Wow, this one was beyond interesting as it dove directly into details and made bold claims. The Conversion Code by Chris Smith starts out by outlining a clear demand for digital marketing to show return. This isn’t your grandfather’s “brand awareness” campaign – this is serious what did my 100 clicks give me in revenue digital marketing. But the best part about this book is that it’s not just an overarching way of looking at digital marketing but gives specific tactics and tricks to nudge people through your funnel and get clear about a lot of things that people leave open ended.
Some of the key takeaways of The Conversion Code
- It’s important to understand your conversion funnel – and have remarketing campaigns for specific services that someone is interested in to move them further down the funnel.
- Chris’s main way of doing this at the moment is Facebook Ads because of the sheer control you have over demographics. Facebook’s referral traffic has been exploding:
- For content marketing the average length of top performing content on search ranking and social shares is going up – Chris encourages you to write more long form content on posts, hubs, and landing pages.
- The Conversion Code talks you straight through the sales process and helps people realize marketing hasn’t done it’s job until it’s fully integrated with sales.
- Beyond that – when you contact leads is important as well. The visuals in The Conversion Code are super helpful and a huge reason to pick it up.
Chris doesn’t feel that SEO does as much as I do. So we diverge when it comes to the efficacy of Facebook ads vs. content strategy for the sake of search engines and people using them. He comes from mortgage and finance – and does indeed sell a marketing platform so it’s always important to examine the source, take what works and take the other things with a grain of salt. If after reading this you don’t want to spend a significant amount on Facebook ads experimenting to see what kind of return on investment you can get though you’re crazy.
All in all a very well researched and written book by someone who has had a lot of success. Perhaps the book isn’t going to make Chris wealthy (it sounds like the tactics already have,) because it’s so niche and a little time specific. But this is what makes this book so incredible and actionable – if you’re a digital marketer of my variety who is voracious to discover more strategies and systems to make yourself and your clients successful you need to read this book.