived experience of your target audience. Your message should clearly address your audience’s individual and collective problems, fears, desires, and preferences. 

Why? Because we’re all human. People want to know that you’re committed to helping them, not just bolstering your bottom line. If you want to build lasting relationships with your audience, you need to understand where they’re at and what they need. 

While there’s no magic messaging formula, you can use a few hacks to learn more about your audience and improve how you communicate with them. What’s the best place to start? Go straight to the source  – your audience👇

Research → Data → Real Customer Insights 🤓

Here at Tuff, as a growth marketing agency, we use data to inform every decision we make for our partners. From creative design to website UX to messaging, we’re constantly digging in the weeds to discover juicy bits of info that’ll inform our decision-making processes. At the center of it all → the customer experience. 

Our research and data mining tells us a story about the customer. It unlocks insights about who they are, what they care about, how they behave online, and where we can reach them. From there, we can better understand their needs and more effectively communicate with empathy and value.

What is “voice of customer” (VoC) data? 🎤

The customer is the protagonist in our epic tale. While the story may have many voices (stakeholders, product designers, employees), only one matters most. The voice of the customer. 

Voice of customer (VoC) data refers to insights and information gathered directly from customers about their wants, needs, and expectations for a product or service. There are various ways to gather this type of data, including (but not limited to) site traffic analysis, customer surveys, social media monitoring, and competitor research. 

This type of research focuses not just on what the customer “says” but also on how they react, browser, “like,” click, and navigate the online space.

From here, we can extract trends, patterns, and themes from the exact language our ‘hero’ in the story uses. 

• Is an event or circumstance triggering their search for a solution (e.g., “I’m worried about my aging loved one’s safety at home”)? 
• Do customers use specific phrases or slang to describe their problem (e.g., “I’m grinding every day in my business and still feeling stuck”)? 
• What interests or hobbies do they share (e.g., “I love cooking,” “I’m passionate about woodworking,” “I’ve always wanted to learn guitar”)?

These are the golden nuggets of language and information we can pull from VoC data to make more strategic, customer-driven messaging choices. 

Infusing VoC into every piece of content ✍️

Once you know your audience, you can infuse their attitudes, opinions, objections, and desired outcomes directly into the content you create. Things like:  

• High-impact hero messages
• Scroll-stopping ad copy 
• Value-focused white papers
• Engaging video content 
• Digestible blog posts 
• Click-worthy call-to-actions 
• Attention-grabbing subject lines 
• And more…

Here are a few examples of this concept in action: 

🍤 Meet our partner, Prime Shrimp 

• What they do: D2C Cook-In-Bag Frozen Shrimp Retailer 
• VoC Data: 

• VoC in Action (Website Page): A simple, compelling homepage hero headline: “Shrimp Made Easy”. This headline effectively highlights how easy it is to pick up, prepare, and cook. No mess, no fuss. 

🛡️Meet our partner, CEO Warrior 

• What they do: Growth-Focused Business Coaching and Leadership Training for Home Service Business Professionals 
• VoC Data: 

• VoC in Action: An impactful, straight-to-the-point Facebook ad calling out the problem and enticing viewers to get “unstuck” from the daily grind of their business operations.  

☎️ Meet our partner, Slang 

• What they do: An Always-On, AI-Powered Phone Concierge for Businesses
• VoC Data: Site analytics showed solid traffic to their restaurant contact form page but very few form submissions. The existing copy used the word “submit.” Our research found that this phrase was too vague and didn’t tell the user the result of submitting the form. Thus, fewer conversions. 

• VoC in Action (CTA Button Text): We swapped “Submit” for “Book 10min Call” and saw great results from this simple messaging tweak. 

Searching for VoC data: where to start? 🔦

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start the search to uncover all the biggest and brightest customer insights out there. To help you narrow your search and make the best use of your time, we’ve compiled our top five sources for finding valuable, usable VoC data.  

⚡Tip: Before you activate the Google machine, take time to create a list of keywords, including your brand name, your product type or category, competitor brands, competing solutions, etc. A little front-end keyword research and organization will streamline your search and get you to the right place faster. 

Top sources for VoC data 

#1 – Analyse your site traffic and user behavior. 

You might be thinking, “wait, I thought we were searching for the customer’s voice?” And you’re right. But, in addition to the actual words they’re used, you’re also looking for information about their experience. With tools like Google Analytics and HotJar, you can gather data related to user actions on your website to better understand how visitors experience and interact with your product pages.

With this information, you can implement messaging strategies that improve their experience, reduce bounce rates (aka keep them on the page longer), and eliminate points of friction that may prevent them from taking action (aka converting).  

#2 – Monitor your customers on social media activity 

Social media is an excellent way to tap into relevant ongoing conversations that customers are having about your brand (or your competitors). Unlike reviews or surveys, social media activity is honest, unfiltered feedback. 

Sit back and quietly listen to candid conversations about your product or service on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Look for trends in the stories they’re telling each other. Use keywords, phrases, and hashtags to find the forums (Reddit) and online communities (Facebook) where like-minded users interact and share advice and feedback. 

#3 – Sift through customer reviews 

Customer reviews are your VoC data goldmine. 95% of customers read reviews before purchasing a product. From a customer’s perspective, reviews are a mutually beneficial feedback loop. People can share their experiences (positive or negative) with others and make more informed decisions based on someone else’s experience. 

From a VoC data perspective, reviews are chock-full of customer stories, phrases, and opinions. Reviews are a quick and easy way to figure out exactly how your customers feel about the quality and value of your product or service. 

Here are a few popular review sites categorized by industry: 

• General: Trustpilot, BBB, Google, Amazon, Consumer Reports 
• Travel / Food & Beverage: TripAdvisor, Yelp, 
• Home Services: Angies List, HomeAdvisor
• Tech: G2, Capterra 

🔴 Fake reviews: When reading reviews, be weary of anything that sounds fake, unnatural, or a little too “cheezy” (think: “this is the greatest vacuum ever” vs. “great vacuum, but battery life is lacking”) 

#4 – Complete competitor analysis 

While a competitor analysis isn’t the fastest route to VoC data, it is a high-priority, high-value exercise. Our digital world is growing rapidly. With that comes increasing competition to win the customer’s attention and loyalty. You need to know what you’re up against to come out on top. 

Your mission: identify and audit your competitor’s pages and customer reviews. 

• How do they describe their benefits and value? 
• What stories do they tell? 
• How do they describe their products and services?
• What are they selling? And for how much? 
• What phrases or calls to action stand out? 

From there, you can identify your key differentiators. What makes you different? Where and how are you winning? What gaps in the customer experience do you fill? 

The result: a critical understanding of the competitive landscape, the messaging used by competitors (and their customers), and what sets you apart.

#5 – Ask your customer-facing team 

Do you have people on your team who regularly interact with the customer (in-person or online)? Maybe it’s your sales team? Or your online chat representatives? Or the receptionist behind the front desk? As you’re going out on your search for VoC data online, it’s easy to forget that there are people internally who have an intimate understanding of your customer needs, pain points, and frustrations. 

Talk to team members who regularly listen to customer feedback and questions. Tease out valuable VoC snippets from phone conversations, emails, and chat transcripts. Not only will this help you identify key messaging, but it will also help you train front-line employees to better communicate with your customers. 

Other direct methods for gathering customer insights that aren’t covered here include customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups. If you’re looking to dig a little deeper and engage in more direct conversations with your customers, try one of these methods. 

Don’t forget your spreadsheet 

You’ve done the hard work identifying all the key messages circulating on the internet about your business, product, competitors, and customer experience. Now comes the fun part: organizing and categorizing your research into one easy-to-use document. 

By organizing your data, you can more easily identify trends and patterns in the data. This document can also be a reference point for you and your team to refer back to when you need inspiration or ideas for new campaigns. 

Activate, Analyze, Refine, Repeat

Hot take: we’re never done learning. This initial research and discovery process is just the beginning. Your customer feedback, attitudes, and needs may shift and change as your business grows and evolves. As a result, you’ll need to stay on your toes and continually collect VoC data to inform future decisions and strategies. 

At Tuff, we make the process simple. After we’ve activated a campaign, we analyze the data. Which ad copy resonated most with our target audience? Which email subject line in our A/B test performed better? How did the updated call-to-action button text affect conversion? 

From there, we identify our key learnings and refine our messaging accordingly. We refer back to the customer and search for new opportunities to engage with them more effectively. Then, we go back to the drawing board and do it all over again. 

We put our partner’s audience in the driver’s seat from day one. No magic messaging formula required. Need a partner to help you create high-impact, high-value messaging that resonates with your target audience and drive conversions? Let’s talk.

The post How to Uncover Voice of Customer Data to Create High-Impact, High-Value Messaging appeared first on Tuff.