Resolutions. We make ‘em, we break ‘em. Still, come each January, recommendations for improving your life—and your business—abound. Most we ignore, for good reason. But if you’ve got a hankering to boost company growth, the RevUp growth team has three simple practices worth committing to in 2017. We’ve used these techniques with our portfolio and they move the needle on growth, but without creating busy work.
Read this post, you'll be able to...
Build a website that better converts visitors into customers.
Squeeze more value out of your content and build a marketing machine.
Visualize your *real* acquisition costs to hone in on what's working (and what isn't).
You can do all of this for free. Ambitious? Yes. Doable? Totally.
1: Observe Your Site
You can't build a better web experience if you don't understand your current one. Getting feedback from everyone who visits your site isn't realistic. One of the easiest tools for site observation is Hotjar. It's free and lets you watch recordings of what visitors do while surfing pages on your site. How do they move around a page, in what sequence do they seek information, and where do they look for clues on what to do next? This exercise is not for the faint at heart. Be ready to be surprised, and sometimes saddened, by how users *really* behave. It’s a good way to gut check assumptions about how visitors act within your digital domain.
Resolution: Commit to watching users behavior on a weekly basis, and right after you make any site changes.
2. Repurpose Your Content
Content is a beast. What sounds easy during a whiteboard planning session can equal hours of serious work to create. Unless your company is flush with creative talent, it's crucial to be efficient with your efforts. We’ve got one word for you: repurpose. Let’s say you wrote a killer blog post. You can convert that post into a podcast or an infographic. Same content, different packaging. It’s a great way to squeeze more value out of your content, while likely expanding your audience. A content marketing win-win.
Resolution: Find new ways to repurpose the content you’ve already created.
Bonus tip: Now that you're pumping out content faster than ever before, you need to manage it. Set up a weekly editorial calendar so nothing slips through the cracks.
3. Throw Out Blended Metrics
When scaling your business, knowing what it costs to acquire new customers is critical. Here’s the standard formula:
[costs spent acquiring customers] / [# of customers acquired] = CAC
One problem: Everyone's acquisition performance varies over time. Knowing that, you can't divide lifetime costs by lifetime customers. You end up with a skewed number that doesn't reflect what's actually going on. How do you really know if your campaigns are really crushing it? Look at your acquisition costs through a smaller window of time. We’ve found that daily, weekly, and monthly windows show offer a finer degree of accuracy when figuring out what's working, what isn't, and how that changes over time.
Resolution: Segment your ad spend through windows of time every month before making adjustments.
Maybe 2017 won’t be the year you quit fermented carbs or land the whale you’ve been tracking like Cap’t Ahab. BUT...with these three small shifts in behavior, 2017 CAN be the year you pump up the volume on growth.
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For more about how the RevUp Growth team works, check out this post.
Interested in joining the RevUp portfolio? More here.