Growth Marketing: 3 quick case studies about product review videos, SEO metadata, and a header CTA button

This article was published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

Growth marketing and growth hacking are all the rage these days.

But before you seek to grow your brand, take a good, long look in the mirror…and seek to grow yourself. Your brand will only grow once you expand your (and your team’s) capacity.

To help you grow as a marketing professional and leader, our parent organization is producing a free digital marketing course. For example, in the session Website Wireframes: 8 psychological elements that impact marketing conversion rates, marketers learn – “People don’t buy from websites, people buy from people.” It’s not technology that drives results. Or ad buys. It’s you – the marketer, the person helping communicate the value your brand offers.

So, watch Session #7 to grow yourself, and then take a look at these quick case studies from your peers to get ideas for how to grow your brand. First up, an ecommerce store grows conversion by adding product review videos to its product pages. Then, a crime scene and bio-hazard cleanup company grows organic traffic with a simple SEO hack. And finally, a marketing agency books more sales calls with a simple CRO change.

Quick Case Study #1: A/B split testing helps ecommerce store discover a 63% conversion increase from product review videos

FragranceX is an ecommerce store that sells perfume to customers all over the world. The team was looking for ways to increase conversion on its product pages. They surveyed customers and discovered that 52 percent would like to see videos for the products the site sells.

The team A/B tested product review videos on select product pages – the control didn’t have a video and the treatment did. To get a representative sample, they included both high-end and low-end products. The videos were professionally shot and edited by a video production company.

As you can see in Creative Sample #1 below, the video was a few scrolls down the page, in the “Watch Our Review” section (the page continued on with more information, but we cropped it for this article to make the image easier to view). The control page was identical, it just didn’t have the video.

Creative Sample #1: Ecommerce perfume product page with video

The results showed that including product review videos increased conversion an average of 63 percent.

The team then ran a further test comparing longer videos of 90 seconds to shorter videos of 45 seconds. The shorter videos averaged 17 percent more conversion.

Thanks to the discoveries from these tests, the team has formed its own, in-house video production team to create a short product review video for each product they stock.

“Subsequent customer feedback showed that our customers felt that video helped them understand the features of each product better and helped them to imagine themselves using the product. We also discovered that many of our customers shared our product videos on social media,” said Leanna Serras, Chief Customer Officer, FragranceX.

Quick Case Study #2: Crime scene cleanup company experiments with meta description for SEO, gets 39.6% of clicks from target keyword variations

“What do you think the first thing someone does when they discover a crime scene or deadly disease on their property? Turn to Google,” said Gabrielle Martin, Search Engine Optimization Specialist, Bio Recovery.

The biohazard remediation and crime scene cleanup company gets most of its website traffic from organic (54.6%) followed by paid (26.5%) search campaigns.

The team wanted to experiment with meta descriptions, to determine if they are still a ranking factor in 2022. “We’ve heard time and time again that meta descriptions no longer have an impact on rankings, so do we really even still need them? Is it even worth using target keywords in your meta description?” Martin asked.

The team optimized a meta description with a long-tail keyword that wasn’t mentioned anywhere else on the post to see if the page would start ranking for the keyword.

“Nothing in white hat SEO is immediate – but to our surprise – we started to rank and get clicks from variations of the keyword within two to three days,” Martin said, with the team receiving eight total clicks from related keywords within two days of the updated meta description.

It took a little longer to rank for the exact keyword utilized in the meta description, but now the page is ranking for the keyword and additional variations. The target keyword and its variations currently represent 39.6% of the clicks to the article. This target keyword and its variations only started to appear after being added to the meta description.

“In conclusion, yes, we believe it is still beneficial to thoughtfully place target keywords in your meta description,” Martin said.

Quick Case Study #3: Simple CRO change increases conversion 15% on mobile devices for marketing agency

In the upcoming Episode #3 of the How I Made It in Marketing podcast, Michelle Burrows told me the epiphany that taught her to start negotiating her compensation package in her career.

She discovered a colleague with the same role in a different division was making much more than her. When she questioned him about it, he said, “Well I asked. Did you ask?”

The same advice could be applied to your websites. Are you clearly asking potential customers for the action you want them to take?

For example, here is a look at the old header navigation on Soar’s website.

Creative Sample #2: Old header navigation

“When I started working with Soar, I proposed adding a call-to-action button to the header, which is a must nowadays,” said Michal Hajtas, Growth Marketer, Soar.

Creative Sample #3: New header navigation on desktop

Creative Sample #4: New header navigation on mobile

In the first month after the change, the team achieved a 15 percent increase in the rate of people scheduling calls on mobile and a 108 percent increase in the rate of people scheduling calls on desktop.

Featured Resources

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools: Marketing case studies with brands that used 5 types of CRO tools

What are the most valuable marketing skills? (with free resources to improve those skills)

Small Business Growth Hacks: 3 quick marketing case studies of ‘alternative to’ SEO landing pages, going broad instead of niche, and a paid lead magnet