Financial services marketing

Project Type

Design, Copywriting, Digital infrastructure, Email marketing, Lead generation, Marketing Automation, Marketing performance evaluation, Renew Marketing, SMS marketing, Social Media marketing, System integration

Investigation

Renew Marketing was invited to review the SEO work and provide further analysis of this financial services company's marketing, online presence and assets. Renew’s initial review of the website revealed a number of issues:

• Pages had been optimised for terms that had little or no search volume.
• The majority of pages on the website had no traffic whatsoever.
• Many pages suffered high bounce rates. 80+%
• The website had been developed in a piecemeal fashion and consequently lacked a coherent structure.
• From a visitor’s perspective, the website appeared inconsistent with a variety of creative and writing styles being used.
• Visitors could easily navigate away from the site without making further contact - even if they wanted to!
• But it wasn’t all bad news:
• Some pages were performing extremely well, with high volumes of traffic and low bounce rates - why?
• A lifestyle blog site created by the client performed extremely well and achieved Page 1 search rankings, but often the content had no direct link to the client’s business! Why?

Challenges

This financial services client had relied on its website for a number of years to generate a steady supply of leads for the sales team. More recently, the company website had suffered a rapid decline in the number of leads being generated. This had been caused partly by Penguin & Panda updates which had penalised the site for SEO work which had been carried out historically.

In an attempt to address this the business had commissioned SEO work to recover the situation which was producing limited results.

Renew approach

Using Google Analytics, every page was individually reviewed for traffic, bounce rate and search ranking. Renew Marketing as a Podio accredited partner set up a bespoke workspace to manage the whole financial services marketing project efficiently.

• Experienced members of the Renew Marketing team reviewed the written and visual content of each page, along with checking and testing every link and the navigation through the site.
• Pages for deletion, amalgamation and reworking were identified.
• Content for reworking was briefed to professional copywriters.
• To ensure consistency; style and copywriting guidelines were produced that accurately reflected the client’s positioning and target audience.
• The content was repositioned from highly technical to reflect the needs and interests of the target audience.
• A customer journey was developed to assist in reorganising the site in a logical way.
• Using open data sources, research was carried out into the client’s particular market place and a series of customer personas was developed.
• Key beachhead markets were identified and using the same open source data, key target audiences for each of the markets were identified. This work also identified potential search terms for use in SEO activity.
• Website redesigned and rebuilt in WordPress.
• Call to action opportunities were maximised for each page.
• Marketing automation techniques were developed/used/initiated to enable prompt responses to be generated to any type of enquiry, along with appropriate alerts to the client.
• To support the positioning and customer offer, a series of videos were produced using a professional film crew and presenter.

Results

Bounce rate on new pages has reduced to c.25%

New pages are ranking on Google

Cohesive call to actions have been implemented site wide

Visitor funnels have dramatically improved in line with the new site structure.

Running the new site alongside the historic site has allowed for direct content and performance comparison.