Holiday rental company doubles its website traffic

At the turn of the millennium, large sums of money were invested into technology. Some people made a lot of money, even more people lost money. Without going into detail on economics, there was simply insufficient substance to back up expectation and hype surrounding technology shares. The result, in hindsight, was glaringly predictable. In 2014, companies and high net worth individuals are again throwing 'crazy money' into technology. Consider the absurdity off Evan Speigel turning down an offer from Facebook to buy SnapChat for a reported $3bn. There were rumours of a bid of $4bn from Google that was also turned down.

Speigel, a 20-something-year-old turned down the offer of enough money to ensure that the next 5 generations of his line would never want for anything (material anyway). There are always extenuating circumstances. But here is the thing: According to SnapChat, their users are sharing around 350 million photos each day.

If the numbers are being backed up by substance, are they really absurd? If 350 million photos are shared on SnapChat every day, it indicates that, globally, people are now accepting technology as their primary source of entertainment, communication, and commerce. If, for example, SnapChat implemented a fee of $0.01 per photograph shared (that is approximately 10 South African cents), it would equate to $1.2bn of revenue for a year. The point is, in 2014, there is economic substance behind the technology of today and the apparently absurd prices.

What relevance is this to my business?

Technology is not entering a bubble, it is coming of age. In a rather intimidating state of affairs, any business that does not capitalise on technology is going to lose market share to competitors. Web 2.0, which is the evolution of the internet into a fully interactive medium brought on through social networking, blogging, hosted services etc., is coming into its own. It presents a tangible opportunity for companies to grasp the nettle and take the lead in their sector. Use technology to drive access to new revenue, not to increase costs with 'nice-to-haves'.

(Image: Capsol

Using technology to drive revenue

A local South African small to medium sized business, Cape Town-based Holiday Rental group Capsol, appointed an IT marketing guru, Max Guedy. Guedy, at the forefront of his field, realigned his client's online marketing strategy to benefit from the shift in Google's ranking algorithms by introducing high-quality content to the company's online marketing initiatives. Holiday accommodation is an incredibly competitive arena on the internet. By appointing a leading thinker in online marketing strategy, Capsol, slowly crept up and passed their competition in search engine rankings in a relatively short period. Being at the forefront of internet marketing enables the company to remain 6 - 12 months ahead of any advances by competition, an enviable position.

How does search engine ranking translate into revenue?

Guedy's contribution to the company is, in essence, a strategic content marketing campaign. Consider the mainstream approach. Many of us are familiar with spending terrifying amounts on Google AdWords. While historically we may have got great results paying for AdWords, there is an increasing realisation that the result is often an increase in 'dumb traffic' to a site. To explain: AdWord's attract a click-through to a site, a large amount of traffic leaves immediately, and generally, visitors stay for a short time.

Quality content, on the other hand, attracts higher volumes of organic visitors to a website, the visitor stays on the site for longer absorbing the content. If the content is good enough, the visitor may start reading or looking at another blog post, picture set, or video. From a search engine perspective, the Average Session (average time a person stays on the site) and Pages Per Session (average number of pages a visitor looks at) increases. The Bounce Rate (visitors arriving and leaving immediately) decreases. The search engine perceives the site to be the home of an industry expert and the ranking goes up. From the perspective of brand identity, the brand is associated with high-quality information and readers perceive the brand as a leader in its field.

But here comes the cream. Not only has the web traffic doubled, the quality of web traffic has been enriched. Content marketing has the ability to attract targeted web traffic. The result being that traffic arriving from content marketing sources is claimed to have enabled Capsol to achieve a higher conversion rate. In other words, the company is able to close a lot more deals with people arriving through content marketing initiatives than those arriving through AdWords and pay-per-click marketing.

Do the following exercise on a spreadsheet: These numbers need to be adjusted according to the nature of your business, but should give you an interesting idea of growth opportunity.

1. Double your web traffic;
2. Increase the businesses existing conversion of web traffic to interested parties making contact through the website by 16% (on the doubled traffic above);
3. Increase the businesses existing conversion of contacts through the website by 150%.

Are these numbers viable? Capsol achieved similar results through their content marketing initiative. However, it needs to be noted that the results don't come without backing up the marketing initiative with a premium quality service and/or product offering.

Double the traffic, with a higher enquiry rate and achieve a higher conversion rate to actual sales. And, content marketing is generally cheaper than paid for ads...

With 100% increase in web traffic, 16% increase in enquiries year-on-year and 150% increase in conversions, moving your business to the leading edge of internet marketing presents a real opportunity.

(Image: Capsol)

Other types of business

The travel sector is largely driven by internet marketing. So what about other types of businesses that are not primarily driven by internet marketing. The New York Times published an inspiring article about a swimming pool installation company. River Pools, reduced its marketing budget from $250,000 to $25,000 by moving away from radio, television and pay-per-click advertising to a content marketing approach and increased revenues around 300%. That is a simple calculation. Why are you not using this type of marketing for your business?

Article supplied By:
Fjord Content Marketing
Fjord Content Marketing is an agency representing approximately 200 specialised web writers. The content is edited and optimised by our in house team before being delivered to our clients to post on their online initiatives.