ConversionXL Growth-Hacking Mini-Degree Week 3 Review
By: Zachary Tan
Tags: Growth Hacking

Just a recap, in the last week — we covered a LOT — concepts like User-centric Marketing, Customer Motivation, and Top Tasks. We also covered important ideas like how to create a Customer Journey Map for a Tour Guide Business and also how to execute effective campaign design.

This is important because we’d know how to adopt digital marketing practices and processes to traditional businesses where we can benefit more people and business owners.

This week, Sophia will be covering Growth Channels or to put it in basic online marketing terms, how to grow the traffic of your business.

I felt that this topic is very timely as by conducting high-quality user research, we can better understand our target market which will be extremely helpful when we’re trying to boost conversions.

Once we’re done fixing conversions, there goes the next part of the equation traffic. It’s no use having a very high-conversion rate when there isn’t enough traffic running through your website — your Bottom Line will still be affected.

Hence, this is the motivation of learning paid traffic.

Sophia starts off her class by discussing the five different major growth channels available at the moment.

These channels are:

SEM: Search Engine Marketing or Paid Advertising (PPC marketing) SEO: Search Engine Optimisation Social Media and Display: Covering FB, Instagram and display networks Email Marketing Content Marketing

Good channels have great ROI and great ability to scale. Find the right channel which works for your niche.

Next, Sophia proceeds to uncover some of the myths revolving Growth Channels and SEO.

Myths about Growth Channels:

You can’t track ROI in Social Media — FB, IG — We can do this through Google Analytics. Social Media Marketing is merely getting attention and engagement. In reality, we can generate leads through Social Media Marketing.

The difficult thing about utilizing Growth Channels is that certain Social Media Platforms are constantly changing and as marketers, we have to do a lot of testing — the type of posting, the content, the image thumbnail, the Call-To-Action, the Offer.

Only by testing, we can then learn what works best.

Myths about SEO:

SEO is automatic — It is not, you need to make a lot of efforts to make sure SEO kicks in for your business. Have to rank #1 for a keyword- the reality is to find a balance between the most searched Keywords and focusing on Long Tail Keywords. SEO is Irrelevant — SEO is alive and kicking. Google releases daily updates for SEO and that says it is here to stay.

Next, Sophia covers two different aspects of driving growth and traffic — Organic Marketing and Paid Marketing

Firstly, we’ll cover the organic component (SEO). This part discusses about Keyword Research and Content Gap Analysis which is absolute gold for Content Marketers.

Content Marketing

To get better clarity of Content Marketing, this is the thing which ties everything together — social, SEO, PPC, PR.

It’s about building a relationship with your audience by giving value in the form of relevant information they need rather than selling products. People purchase from content sources they trust and can refer to. Content marketing builds that trust and enables users to explore the brand.

Just keep in mind, there are three main promotional mediums in content marketing: Search, Social and Email. Your content should be in your website, blog, newsletters, every email you send, everything that appears in your social streams.

To create a SEO Content Strategy, we have to begin by understanding the Keywords and uncover the gaps in content. To do this, we can use tools like Moz, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest and look at competitors who are succeeding in content marketing.

One other key to drive traffic to your page is to do on-page and off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO: Search engines use links to discover new web pages and to determine how a page ranks in SERP. Due to the stringent approach by Google you need to seek links from established sites which are relevant to your website content. On-page SEO refers to all the efforts taken on the actual pages to drive traffic. The main one’s are page title, meta description, URL, keyword optimisation, header tags, so your H1s, H2s, H3s, and the image alt-text.

In addition, here are a few guidelines to be a great Content Marketing Strategist:

Know your Target Market Understand Topics, Keywords and SEO; Write simply at a Grade-5 level where everyone in your target market can understand. It should be simple, straight-forward and helpful. Publish in different formats and channels. Collaborate with influencers in the same niche

Basically, the content strategists must build a strong base of content that goes higher, rising on itself with a larger foundation, until it gets to the top search results on the first page of Google.

Moving from Organic Traffic to Paid Traffic:

Paid marketing is one the most popular ways to bring traffic to your website. The ads and marketing strategy has to be optimised as per the user stage in the journey. Some of the key points:

PPC is not costly if you optimise it correctly PPC drives customers directly to the site Goals — higher CTR and conversion, Lower CPC, CP

Most Common Type of PPC campaigns:

Awareness Lead Generation Engagement Pre-sales Promo

With a variety of Growth Channels and both Organic-Paid Marketing covered, Sophia emphasizes that it’s important we test out different channels to find out what works best for your market or niche.

Also, she warns companies of spreading themselves too thin when it comes to using multiple channels.

In this article, we covered Traffic and Growth Channels very thoroughly — SEM, SEO, Social Media, Email and Content Marketing. Sophia also stresses that paid traffic isn’t always superior to organic traffic… and it really depends on your type of campaigns and the needs of your business.

Also, she covered a few very important pointers for aspiring content strategists to note. That Content Strategists has to be savvy with basic SEO and they should be able to write at a Grade-5 Level.