Do You Really Want that Internet Traffic?
At Grupo Porvenir we heavily rely on word-of-mouth in order to attract customer to our branches. Our target market consits of C and C-minus segments of the Mexican population. This segement does not, for the most part, have access to the regular banking system or let alone have access to the web. Because of this, our Marketing strategy has been focused on becoming something like the “mom and pops” version of banks. We work with our clients, looking to understand their individual needs by tracking their customer behavior, measuring their NPS in every transaction they make, and rewarding them with special treatments when they deserve it. We want community members to trust that we have their best interest and for them to talk about this with their neighbors. So far, this strategy has allowed for us to grow as a company. We started with one branch in 2009, today, we are up to 87 branches.
Our fast and sustainable growth was evidence that a more tradicional Marketing approach was working for us. Despite of this success, when I first joined Grupo Porvenir in 2013, I was eager to propose and explore a more integrated way of doing Marketing. With the rise of social media, SEO, e-mail and the internet in general, it only seemed logical to incorporate these mediums as part of our Marketing strategy. One of the first steps we took was to create a Facebook page and try to get users to “share us” or “like us”. We also began adding customers to a mailing list and implemented a Loyalty Rewards Program. We worked on getting to the first page of Google by using SEO and creating Banner Ads to drive traffic to our website.
All of these steps seemed crucial to get us to the next step and giving us competitive advantage with our direct competitors who did not have a strong online prescecnce. We were “in” with the trend and that was great! With all these improvements came one big and crucial issue though – our website. All the changed we made to improve our online precesnce were comparatively cheap to improving our website. We were using online channels to drive new traffic to our website, but our website was a very poor representation of our company.
The Time article “What You Think You know About the Internet” really resonated with my experience at Grupo Porvenir. The article reads:
“When sites are built to capture attention, any friction, any bad design or eye-roll-inducing advertorials that might cause a visitor to spend a second less on the site is bad for business. That means better design and a better experience for everyone. A web where quality makes money and great design is rewarded? That’s something worth paying attention to.”
Today, the “shares” and “likes” we get across the Internet do not easily deceive us. Rather, we decided to go ahead and invest in creating a well designed website that created a better experience for the users who access it. The biggest take I got from this article is that driving traffic to content that is not good is a waste of time and money. All our efforts to improve our online presence should have come secondary to improving our webpage. We should have cared less about the “click” and more about what happened after it. Luckily, we are aware of this mistake and are well on our way to sorting it out.
