Whether its headlines or recipes, never let good taste stand in the way of a great lede. With the death of grocer Galen Weston and the price of bread on every Canadian consumer’s mind this morning, the B2B marketing world turns to toast.
When it comes to conversion rates, marketers have a propensity to burn themselves while paying too close attention to larger cultural norms and current events instead of keeping their eyes on buyer behaviour.
Unbounce, a provider of landing page and conversion intelligence software, released its 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report yesterday.
The report found that while negative news drove an “unprecedented amount of clicks and content consumption in the media in 2020,” it did the absolute opposite for marketing campaigns. As the use of negative emotional language went up, conversions across multiple industries declined.
Unbounce’s analyses come from the outcomes of 264 million visits to over 44,000 landing pages which led to only 33 million conversions.
“The past 12 months has been a fascinating and emotion-filled year where business was not as usual and consumers across the globe shifted perspectives and behaviours like never before,” said Megan Sakakibara, VP of Marketing at Unbounce. “People seemed to devour content and conversations seeded in negativity in 2020, but interestingly this negative sentiment had the opposite effect when it came to marketing campaigns. The data from our study uncovers the enormous challenge marketers faced trying to land the right tone in one of the most heady social and political times most have ever seen. The findings in this report provide real value for marketers and ultimately will enable them to learn from the lessons of 2020 in order to build high converting campaigns in 2021.”
The full report: https://unbounce.com/conversion-benchmark-report
That doesn’t mean marketers can just go with the grain of positivity – especially if they are relying on influencers to knead that positivity into sales.
According to the results of a new survey from Visual Objects, 58% of American social media users have never and have no intention of ever buying products with an influencer’s promo codes. Kim Kardashian’s reminder to pick up pineapple juice for the weekend came without a code and was just a one-off, I guess.
Not to spoil the sour dough starter, but the results of the survey found that instead of product placements and advertisements, social media users are actually “drawn to informative content that provides insight into a subject of interest.”
“Brands should only reach out to influencers that are highly relevant to their products,” says Kyle Dulay of Collabstr, a marketplace service connecting brands with influencers. “The influencer should be able to talk about the product with ease because it’s something they would’ve used in their everyday life regardless of the sponsorship.”
Press release: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/58-of-social-media-users-dont-ever-plan-on-buying-influencer-promoted-products-301267803.html
After a day of hearing that marketers must drive conversions with positive language, but also be authentic in difficult times, there is one more piece of news before everyone starts mixing vodka into their pineapple juice.
Qualified.com has launched Qualified X. It’s the next generation sales and marketing platform for revenue teams that use Salesforce. The San Francisco-based company has a different approach to conversions using baseball metaphors instead of bread and butter.
“In today’s remote selling environment, it’s no longer enough to sit back and wait for buyers to initiate inbound conversations. That’s like expecting to hit a home run without ever taking a swing,” said Kraig Swensrud, Qualified CEO. “Through every digital channel, proactive engagement increases the number of conversations with buyers. Qualified X arms today’s virtual sales reps with the knowledge and the tools they need to execute proactive conversations, right on their corporate websites.”
