Dan MoyleOverview
At Impulse Creative, we are Wayfinders. Wayfinding is all the ways in which people orient themselves and navigate from place to place. Our clients know where they want to go when it comes to business growth. We're the compass to help them navigate there, and make their brand’s mark on the digital marketing map.
We could call ourselves a marketing agency, a digital agency or a branding agency, but we’re more than that. Because we don’t provide services without results.
We believe that good marketing is a long-term journey together, toward a clearly defined goal. That includes our own marketing.
"It’s a scalpel versus a sledgehammer."
-Remington Begg on marketing strategy
The Challenge
Our website homepage wasn’t performing the way we wanted. We looked at the Impulse Creative homepage and the "unknown visitor traffic" bounced at a high rate, around 80%. In the same token the known visitors (2nd+ visit) were clicking through to other pages. But from there, their journey came to an end.
“We have operated over the past few years on assumptions about who our visitors are,” Co-founder and CEO Remington Begg said. “That was based on the types of content they consume and the sales process. But we didn’t know beyond a reasonable doubt that the people were who we intended.”
In addition to the high bounce rate telling us that our intended viewers weren’t who we thought they were, we experienced a 75% exit rate of the homepage. This means three of every four visitors left after seeing the homepage. Beyond that, the traffic that was clicking through was not going where we'd prefer them to (like service pages and deeper).
"We didn’t know beyond a reasonable doubt that the people were who we intended.”
-Remington Begg on knowing our audience
The Solutions
Remington says the data showed Impulse Creative what was needed. “We could tell it was a homepage improvement rather than a full site issue. It’s a scalpel versus a sledgehammer.”
It was obvious after looking further into it that our homepage was not communicating properly. So we focused on two initiatives:
- Build out a selector that recommended services dynamically based on user
- Incorporate smart content on page (and service pages) that allowed for us to change the message to make it more useful to known contacts
Phase one, building a selector for homepage viewers to segment themselves, helped us better understand our audience. At its heart, the selector is meant to begin to give us context. A contextual conversation begins with precise targeting.
The bonus with using tools that connect is that creating the selector on our HubSpot-hosted page, funneling the data into our HubSpot CRM, then connecting our Drift chat tool to it all means we have contextual conversations in Drift as well.
Phase two meant adding smart content to the homepage (and deeper into the site like on service pages) to speak directly to viewers. This allowed for us to customize messaging to make it more useful to our known contacts. It even lasts beyond the initial visit, keeping our website more relevant to users.
For instance, when a user chooses that they want more leads, we’ll offer content throughout the site on blogging, lead generation, and other inbound marketing tactics.
The Results
We saw immediate results on lowering our bounce and exit rates when we implemented these solutions. Then, more than six months later, we still see a great improvement.
Our Smart Content Exit rate is 30% less than default content (IE: known users being more engaged).
Also, time on page was 15% longer.
In regards to the persona chooser's effectiveness specifically:
19% of people who visited the homepage engaged in the selector.
This allowed for us to target users based on persona & intent for drift bots and future conversations resulting in 29 leads drift leads from our website's homepage.
The click-through-rate (CTR) to our company page (who is Impulse Creative?) and our service pages (what can they do?) is working much better. That was a goal of ours at the onset of this project.
- 5% of our traffic since Feb 2019 goes to services and data is cleaner - people going to specific areas where we want them to
- Previous period was scattered and only 3% went to services
- 25% went to company page vs 17% company page between those two periods
Future Plans Based on What This Tells Us
Our plan from here is to increase our contextual marketing on the website and offsite in ads.
Once people say who they are and they leave your site, you can start catering social media content to them. So if they’re a CEO who wants more leads for their business, we can create ads that say that exactly. “If you’re a CEO who wants more leads, Impulse Creative is the partner for you.”
Or if users are in a different segment, like a marketing manager looking to increase email conversion rates, we can target them with a different resource.
Adding context to ads will drastically improve conversion rates due to relevance.
Impulse will also further build out bots that target specific high priority targeting of intents. When visitors have returned and we know who they are and what they’re looking for, we don’t have to serve up generic bots asking “how can we help.” Instead, we can offer the latest resources relevant to their needs, or connect them with a rep who can help immediately.
