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Kiera Abbamonte on April 30, 2021 (last modified on August 19, 2021) • 4 minute read
A recent episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast saw John Bonini chat with Stephanie Donily, Head of Content & Communications over at Zapier. Stephanie shared how theyâve turned a successful blog into a full-funnel conversion driver.
A tool that connects over 3,000 apps (including Databox) to each other and enables SMBs to automate work, there are tons of topics and keywords for Zapierâs blog to cover. Stephanie explained how they narrowed it down to uncover the opportunity of mid-funnel contentâand how they turn that content into activations.
Read on for more details, or listen to the full episode here:
At Zapier, theyâre working to democratize automation, making it easy and actionable for people of all walks of life and technical skill level. âPart of that,â according to Stephanie, âmeans making automation really accessible and approachable for people. Is it easy and not scary to set up a Zap?â
But automation isnât widely considered to be either of those things for the average person. Thatâs why, as Stephanie puts it, they often see âa mindset gapâ where people have heard of Zapier, but they just donât know how or where to start.
Thatâs why they define activation as anyone who sets up a Zapâan automation within Zapierâand why they focus on activation as a key metric for both their business success and the broader mission of Zapier.
âContent plays a big role because Zapier does not have a sales team,â Stephanie explained. âZapier is a self-service product, so our users and our readers self-educate. They like to choose their own journey. They look to our content for inspiration, for instructions, and for tutorials once theyâre ready.â
Prior to 2020, Zapierâs blog was a top-of-funnel success, bringing tons of organic traffic and new readers. But the team wasnât focused on turning those readers into regular Zapier users, and the blog saw high exit rates as a result.
Stephanie and team saw an opportunity to produce more mid-funnel content in addition to their TOFU contentâcontent that would âinspire people to think a little bit differently about how theyâd solve a problem, to recognize that the work is actually pretty repetitive, pretty manual, and figure out how the product could help from there.â
Once the team decided to focus on mid-funnel content and activations, their strategy was two-fold:
The idea was to create content that could bridge the mindset gap Stephanie mentioned, to âgo a bit deeper and talk about what you can automate with these types of apps.â
The team started out by identifying the mid-funnel topics they could cover. While their top-of-funnel content covered how to be productive at work more broadly, this content would focus specifically on automation and how to use it.
With their topics sorted, Stephanie and team looked for a way to build activation into their blog postsâa way to make the content more actionable by making it easier and faster to go from reading about automation to implementing it.
To do that, they built embeddable widgets that pre-load a particular Zap. By clicking on the âUse this Zapâ link, Zapier users can go very quickly from reading an article to setting up the automation discussed.
Hereâs an example of what that looks like:
âIf youâre reading this, youâre inspired and youâre like âGod, I could totally use something like that,â thereâs a button where you can set up that Zap right away,â Stephanie told John. âIt doesnât feel like an outright ad for Zapierâitâs a less intrusive way to start introducing a Zapier solution into that content.â
For those interested, you can check out a few more examples of this type of content and the âUse this Zapâ widget in action:
âBuilding out this library of automation-focused content really helped us talk about how you could use automation to become more productive and how you could actually try it out,â Stephanie said.
And the results of centering that focus have been huge in the first year.
âSince weâve built out those widgets and started putting them in more of our mid-funnel content,â Stephanie told John, âweâve seen activations grow and weâve seen people go directly into the product coming from these articles.â
According to Stephanie, after launching this effort in earnest in early 2020, both signups and activations from the blog are up 400% year-over-year. Plus, theyâve seen pageviews to their mid-funnel content double, too.
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