Neil Patel: Creativity is the Key to Increasing Traffic

Neil Patel is renowned as a marketer and entrepreneur. As co-founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and Hello Bar, he has found enormous success: he was even named a Top Online Influencer by the Wall Street Journal, and a Top 10 Online Marketer by Forbes.

If you have a few minutes, watch the video below to hear Neil ruminate on how to drive traffic to your site through creativity. We’ve also outlined the major points below for your easy perusal.

Tap Into Your Creativity

Believe it or not, Neil Patel’s first entrepreneurial effort was a failure. He was self-admittedly young and naive, assuming that the adage “If you build it, they will come” applied to Internet marketing. He soon learned this was untrue, and then went broke paying a professional marketing team who weren’t able to deliver results. But, when there’s a will, there’s a way—going broke forced him to get creative, and that’s when he discovered the truth:

“Creativity is the #1 secret to actually driving traffic.”

As it turns out, Neil had a natural gift for driving traffic, and one that continues to serve him well. Because after all, the more visibility you get, the more leads will result.

But you don’t need to be a natural-born marketing genius to succeed—you just need to be creative. In the video, Neil walks us through his basic two-pronged approach when trying to improve traffic on a site.

First, he looks at what is working: what traffic is converting, which keywords attract traffic, which referring sites are driving the most converting leads. It’s crucial that you understand what is contributing to your site’s success before you…

Secondly, start looking at what isn’t working. Look into why visitors aren’t converting. Is it that they’re irrelevant, ie. coming from sites that aren’t related to yours? Most often, Neil finds the problem is that they simply aren’t ready to buy—yet. The solution? Collect their email, educate them and gain their trust over the coming weeks and months, and sell to them when they’re ready.

Improving Conversion is a Team Effort

It’s also important to remember that marketers aren’t the only ones who can impact conversion rates. Designers can tweak the landing pages to help people more easily navigate the site. The product team can improve the the onboarding process, so customers are actually encouraged to use your service. Salespeople can fine tune their approach to ensure that reality meets expectations. Improving conversion rates should be a motivating factor for everyone on your team.

Dropbox is a great example of a company that achieved higher conversion rates by paying attention to what was and wasn’t working. Originally, they acquired customers through PPC and SEM. With a price tag of $200 – $300 per customer and each customer paying $60/year for the service, the math simply didn’t add up. But they found that if they rewarded existing clients for referrals, their customer acquisition costs plummeted and conversion rates grew exponentially. Bottom line: it’s crucial that you think about what creative ways you can drive more traffic, more customers, and more sales.

Don’t Drive Yourself Crazy with Analytics

The final piece of advice Neil gave us in this video is that when you’re just starting out, don’t bog yourself down by trying to do too much tracking. It can get overwhelming fast, and it’s just not worth your time. Google Analytics is free, and it offers everything you need when you’re just starting up. Just track traffic and signups, and you’ll have plenty of data to work from. It’s more important to focus on your product and getting more users to the site.

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This is just the 1st in a series of 10 videos Neil Patel created with us. To learn more about content marketing, check out the rest of the videos!