How do you increase traffic by 700% ?

People are busy.

The fact that you’re spending your precious time reading these lines right now is mind-blowing. Seriously. And as an act of appreciation we are not going to waste your time, so let’s get started.

Make sure not to your potential visitors time. Always be consistent and make sure to highlight your company’s real values, and just meaningless high-level marketing tag-lines. Your visitors will appreciate it, and more likely that your messages will resonate.

However, that doesn’t mean you should be boring. They already heard similar slogans many times in the past, they heard different vendors promising the exact same dream benefits – so how do you get them to engage with your brand?

Use Zombies in your marketing campaign.

After running tens of ordinary campaigns we’ve realized that the display banner campaigns on Facebook are getting costly due to relatively low CTR’s (Click through rates). So, we have decided to change it and add some sense of humor to our ads.

As a Website Personalization company, that is not an easy task to do! Usually campaigns in our space presenting smiling marketers, analytics graphs etc.

But guess what? We did it. We managed to get targeted Facebook visitors attention, and drive much more traffic to our site, at lower costs.

Original Campaign

Here are the ordinary campaigns we ran at first. CTR was about 0.045%, leading to a cost-per-click of $14.55 (!)

Example A:

Example B:

The improved Campaign

So after doing some thoughts on the type of campaigns that would work and serve our purpose the best, we chose to go for the humorous take.

We tried to find metaphors or reasons for our potential customers issues, and wrap them with attention drawing image. Something that will catch their eyes, intrigue them and will get them to read and learn more about it.

That already worked much better so click-through-rate increased for over 0.33%, leading to a cost-per-click of only $1.06.

Improved Campaign Example A:

Improved Campaign Example B:

What’s next?

In order to make sure that you not only attract visitors, but also convert them at higher rates, you should complete the ads’ experience with an on-site experience to ensure a great journey for your visitors.

So we used our own tool in order to run a holistic campaign and target visitors that landed on our homepage from that specific campaign. For example:

Want to run real-time personalization on your site? click here and start your free trial.

Conclusion

We didn’t seriously mean for you to use zombies. Wait, scratch that. We did. You should use zombies, dark lords, and even chickens. The idea is to get people to smile, to raise their eyebrows, to simply engage. You can only deliver your message after you receive someone’s attention. Be playful and try and get any sort of emotional reaction. Do whatever works for you, don’t take yourselves too seriously.

Originally published at blog.commercesciences.com on October 30, 2014.