How VWO overhauled their content and increased MQLs by 200%
A guest post by Siddhartha Kathpalia, head of US marketing for Wingify
This is a guest post by my friend Siddhartha Kathpalia, former colleague at Freshworks, and now head of US marketing at Wingify.
A couple of months ago, I asked a question on repurposing content in a marketers’ community I’m part of. And Siddhartha graciously ran me and a few others through the process he adopted to increase the performance of VWO’s content.
I immediately asked him if he could write this as an essay for the newsletter, for two reasons: One, the tactics were extremely useful, and two, because I think we underestimate how much we can do with the content we already have.
Over to Sid, then.
Of the four organisations I have worked at until now, VWO is unique.
When I joined, content marketing (organic + direct) was driving more than 50% of leads. Performance marketing at this time was just 3 years old while content marketing was 11 years old. It was an important, crucial-to-business role I took over as head of content marketing.
This was a tremendous opportunity and I was more than happy to own it.
Phase 0 - Identifying the challenge
In the initial period of handling this role, I had two things to do. The first was figuring out the approach. The mandate I received was to ship more articles, increase our keyword coverage, have more knowledge available on the website, all in the shortest possible time.
While I agreed with shipping new content, I didn’t think it was the most important thing to do. But I didn’t have the data, nor had I earned the right to suggest this. I had to do both.
The second thing I had to do was to motivate the team. The team at that time had seen a few shelved projects. An internal project of asking everyone in the org to contribute with articles had led to no success - content quality wasn’t up to the mark. Outsourced writers submitted drafts but these didn’t see the light of the day. Processes were being set up during this period and the focus had shifted away from go-live.
The material was there, we just had to get everything else sorted.
Phase 1 - Warming up
The content team was focusing on shipping new articles. The SEO team got started on keywords and on creating a 6 month plan. The referral link owner’s job was to get backlinks rapidly.
Time was for action, and the pressure was on.
So the team decided to proceed with the lowest hanging stuff. I decided that we’d either go-live or discard sub-par content. Nothing would be left hanging. This would give the content team closure and create fresh mind-space for new articles. With the SEO and referral traffic owners, we got down to action:
Enhanced 20 articles written by an outsourced writer and shipped 15 of them immediately.
Scrutinised 30+ articles written by our own extended team and shipped 5 of them, rejecting 25+.
Revisited 15 shelved articles written by our content team and shipped all of them.
Wrote 15 fresh articles with the team and shipped all of them.
At this exercise’s conclusion, in 3 months, we had shipped 50 new blogs, 2 pillar pages, and 3 success stories. Each went through the eyes of our editorial team ensuring quality and adherence to checklists.
We also had a 100+ keyword plan and a solid backlink generation plan underway.
It was a great start, but I knew it was nowhere near our best.
Phase 2 - Negotiations
Having had this early success, leadership now had some faith in me. So I pitched to them what the data told me to do: 3 months of not writing any new content but repurpose and update what we already had.
This wasn’t just a pet project, but something purely data driven. I had grouped the various parts of the existing VWO website for comparison - home page, product/feature pages, landing pages, resources, blogs, pillar pages, and performance marketing pages (which were outside of my purview) - and compared data.
I observed that blogs were receiving 2x the traffic of other website sections but generating the lowest MQLs. It was a huge opportunity, and I wanted to tap into it.
I was given the go-ahead.
Phase 3 - Nailing it
We ran several experiments (using VWO, of course) to make improvements on the blogs. Some major ones were:
Images in the ‘recommended blog’ widget - We hypothesised that having images in the blog card widgets would lead to higher CTRs. We also knew by now that pageviews/user (and not traffic) had a positive correlation with conversion rate. So we wanted to get people to go through more pages. The A/B test showed a 66% higher CTR with the images.
First fold landing section - We hypothesised that having a ‘hero section’ on the first fold explaining the product would lead to more people converting into free trial MQLs, or visiting the high converting product pages. We ran this test on 33 e-commerce blogs and observed significant improvement in conversion rates, and an infinite increase in visits to the product page (we didn’t actively link blogs to product pages, except in a few cases).
Contextual NavBar CTA - VWO blogs had ‘Start Free Trial’ and ‘Request Demo’ CTAs on the NavBar. We hypothesised that having a contextual CTA would increase conversion rates. So, blogs talking about heatmaps had a ‘Try heatmaps for Free’ CTA. Similarly, blogs talking about CRO had a ‘Try CRO for Free’ CTA. These again led to an increase in clicks on the CTA and in conversion rates.
Updated content - VWO had a library of 300 blogs written over 11 years. Naturally, many of these were outdated - the product had evolved, the market had changed, even our perspective as a brand has become more mature. But the blogs didn’t convey that. So we picked up our top 8 blogs (by monthly pageviews) and ran A/B tests with updated content. We observed an improvement in conversion rates.
Phase 4 - Celebrations!
During this period, we observed a 30% m-o-m increase in MQLs from blogs. We now pressed ahead on executing everything that we had now learnt on the whole blog.
First was images. Creating the images for 300 blogs took a month, and 2 brilliant designers at VWO helped complete it sooner than we’d planned.
We created the backend for the ‘Hero Section’ on Wordpress in a week. We created the content on a Google sheet and got the images made. We shipped this in 2 days.
We created the backend for Contextual NavBar CTA in a week. We shipped updated content for the 8 A/B tested blogs in a week again. We also created a robust 17 point checklist for blogs.
We managed to deploy everything on the 1st of the month so we had the whole month for data comparison.
We immediately started receiving 3x the number of MQLs - a 200% increase. Because our blog engagement became better, we also grew our traffic by 40%.
We also started receiving and scaling backlinks. In the first month, we had 2 backlinks, second month 5, and then 10, 17, 24, and 36 backlinks each subsequent month.
Phase 5 - The show goes on
With our new SEO lead getting stuck in, we increased website traffic by 20%, improved keyword coverage by 20%, and reduced junk keywords by 16%.
In the end, we managed to update 140 blogs in 2 months.
Here’s an aside: Blogs updated in-house saw a higher conversion rate as compared with freelancer-updated ones. Similarly, we observed that Indian freelancer updated content saw a higher conversion rate uplift than non-Indian freelancers.
We will act upon this data as we chart out the way forward for the 160+ blogs that await updation. Please also note that we used first click attribution model both before and after.
Thanks so much for this, Sid!
We worked on writing and editing this essay for at least a month, I hope it’s useful for you and your content strategy.