Bonus Episode 6 – The Relationship between CRO and Branding

My name is Khalil Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live, our podcast today, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the CRO Live, our podc. I'm your co host, Simba Dube. This is another bonus episode edition, so if you're listening to this show for the first time, thank you and welcome. Subscribe to this podcast and drop us a review or a follow. Another thing you should know is that this podcast is long and short episodes. Every Mondays we publish the long episodes, and on Wednesdays and Fridays, we publish short episodes, which we call bonus episodes. The idea behind these short bonus episodes is to focus on one CRO question at a time. So you can always expect these bonus episodes to be way short, straight to the point, and of course, insightful. If you know a thing or two about this show, you'd know that I always ask tough questions and Khaled answers them all. So the question for today is, what's the relationship between CRO conversion rate optimization and branding? Which one should drive the other? Is it the brand or CRO? And how do these two impact each other? So this is what Khalid has to say about this.

Branding and the strength of the brand has a direct impact on your website conversion rate. Yesterday I was talking to a startup, they've been around for about eight months, and he was telling me that their conversion rate is less than 1%. And he says, hey, is this reasonable? Should we be hitting higher or lower? And I told him, okay, we'll look at the site and look at the metrics, and we'll look at the usability and the conversion issues. On the website. But if you are a company that is brand new and your brand is not very strong, don't expect a high conversion rate unless you have this strong media push and everybody's talking about you. Perfect example, at some point two years ago, no one even thought about something called Clubhouse. Correct. And then there was a push for Clubhouse and everybody was signing for Clubhouse and there was no invitations to get into Clubhouse at that point. I'm sure their conversion from visitor to sign up was very high because they had this huge push. Other apps probably did not have such a high conversion rate. So the branding, your branding has an impact on your conversion rate. And naturally, if you are doing branding campaigns the correct way, your conversion rate will actually go without doing conversion optimization, by the way, unless you have something absolutely horrible on your website. But most of the time your conversion rate. So if you're starting at 0.7%, maybe within a couple of years, your conversion rate is going to go to the 1%, because people are more aware of your brand, they have more affinity to the brand. And of course, this depends also on the quality of the traffic that you're bringing to the website. Now, it's important that branding campaigns and CRO work, improve campaigns to improve conversion rates work hand in hand. We cannot exist in a vacuum. Branding is doing whatever they're doing to bring top of the funnel traffic. They don't care about conversions. Conversions Conversion team is just focused on, oh, how do I actually convert people? And that will, at the surface, can create clashes between the two campaigns. Because the conversion guys will say, hey, you're bringing me traffic over here. Well, I need to convert them. And the way I can convert them is by asking them to create an account or add an item to the cart. No, well, that's not the goal of branding campaign. The goal from branding campaign is to have more awareness of the brand. Now, that doesn't mean that while the conversion guys should go away, no, there should be a discussion to say, okay, so people are coming to my site. The goal is top of the funnel traffic. I want them to be aware of the brand. What should I do to keep them on the site? How can I actually convince those people that I'm actually a worthwhile brand for them to stay, navigate, click around, just have a little bit more awareness of the brand. So now the work of the conversion team is not to create conversions, but to help with brand awareness. And there are many things that you can do. Maybe as an example, well, I'm going to redesign my landing pages that are done for branding campaigns with the goal of keeping people on the website. So how do I do that? Maybe I'm going to use video. Maybe I'm going to figure out ways to drive people to other parts of the website based on where they're landing. So there are many things that those two groups need to work together, otherwise they will clash, and that will cause issues in the short and the long run.