How we got people to use our furlough pay calculator

Part 7

(Read part 6 of “Making a website that gets some traffic” here)

I’m on furlough. I’ve been filling my time with getting a formal marketing qualification and by working with my fellow furloughed friend Naz to build something strangers on the internet might use.

If you haven’t already, you should read Naz’s posts on how he kicked off building a furlough calculator.

Naz started the project by building the calculator and making it super simple to use, and then I jumped on board and we started trying lots of things to get people to use it.

In one month, we got 3,750 people to use the furlough pay calculator we built.

Here’s what we did.

We started with content

At the heart of any good marketing plan is content. So whilst I started thinking about what we could write about, Naz rebuilt the website from the bottom up, and built a blog, complete with a CMS (content management system — basically an easy way to let non-coding folk like me publish blog posts).

As someone who can’t code, I was blown away that he managed to do this in a day 🤯

Whilst Naz was working his magic, I used Google Keyword Planner to figure out what people were searching for when trying to figure out their salary on furlough.

Then, I put together a Google Sheet with all the keywords and phrases I thought people would search (and read things about), and made a list of blog posts we could write.

We hoped this would get us awareness and users fast, and people would trust us because we’d demonstrated we’d researched our stuff.

Usually, marketers write content that’s well optimised for Google search, in the hopes of “ranking” for the search terms relevant to their thing. But, new to the internet, getting to the top of Google would take us some time.

And, the top result for “salary calculator” or “furlough” have been around a while; they had hundreds of backlinks (other websites linking to them) — we knew Google had to be a longer game. We still wrote in a way that Google would like, but without any hope or expectation that we’d get to the top fast.

We wrote things we thought would be helpful to people on furlough

We really wanted to be helpful where we could. Based upon what I’d found from Google Keyword Planner and from doing some of my own research, we wrote:

What does furlough mean?

Why has the furlough scheme been introduced?

What happens when I’m furloughed?

How is my furlough pay calculated?

On the day Rishi Sunak announced that the government were extending the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme by another month, we wrote What does the furlough extension mean for me?.

And we keep writing, too — we’re writing a couple of new posts a week, based upon what people are talking about and searching for (all our posts are below the furlough pay calculator, if you’re interested).

We made @FurloughCalcUK on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Now we had this content, we wanted somewhere to share it. So we started with a very quick, simple social media strategy. We set up @FurloughCalcUK on Twitter and Instagram, “Furlough Pay Calculator UK” on Facebook.

We decided to focus most of our efforts on Twitter to started with. We just searched “furlough”, “furloughed” “on furlough” on Twitter and started following everyone in the UK who talked about being on furlough. We did this every day for the first week — and we gained 41 followers. Better than nothing, but nothing to write home about.

We then did the same on Instagram. And then we had our first ever engagement — someone put us on their story!

We were super excited — someone recommended us 🎉

So we carried on doing the same, and a few more people shared the calculator — but again, nothing too huge.

We made a content plan and stuck to it (most of the time)

Now we had places to share our content, and content to share, we made a plan. This started as a Google Sheet, where we’d planned to share a few posts a day, by platform.

Once we were convinced there was enough to talk about, though, we decided to switch over to Buffer, a social media scheduling tool. With Buffer, I planned out the week’s postings — some memes, some re-sharing of our blog posts, some short-form content for Twitter. All links would lead either to the blog, or to the calculator itself.

We found that people prefer people when they’ve not heard of a “brand” before

We then decided to try something different. Instead of using @FurloughCalcUK, we started sharing the calculator from our personal social media accounts. I started with Facebook, and lots of cousins, some old school friends and my Mum re-shared my post. Then their friends shared. This got us 200 new views! Our highest point yet, but still small.

We figured that my Facebook post was more successful because it came from me — someone that my friends know and (probably?) trust.

Perhaps that’s the key? So, we tried the same on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Again, a small amount of people clicked.

We borrowed other people’s audiences

On 23rd April, Monzo tweeted this:

This felt like a good opportunity. Monzo has over 100,000 followers, and most of them are big fans. Not expecting much, I tweeted this:

And then this happened:

From my reply to Monzo, over 500 people visited our site, which was our highest yet.

Note: this isn’t me advising you to tweet at Monzo for any old thing you’re trying to get clicks for. This worked because my reply was relevant to the original content, it came from me as a recommendation and it connected with people who tapped to see replies to Monzo’s tweet.

We got carried away with the power of memes

And we probably got a bit too invested. We even changed our Instagram account entirely to be meme-only (@furloughed_).

We thought it’d be successful because people love memes. But actually, it ended up meaning our Instagram account lost a sense of purpose (it was really hard to shoe-horn “hey, come look at our calculator!” into posts that were supposed to be funny and relatable) and we ultimately didn’t spend enough time thinking through truly good memes, so the account went quieter than we wanted.

What we guessed might be a good idea to become a “memes account” didn’t really serve any purpose in the end, so we’re going to change it back to be the voice of the calculator site (and we may still occasionally post memes, like we do on our Twitter account).

We did a simple six day Instagram ads test

We did the simplest possible test we could with paid advertising — we set up a 6 day test. We didn’t used Facebook’s Ad Manager — we did it straight from the Instagram app on my phone.

We didn’t try anything too fancy either — the ad was a screenshot of the calculator, and that’s it. Here’s how it looked:

We also didn’t choose our targeting — we let Instagram handle that automatically.

We set a budget of £2 per day (so we spent £12 in total). This got us roughly 150 extra visitors a day. In total, over 6 days, Instagram sent 1,060 people to the calculator, and 12,220 saw the ad.

We’re seeing search engine shoots

Now that we’ve been around for a month, search engines are starting to notice. Bing and Yahoo! have been our best friends so far:

Of course, Google’s the big one, and we still haven’t quite cracked it yet.

We’ve also been changing a few things in the background (you might’ve noticed our URL’s changed, more on that later 👀) — so, whilst we’re being inconsistent on where to find us, search engines will also find it harder to find us.

We’re heading in a different direction

We’ve learned a lot from building a furlough pay calculator. We learned that it takes some time and a lot of effort to get Google to like us, people prefer recommendations from other people, and that communities (like a bigger brands’ loyal following on Twitter) are the better places to grow awareness quicker.

We’re not out of the woods with coronavirus yet, and it’s likely people will be on furlough for a while longer.

But, we also know that the world is starting to return to normal, and we think we’ve stumbled upon a problem that the internet hasn’t solved in the easiest, most user-friendly way just yet: figuring out your post-tax salary, whichever country you live in.

So, we’re taking a step back from marketing the furlough calculator (as I’m sure you can see in the graphs), and re-thinking what this looks like for the future, maybe as something a little different.

Stay tuned here for more next week 😉