Here’s a Great Recipe For a Successful Marketing Mix
by Candace Brown, Marketing Manager, Gourmet Ads Pty Limited
In the marketing world, high conversion rates are the gold standard. It’s what everyone wants, but it’s often a metric that’s hard to achieve. When we began our journey with Pardot, we had lofty goals of off-the-chart conversion rates, but we quickly found that simply having a top-notch marketing automation platform wasn’t enough.
“In the beginning our numbers were frankly horrible,” shares Gourmet Ads President and Founder Benjamin Christie. “We spent months working on integrating Pardot with our website, landing pages and tools, but never took the time to focus on the content — and it showed.”
So the Gourmet Ads team took a focused approach to creating content that was worthy of the engagement metrics they sought.
“Our publisher team took on a massive research project to reach out to both our prospective and current publishers to find out exactly what they needed, and wanted to know, and when they needed certain information,” says Alison Rabschnuk, Global Director of Partnerships.
As part of the research, we talked to website owners who had been long-time partners of ours, publishers that had just signed up as partners (within the last 7 days), and publishers that had decided not to work with us. We asked them to rank 10 items in order of importance. The research phase uncovered valuable information about what was most important for our partner publishers.
These insights resulted in a series of highly targeted drip campaigns tailored to the needs of the publisher at every stage of the conversion funnel. “We created emails that cultivated the prospect and answered their questions, messages for active publishers to increase their participation, and content for inactive publishers to entice them to reactivate,” Christie said.
And the content worked, in fact, it performed beyond the team’s expectations.
“We saw a 14 percent conversion rate from less than 2 percent almost overnight,” said Christie. “Having a robust system like Pardot to drive our targeted content was definitely the recipe for our success.”
While the Gourmet Ads story might not be a one-size-fits-all method, it serves as a smart reminder that carefully crafted content plays a huge role in a successful marketing mix. Here are a few of the company’s tips to creating engaging content:
- Understand your audience. Develop personas representing your top 3 types of users. This will help you determine the content that’s in highest demand.
- While your technical team works on integration, take time to create great content — this is what ultimately drives your success. Work with your team or hire an external resource to develop emails that are relevant to your readers and that answer their most important questions. Be sure the messaging encourages them to move through your conversion funnel.
- Get the most from your automation system. Utilize the resources provided by Pardot to maximize your content by timing it appropriately, and automating the next step as the user progresses. Be sure to track your performance regularly and modify your messaging or your approach as you go.
Gourmet Ads is a global food marketing network focusing on branding campaigns reaching the grocery buyer online.
