Content Marketing: Are users more likely to convert with only one article featured or multiple articles?
Let’s look at a recent content marketing test from the MarketingExperiments Research Directory …
Background: After a successful content marketing campaign with Sermo, a MECLABS Research Partner, the MECLABS team wanted to run a follow-up test on the company’s landing page to extract more leads from traffic coming from Fierce Pharma, an industry news site the company had partnered with to conduct surveys
Goal: To increase lead rate on the content marketing landing page
Primary Research Question: Are users more likely to convert with only one article featured or multiple articles?
Approach: A/B multifactor split test
CONTROL
The control followed many so-called “best practices” of landing page optimization.
However, Jon Powell, Senior Manager, Research and Strategy, MECLABS, and the team decided to add multiple calls-to-action for Sermo’s many other reports.
The team hypothesized that the perceived value of the individual reports would increase when presented alongside a larger selection of content.
TREATMENT
To test its hypothesis, the team developed this treatment:
Each call-to-action drove visitors to alternative reports they could view. The sidebar also gave visitors the option to directly learn about the main offer.
RESULTS
The landing page’s lead rate increased by 197% for returning visitors.
By increasing the number of available reports, the perceived value of the individual reports may have increased, which offset the increase in friction on the page for returning visitors.
To learn more about this experiment, to see a case study of the content marketing campaign that preceded this test and reduced cost-per-lead by 90%, and to learn principles to help you improve the effectiveness of your own content marketing campaigns, watch the free Web clinic replay – “5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing: How to extract the maximum revenue from your content.”
Related Resources:
Content Marketing: Tactics that have worked for your peers
Conversion Optimization for Content: Publishing site decreases bounce rate 43%
Content Marketing How-to: 7 steps for creating and optimizing content in any size organization