Hi Everyone
I hope you are all having a strong, productive week.
In this issue I am going to share a story of a growth case that I personally had the privilege of being part of. This is by no stretch a famous company or well known industry, but it's important to also spotlight cases like these, as not every success story comes in the form of a big, famous brand.
The challenges and tactics we used to overcome them are much more relatable than a unicorn's success.
Enjoy the read.
- Stefan
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How content marketing doubled the revenue of an Immigration Consultancy in 2 years.
Growth story by Stefan, from CXL |
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Setting the stage
Back in 2019, after a few years serving as a brand and content strategist at some big-name agencies in Cape Town, I decided that agency life was not for me, and I wanted to explore the other side of the table to see if I don't like it a little more.
I had no plan or specific industry or brand I wanted to work for. I just wanted the opportunity to play around with internal budgets, drive strategy, make an impact and most of all learn what it's like to lead my own marketing team.
I landed a job at a Canadian Immigration Consultancy that were facing some very interesting growth challenges.
In this mail I will unpack those challenges and tell you how we leveraged high quality content, a brand refresh and repositioning to break through and double the revenue
to 7 figures in 2 years. |
The company, service and challenge
The company:
A Canadian Immigration Consultancy with multiple websites targeting different regions and audiences.
The service:
Immigration and visa services by government certified Immigration Lawyers (called RCICs).
These services ranged from affordable survey-based system-generated evaluations, to human-generated profile-based evaluations, all the way through to full service application and immigration guidance, with a price tag spanning well into the thousands of Dollars for bigger families moving over.
The Setup:
When I started there in 2019, they were pushing around 2 million website visits per year on the main site and doing a solid 6-figure revenue. By the end of 2021, we managed to double that and set the stage for rapid, sustained growth.
The Challenge:
There was a unique set of challenges. Driving traffic was not one of them. Converting that traffic into leads and sales was the hard part. Why? The industry is notorious for scams.
I'm not here to explain how the Canadian Immigration system works, but it's good to know there's over a 100 different visa options available and the government actively invites immigrants into the country to help grow the economy. So much so that they have government certified representatives that can advise and help people navigate the landscape and help them with their applications.
You will be astonished to know how many people want to move to Canada. It's a serious business.
Just to put this into perspective, here is a screenshot I still have from our Google Analytics account back then. (Not even sure why I saved out the date range like this, but what is important, is to note is the growth over this period.)
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Google Analytics - website traffic and conversions |
The growth story?
How did we manage to overcome the conversion issues? Here's a hint, it was not by any fancy conversion optimization techniques, or excessive a/b testing. Sure, we did that as well, but, we had bigger problems to solve.
We focused on building trust among our audience:
1) High quality, informative, educational content.
2) Go to war against scammers pretending to be us.
3) Double down on exceptional customer service.
4) Showcase customer immigration stories.
5) Reposition from "Canadian Visa Company" to "Canadian lifestyle and immigration knowledge center"
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1) High quality, informative, educational content.
My job was everything that touched brand and content. When I started, there was a designer that worked two days a week and two blog writers slaving away at braindead SEO content. The rest of the strategy relied on paid media and email marketing, spamming the living shit out of anyone and everyone who dares picking up a cookie we can target. "Move to Canada Today" read the headlines of the ads that pointed to a cold, washed-out, industry standard, website full of cringe stock images of from the first-page-search-results of "lawyer" on Shutterstock.
Tapping into dreams of a better life abroad, people clicked the ads and search results. It got millions of people on the website, but that's where most of them just dropped off.
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We went back to the drawing board. What content do people want and need when they might be interested in moving to Canada. How do we help them with one of the biggest, most expensive life decisions one could make. Instead of telling them it's easy, let's put in the work, dumb it down and really answer the questions they have.
Within a few months we quadrupled our content team and 10x our output. Strong writers and designers capable of flushing all our channels with high quality content. We went after the questions people ask on Google and changed our tone on our ads to build pipeline instead of just trying to tap into dreams. "Want to learn more about moving to Canada?", "Canada is in serious need of medical nurses, find out if you qualify".
We linked the ads to highly relevant blogs and videos clearly explaining the opportunity as well as the visa options linked to it.
It wasn't long before the quality of our leads and engagements got better. But, that wasn't enough. Converting to sales was still blocked by one big problem. Uncertainty if it's a scam. |
2 & 3) Fight the scams and double down on trust-building customer service.
The content wasn't enough to convince everyone that we are a legitimate service. At some point the scams were so bad that we tracked down a fake copy of our site on a weekly basis. We declared war, and started hunting down these websites and scammers, reporting them, and getting them taken down. All while managing reviews about our brand that was never even about us, but someone pretending to be us or one of our RCICs.
This was an operational nightmare, but we set up a taskforce and managed to get our reviews in a positive place. Sometimes even going as far as pay someone the money they lost in a scam to go remove or update their review.
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We went up from below a 1-star average to a stable 4+ across all domains. We also launched a review site to help those interested in moving over make informed decisions. Calling out scams and dodgy website publicly. This site ended up getting more traffic than our main site and ultimately drove a bunch of referral traffic to our domain. Becoming our highest converting traffic source, at 17%.
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4) Showcase customer stories.
This doesn't need a lot of attention, you all know the power of authentic customer reviews. But Trustpilot reviews were not enough. We needed more power here. We started giving discounts or paying customers who would provide us with videos, telling their story about how we helped them and their loved ones make the move to Canada. We starting showcasing these on the website and social media. We could immediately start seeing conversion rates going up.
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5) Finally - Reposition from "Canadian Visa Company" to "Canadian lifestyle and immigration knowledge center".
Where things really got exciting was when we decided to put a cherry on top of all the positive signs we were seeing. We launched a fully revamped brand identity. A fresh new look, updated website and a positioning grounded in our new approach to informative, trustworthy and educational content. We needed to stand out from the rest of the industry and make our website and content harder to copy, while being the trusted source of information to our audience.
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Learnings and conclusion.
In two years we managed to take this company from fighting against scammers to thriving as one of the top, most trusted brands in the industry.
This was where I personally discovered the true power of high quality, informative content as growth lever to get ahead of competition and stand out in a challenging industry.
Invest time into understanding what your customer need, what they are looking for and what content will build trust to solidify your position as the best in the industry, and watch all your numbers go up.
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