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PDFThis month we implemented ConvertKit on this blog – a very useful marketing tool for improving engagement on any blog.
ConvertKit allowed us to add Calls to Action to encourage readers to give us their email address.Calls To Action
We added 3 Different Calls to Action.
- A Sidebar Ad prompting readers to Join the MediaVidi Blog
2. A Pop Up offering our Free Guide – 12 Ways to Make your Content Mobile Friendly. The pop up appears when you read your first article on the site.
3. A Sidebar Ad for our Free Guide
The standard practice on blogs today is to give away a free piece of valuable content to your readers as an inducement for the reader to join your email list.
Calls to Action – Marketing Goal
The goal of these 3 Calls to Action was to get readers to give us their email address so we can build a relationship with the people who like our content.
Early Results
The pop-up advertising our Free Guide – 12 Ways to Make your Content Mobile Friendly – was implemented to pop-up the first time a reader read one of our blog posts.
Once a reader had read their first post they would then see the Sidebar Ad for the Free Guide.
These Calls to Action worked really well and we collected lots of email addresses. So we decided to run an experiment.
The Experiment
Our Free Guide is filled with actionable tips, tools and valuable resources to help readers make their Content Mobile Friendly.
The Guide is targeted at people who create or curate content and are engaged in content marketing (the target market for our startup MondoPlayer).
Normally our blog covers a broad range of topics related to entrepreneurship, startups, digital media and marketing. But we decided to run two posts in a row about “mobile”.
The idea was to bring people to the blog who were interested in content marketing for mobile. We assumed people coming to the site with “mobile” on the brain would jump at a free guide to help them make their content mobile friendly.
An Unpredictable Result
We saw zero engagement from people who visited the posts about mobile. Strangely they were not the least bit interested in getting a comprehensive guide. Maybe once they read the articles their curiosity was satisfied.
On the other hand, people who visited posts on other topics engaged like crazy and signed up for the Free Guide.
Lesson Learned
We learned an important lesson about the way people consume content on the web.
Our assumption that people coming to the site to read a post about “mobile” were somehow self identifying as “mobile people” was wrong.
Once again the old adage about assuming held true. (“Assuming makes an ass out of you and me”.)
Take Away
Sometimes the results you expect in your online marketing don’t add up. In the arithmetic of web traffic, 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.
Our experiment proved how important it is to test rather than to rely on your gut instincts.