Whether you want to call it Growth Hacking, Digital Marketing or – my personal favourite – Tactical Data Warfare, any good website strategy hinges off of two things: traffic and conversion. Traffic is the number of people who visit your website and conversion is the number of people who take the desired action (sign up, purchase, share – whatever that means for you).
In this post I’m going to give you a quick tactical hack for driving more (hyper targeted) traffic to your website using data. By using your knowledge of your product and target personas, you can drive high-quality traffic to your website and (hopefully) increase your conversion rates using this handy hack.
Understanding Your CPA
Before you can start, you need to know what your cost per acquisition is – i.e. the amount of money you need to spend to get one person to convert on your site. This amount is closely related to your website’s conversion rate. So, if you spend $100 and get 100 visits and 2 conversions, your conversion rate is 2% and you CPA is $20. The right CPA for you will also depend heavily on how much value you generate from each conversion, since our tool is free, our CPA needs to be as low as possible.
I’ve done a lot of work optimizing our homepage to make it as easy to use and simple as possible, giving me a nice, high conversion rate of around 40%. If we imagine (to make the maths easy) that my target CPA is $10, we can work out that if I spend $100 on a traditional CPC campaign, I need at least 10 conversions to hit my $10 CPA target. Which, based on my 40% conversion rate, means I need at least 25 people to click the campaign and visit the website.
But, using data – and a little creativity – I can blow this figure out of the water!
Step 1: Defining Your Target Audience
Just as you would for any other paid campaign you need to start with who it is you want to drive to your site. Part of this process should be figuring out where your target audience hangs out and what other sites they use. For us, one of those target audiences is people who are already writing web scrapers the hard way.
Looking on oDesk I can see that there are loads (11,603) of freelancers that claim to have skills in “web scraping”. These are exactly the kind of users who could benefit from a tool like import.io, so what I want to do is encourage them to visit the website, check out the tool and sign up for an account.
Step 2: Create an Incentive
Now that I’ve identified who I’m targeting and where they are I need to create a reason for them to visit my site. First, I to create a job on oDesk that specifically references using import.io to get data. I’m going to make it a pretty well paid job so that it looks very appealing to would-be applicants.
Step 3: Start an Interaction
Next, using import.io, I build a Connector to oDesk and search for the skills that I think will be relevant to the job I’ve posted. This gives me a comprehensive list of the names and contact links of everyone on oDesk who I think would be relevant for this job. Then, using a second Connector I can automate the process of personally inviting each one of them to apply for the job through oDesk.
Measuring Your Success
You’ll want to measure your success for this hack in the same way you would for any other campaign – by looking at your CPA. Using the figures I quoted before I can work out that if I put up a job for $500, I need 50 conversions to justify the spend – which means I need 125 site visits.
But, when you consider I’m personally inviting 11,000 people to apply for the job, even if less than 1% of them click through to the website I’ll still easily reach my target. Not only that, but I know that each of the people who visits my site will be part of my target market and is probably more likely to convert than the average 40%.
Growth Hacking vs Traditional Marketing
There’s a lot of debate at the moment about what is Growth Hacking vs Traditional Marketing. My answer? Who cares! It doesn’t matter what you want to call it, you’re all trying to accomplish the same goal: more conversions.
When you start thinking creatively about how to use to engage with your audience the possibilities are endless. Anyone can be a Growth Hacker, it just takes a little out-of-the-box thinking. If you have an idea for using data for digital marketing I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
This post is based on a talk I gave at the import.io User meetup Group in London – slides below.