Learn the step-by-step approach we've used to increase a client’s website traffic by 108% and lead conversions by 65% using SEO, Content, & Email Marketing.

Introduction

This article follows on from our previous post: Why SEO + Content + Email Marketing is a Powerful Formula

In that article, we talked in-depth about how using SEO, Content, and Email as the basis of your digital marketing strategy can focus your efforts, time, and budget, to create a snowball effect that builds in effectiveness as it matures.

To put the benefits of this approach into perspective, below, you can see the types of results we have helped our clients achieve once they adopted these methods to their digital marketing.

Bonus material: Learn how to get up to 4x more leads and sales with ethical SEO, Content, and Email.

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The Digital Snowball Effect: why your business needs it

The Digital Snowball Effect. What exactly does it mean? Simply put, it's an approach to marketing that grows both in performance and effectiveness over time.

Imagine a snowball rolling down a hill. As it continues its course downwards, it gathers speed and starts collecting more snow faster, becoming larger and more powerful.

Applying the snowball effect in this context, you would start by building out your SEO strategy, with keyword research informed by user intent. Then you'd start to pick up speed by implementing Content and Email Marketing.

Each tactic compounds, helping you drive more traffic, push more leads down the sales funnel and grow over time.

Even Warren Buffet is a fan of the Snowball Effect!

Using this approach, we helped our fantastic client PR Academy gain a competitive advantage and pursue gaps in their market. The end goal was to put them in a prime position to tap into the growing demand for online learning caused by people working remotely due to Covid.

The results speak for themselves:

Website traffic sessions increased by 156% YoY
SEO ROI 5,600%.
Email Marketing ROI 1,470%.
Key first page SEO rankings include: 'PR training', 'PR courses', 'public affairs courses', 'online PR courses', 'PR foundation'.
In the first 12 months of the new programme, PR Academy achieved its best year ever in terms of revenue, despite adverse economic conditions resulting from COVID-19.

The 3 steps to creating a Digital Snowball Effect

To simplify the approach, we’ve applied a three-step framework:

Create an SEO keyword strategy based on your Traffic Tier
Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that encourages users to act
Provide value for prospects through Email Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Step 1: Create an SEO keyword strategy based on your Traffic Tier

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you publish a new blog article or create a new page for your website, it ranks well in Google pretty much as soon as it's published?

Or that other times pages struggle to rank?

One reason could be to do with the natural traffic tier Google categorises your site within.

The traffic tier idea comes from Chris Carter's 'SEO Avalanche Technique', based on the theory that Google classifies websites into different tiers.

The tiers vary depending on their average monthly traffic. According to the concept, all live websites fall somewhere in the below table:

You may be asking — "what's my traffic tier then, and how do I find it?"

You have two options:

Use Google Analytics to assess how much traffic your website has received over the last 30 days. Once you have this, locate your highest traffic day and then your lowest. The range between these two is your natural tier.
Calculate the average of your daily traffic value over 30 days and use this to find your natural tier.

With this data, you can begin to research the keywords and topic areas you may target when creating or optimising the content on your website.

The idea is to optimise your website for keywords that are relevant to your traffic tier. This way, you stand a significantly better chance of ranking for the keywords you're targeting.

For example, if your natural traffic tier is Level 100, you will need to focus your keyword research on keywords that have monthly search volumes between 100 and 200, or even less than this. We recommend starting a tier down, as this will increase your chances of climbing up the ranking ladder faster.

With this information to hand, you can start creating content and modifying your website pages to target the set of keywords that are natural to your traffic tier. By doing this, you will have a higher chance of ranking on Google.

As you start building more traffic to your website, you will start moving up tiers. This means you will have a stronger chance of gaining rankings for keywords that have higher search volumes. Once you complete a level, you repeat the process all over again.

Now that you have an idea of the traffic tier you want to target, you can begin your SEO keyword research and competition analysis.

Before you start, note down all the general topic areas you think your customers may have interest in and where your competitors may also be trying to win traffic from SEO.

There are four key factors to consider.

The first step is to find keywords with a high enough search volume within your tier. Search volume shows the level of interest people may have in a particular topic. You want to be sure that if you manage to secure a ranking in Google for that keyword, you will get enough traffic for it, and therefore, it's worth your time and effort.
There are tools to determine how many people are searching for keywords each month. Here are some great keyword research tools that we use all the time: SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and Google AdWords Keywords Planner,.
Assess how competitive each keyword/topic is going to be. Your keyword research and tier selection should be targeting keywords you have a chance of ranking. Is it going to be challenging to rank for your target keywords?
Search intent. Review your keyword list and the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you are considering to try and understand more deeply what they're looking for by using that keyword. Are they looking for products? Entertainment? Information? Services? If you know the intent behind the search, you can then match your content to that intention.
Define what stage of the buying process the prospect is. Or, where in your sales funnel?
Is your keyword Top of Funnel (TOF) with a very broad intent? Typically, these phrases have fewer words and much higher search volumes. Or is it Middle of Funnel (MOF) or Bottom of Funnel (BOF)? Bottom of Funnel keywords are generally longer tail phrases with more words (or clear signals like 'buy'), lower search volumes, but stronger commercial intent.
In short, ask yourself where your target customer might be on their journey – information gathering (TOF) or closer to purchase (MOF or BOF). You need to create content that helps them at every stage.
Again, be clear on your tier and target suitable keywords within that.

Step 2: Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that encourages users to act

Once you have identified the keywords and topic areas you want to target, you need to focus on Content Marketing. Done well, Content Marketing drives traffic, positions you as a thought leader, builds trust and ultimately persuades users to take the desired actions on your website (e.g., get in touch, sign-up to a newsletter, download something).

Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of useful and entertaining written and visual media for your target audience to learn about your business, expertise, products, and services.

It's a fantastic way of providing value and nurturing long-term loyalty.

Great content is essential for ranking in Google and building your audience. It's flexible, repeatable, and scalable, allowing you to develop your relationship with your customers by sharing your expert knowledge.

You build trust, rapport, and fans. It's worth the effort and can pay you back 10x and more when done well.

Armed with your keyword research, you can now begin the enjoyable content ideation process to create your Content Marketing Strategy.

By this stage, you should have defined your keywords and topics of interest by their Traffic Tier. Then, you can map them to the different purchase stages to ensure you're creating content for each step. Then you should work on ideas for the types of engaging, valuable, and entertaining content you can create around those topics.

We have a unique way of running a Content Ideation Workshop rooted in data that will uncover at least 30+ solid ideas for content assets. Drop us a line if you'd like to discuss this.

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When you’ve come up with your bank of ideas, you should prioritise what you will create and then plan them into a content calendar with dates. Have a timeline of who will create what and by when. When you have everything mapped out, it helps with momentum and keeps things efficient for your content marketing efforts.

If you're unsure how long your content needs to be, have a look at the top 3-5 ranking posts in Google for any given keyword/topic and review why that page may be ranking well based on its word count, structure, imagery, headlines etc. If you want to beat them in the rankings, you'll need to create something of equal, if not better, quality.

You don't want to copy what you find, but by all means, take 'inspiration' from them and the topics and sub-topics that seem to be important across any given area.

Your job is to create something better. If it's not better, why should you rank better? If it's not better, why should a visitor stay on your website vs a competitor?

To get even more from your efforts, you can repurpose your content into various formats (infographics, social media posts, presentations, short videos, etc.)

Image credit: Pexels

Step 3: Provide value for prospects through Email Lead Nurturing Campaigns

We've now reached the last step of building out our Digital Snowball Effect framework — Email Marketing.

Done properly, Email Marketing is a highly effective way to scale your sales and marketing and build up your list of potential customers. It represents the main channel through which you can communicate with all the subscribers who have given permission through your content marketing efforts for you to contact them.

Email campaigns can be used in multiple ways. For example, you can use them to:

Build your brand's relationship with your prospects
Nurture your current customers by keeping them informed of your latest business updates
Customise your marketing messages

So, how can you add value to your prospects through a lead nurturing campaign? The answer is threefold:

You leverage your content:
- Research and a deep understanding of your buyer personas are fundamental here. Only by doing this can you create a wide array of content dedicated to nurturing each of your personas based on their interests, objectives, goals, and marketing triggers.
Dedicate time to creating multiple touches
- Research has shown that, on average, prospects are being targeted with at least 10 marketing touches from the time they are aware of your company until the moment they become customers. The most effective lead nurturing campaigns deliver content that addresses prospects' concerns at each stage of their buyer journey, ensuring progression is taking place.
Take the time to send personalised emails

A timely planned follow-up email after a user completed a particular action on your website can increase the chances of conversion. Once you combine timeliness with behavioural triggered emails and marketing personalisation, you can expect to deliver the exact marketing messages to the right people at the most opportune moments.

If you don't have the resources in-house to create a sequence of emails that you can send your email list, we can work with you to help define the ideal cadence of emails and create a bank of content ideas ready for creation. We can then write everything for you or work with you on them.

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The Digital Snowball Effect in action

So, are you ready to start your creating your very own Digital Snowball Effect?

Below we've summarised the main points:

First, you need to determine your website's traffic tier so you can research and select the keywords you can target to boost your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

You can find your traffic tier by using Google Analytics. Once you have the tier sorted, you can then turn your attention to researching the keywords you can use as part of that tier.

Second, you need to turn your attention to your Content Marketing strategy. You should include a mix of blog posts, and articles repurposed content, and long-form content as part of your approach.

Using blog posts will engage your target audience by providing them with helpful information and effectively add more target pages to your website, thus increasing your ranking on Google.

To get more from your content efforts, you can repurpose your articles into various formats (social media posts, infographics, short videos, presentations etc.)

Long-form content is a progression from simply writing articles for your blog. This form of content involves in-depth writing, positioning you as a go-to source of information for all things related to a particular subject that is important to your target audience. Although they can be challenging to create, long-form Content can establish you as an industry thought leader.

Third, you need to create or optimise your email marketing with lead nurturing campaigns. Seeing as Email is still the most cost-effective and conversion-driven form of digital marketing, you can make use of the principles of a lead nurturing campaign to lead your prospects through your sales funnel.

The SEO + Content + Email Marketing Funnel

You may have seen this from us before. Here's a scalable, effective funnel that you can build following this approach.

How it works:

Identify a genuine challenge that your business/product/services can help to solve.
Create in-depth, long-form SEO content providing solutions to the challenge.
The ranking content appears for related keywords in Google and drives traffic to your content.
Provide links within your content to additional resources and content offers – these act as your lead generators.
Upon sign-up direct the user to a landing page that makes an attractive offer (free consultation, demo, trial etc.)
If they take up the offer, you can move them to another process that fulfils that.
If not, you can start your email nurturing activity.

In conclusion

We understand that it's challenging to plan, implement and optimise effective digital marketing campaigns without spending lots of time and money to test things out.

By following the approach outlined in this article, you will have a clear framework for focusing your marketing efforts on the activities that will deliver you results as you progress and your snowball grows!

If you'd like some help building your own Digital Snowball, we'd love to chat!

The overarching framework we use is called FOCUS > ATTRACT > CONVERT.

FOCUS on the things that will deliver results.
ATTRACT new traffic and leads, and
CONVERT them into customers

First, we'll help you get very clear on who you want to serve and what to say to them.

Then, we'll create content, and offers designed to attract your perfect customer and guide them towards becoming a customer.

From there, we'll build the lead magnets, Content and landing pages that will get people to give you their email address so that you can start the conversation.

Then, we generate demand by driving highly targeted traffic towards your website.

It's a tried and tested framework that has worked time and again for our clients.

Why not find out how it could work for you too?

Schedule a 20-minute consultation call, and we’ll get to know each other to find out if we're a good fit.

Thanks for reading!

How to implement the Digital Snowball Effect