By: Craig Spooner
Marketing in the ed tech marketplace is a whirlwind. Trying to connect to your audience in a meaningful way without getting in their way is a constant struggle. You may find yourself scrambling to get your message out to the masses, crossing your fingers in hopes that it will rise above the noise and contribute something meaningful and noteworthy—but too often disappointed with lackluster results. As a marketer, I can confidently say that the old ways of marketing are slowly fading into the shadows and the new form of inbound marketing is stepping into the light. It’s no longer enough to simply publish stories and hope that the leads will pour in. Nowadays, your website must be a finely calibrated content machine that delivers your prospects the information they want and need, without giving them the feeling that they are being pushed to buy.
Now you might be asking, “If I have these assets on my site and my blog addresses the goals and challenges of my buyers, shouldn’t that be enough for my prospects to find what they need?” The simple answer, my friends, is NO. Prospects are always looking for the easiest, most time-efficient way to solve their problems, and companies are always looking to increase the conversion rates of their marketing and PR efforts, so why not kill two birds with one stone by launching a website strategy that automagically puts the right content in front of prospects at the right time based on their perceived interests—and in the process, increases conversion rates? Sound like a headache to you?
Well, don’t crack the bottle of Tylenol just yet. Let’s take a look at some recent data that we’ve collected that shows the value of a connected ed tech content linking strategy. Here’s a teaser: We increased the conversion rate on a client’s site from an average of 7% to 42% in less than two months.
This client came to us looking to do three things:
The first step for PRP was to develop three separate pieces of content for each stage of the buyer's journey that addressed the goals and challenges of their ideal buyers. We chose to create a checklist, an infographic, and a playbook, each crafted for a targeted audience and specifically written to build on pre-existing material on their site. Once these pieces of content were finalized, our next step was to develop our linking strategy.
By using some of our favorite HubSpot tools, we built the visibility of these three new assets in no time and ultimately increased their on-page conversion rate from an average of 7% to a whopping 42%! Here are three tactics we used:
The final numbers for each content piece were astonishing (and are still growing). The industry average for landing page conversions is a dismal 2%. In just less than two months, our linking strategy brought an average of 380 views a week to each asset, with a conversion rate of 40% or higher for each content offer.
Bottom line here: in order to produce consistent, quality leads and keep your prospects (and sales team!) happy, you NEED to be designing your content delivery system to match the needs of your buyer personas. A linking strategy that guides users through your site naturally not only introduces them to more of your brand and your services, but dramatically increases the likelihood that they will venture further down your content funnel and move that much closer to a sale.
Thanks for sharing!