At Sales Funnel Professor, companies from all over the world reach out for conversion rate optimization assistance or audits, which is also sometimes known as CRO. Yes, sales and marketing jargon is confusing. CRO also stands for “Chief Revenue Officer,” but that’s not what this article is about.
Horror Story
The founder of a marketing agency from a suburb of London reached out for a free consultation about CRO. She had just spent a lot of money on a new site and it was clear that she didn’t want to hear that her sales funnel strategy wasn’t really there nor that her CRO problem was a lot more than a few directional queues away from solved.
Context: Her only meaningful traffic was on two phrases for “SEO in [her suburb]” but her branding was a mishmash of crypto animation and global branding.
In other words, the only clients she could possibly win on her site were local people seeking SEO for physical location-based businesses (stores, local attorney, etc.), but instead of showcasing that aspect of her capabilities (she actually has an office you can visit), her graphic designer had her looking like either:
A) 10 years out of date by using animation that lost its novelty years ago.
B) In the Web3 or crypto space…these guys never got the message.
To make things even more confusing, she referenced global a number of times in an attempt to sound like she works for huge brands. That’s confusing to SMBs, who are generally super price sensitive at least until an agency can prove positive ROI.
Her Narrow View of CRO
It quickly became apparent that her idea of CRO was moving around the geometric positioning of buttons and images on a page, and that is part of CRO, for sure.
But you’ll only ever be able to feel the results of doing just geometric reorganization if:
- You have massive traffic on that page. Like any good statistician, we must understand that marketing is always a multivariable game, and you need statistical significance on a meaningful amount of traffic to prove progress on CRO.
- You don’t have one or multiple showstoppers or what is known in statistics as a confound.
Her CRO Had a Massive Branding & Messaging Confound
A confound is a variable that is not considered in your statistical model but has way more impact on the dependent variable (conversions) than the other variables that you think you are testing.
So this agency owner didn’t consider writing, design, or branding as variables in CRO at all.
Here’s the new hero section and there are a number of issues:
- Webflow would have you believe adding animation to your site today works in the same way that minting NFTs used to do jpgs. It doesn’t work that way. Crypto/Web3 sites still use black backgrounds and animation that does nothing to support the purpose of the business and they can get away with because many of those businesses don’t actually need to make revenue. Most legitimate businesses realized futuristic/trippy animation novelty as a credibility element many years ago. If you were to ignore any words on this agency’s new site, you might surmise they are a crypto company or are very out of date.
- The contrast on the mirrors (if that’s what they are) is extremely high and makes most of the header navigation unreadable during a huge portion of the cyclical animation.
- Just below the fold, the trophy logos have a “TRUSTED BY BRANDS GLOBALLY” section header. That’s a great section header if your target audience is corporations with huge budgets, but a terrible section header if you’re trying to sign the local insurance agent. Why? It’s code language for “We’re very expensive.”
In fact, each of those individually can eliminate the possibility of any conversions and when there are issues with multiple, there’s no way that geometric rearrangement will do anything.
Fundamentally, the intended takeaway that this agency wanted pure strangers to believe was that they could trust her/her team to create a meaningful brand and connect it to SEO as top of funnel.
She Needed to Think End-to-End
This agency does their own SEO, and they’ve successfully ranked for SEO services in their suburb of London. That’s a very local search made by people who want someone who actually lives/works in their neighborhood. The people that are searching that term are likely wanting to attract the local market as well.
That’s all well and good and is a relatively commoditized SEO service. This founder clarified that she is seeking exactly that ICP and charges $3k/month on average, which is perfectly appropriate to charge a client who is only looking to reach a single suburb’s market, which in London likely has plenty of expendable income.
But for this audience, she’s extremely cross-branded. Her local insurance agent doesn’t need someone who wants to create the branding for a new altcoin or bitcoin conference.
Both her visual design and word choice need to speak to that audience. It’s very hard to trust an agency who portrays itself as crypto or dated to brand your traditional company.
Would you want an agency who represents their branding service with a pink 3D-rendered Mastadaon to brand your law firm?
Cross Branding Creates the Wrong 1st Impression & That Is Horrible for CRO
It quickly became clear that this founder didn’t want to hear that she had more to solve than she thought she did. I actually believe she could create a decent brand for a law firm, insurance agent, home services company, or another very locally-oriented business in her part of London.
And that’s what her only traffic was for. But she chose to showcase a completely different type of branding and messaging.
If we were to break CRO down from top to bottom, it looks like this:
- Stranger with needs finds…
- Ad or Google Result or Social Post etc (top-of-funnel) and clicks and lands on…
- Website hero section top (middle-of-funnel) and scrolls to learn more…
- Rest of website (middle-of-funnel) creates clarity and trust so primary call to action is taken resulting in…
- Meeting or purchase (bottom-of-funnel)…
- Money arrives in the bank
Imagine their potential client’s journey: “So I thought I found a local SEO firm that would help my lifestyle business in [their suburb of London, because the agency is top of Google], but then I see they must be a crypto company. I need someone who can help my type of business.”
With sites like this, running Hotjar or other session recording software will quickly reveal that hardly anyone scrolls. They bounce on the hero. The level of cognitive dissonance/distress is intolerably high.
With CRO, the top-of-funnel and the hero section need to be completely aligned. When they contradict each other, conversions don’t happen.
Professor’s Note
The hero section’s job is to get someone to stay on the page and keep reading.
If it doesn’t do that, change it and yes, you may need to fix your visual branding if it doesn’t align with what your ICP cares about.
A More Realistic Understanding of CRO
A “conversion” in marketing speak is a change of state. Many people mistakenly think it’s a purchase. That is the ultimate goal but there are actually a number of conversions along the path to purchase.
While making geometric changes to an e-commerce site where items get 20,000 views per month each will actually lead to additional revenue, for less trafficked sites, that exercise would likely be a cost center and might not result in any incremental revenue.
We actually told this client that we don’t do incremental work and she didn’t want to hear the explanation, which unfortunately was news she didn’t want: she’d spent a lot of money on tactics without a strategy.
For most companies, a more realistic CRO audit should include:
End-to-End Analysis
A particular page needs to be optimized for its visitors, not imaginary visitors and not visitors of other pages on the same site. Most “CRO experts” ignore top-of-funnel entirely, which means the whole exercise is a guess.
Include Brand, Story, Messaging, Emotion
We use the terms sales funnel audit and CRO audit synonymously because we only do end-to-end audits. What’s the point of charging a client money if we know their branding problem will kill any potential gains from traditional CRO?
Imagine that you come across a page that is technically spot on for CRO from a geometric perspective. It’s crystal clear what call to action is required to move forward, but…
- You don’t care about the brand or company at all (they haven’t given you a reason to)
- You feel nothing about the product or service or might actually feel like the company is broke or incompetent because of how little thought they’ve put into the emotional side of the business
- You don’t trust that you’ll actually get what is advertised
- You don’t think that what is advertised is actually for you
Each of the elements individually can completely kill a sales funnel and often do. Confusion is a show stopper. Why risk getting the wrong thing when you can just keep searching?
Need Help
Our CRO audits are a great place to start. They fall firmly on the teaching side of our business.
You’ll get a multi-chapter report on a single, end-to-end funnel with a full Storybrand, critical pages rewritten, and in-depth analysis on all the lenses that customers use.
We’ll identify where you’re currently cross-branded and what you can do to solve it.
Raise your scores across multiple lenses and your sales will sore. That’s how you get multiplier instead of incremental gains, or even worse, can’t feel the impact of your CRO adjustments at all.
Learn more about our:
We’ll be happy to help.
