Jess Overton is joined by Noam Auerbach, Head of Product and Growth at Enhancv. They cover the power of SEO in driving organic growth, the impact of using a closed funnel with their marketing touchpoints, and why growth and product teams need to work together. Listen now or read the edited highlights below.
Using SEO to power organic growth
Enhancv started eight years ago as a resume builder, when resume builders were a big thing. Since then it has grown to be an entire platform with many digital features that help you move throughout the hiring process in various companies.
We used our database of how users have engaged with us in the past when creating resumes to identify three keywords - let's say product manager, resume engineering manager, resume, et cetera.
We then found strong resumes from these roles in our database, and automatically generated hundreds and hundreds of SEO pages (adding some extra information from automated resources). We obviously got approval from users and also compensated them with coupons and rewards and then automatically generated together.
And we're now at the point where, if I'm not wrong, we have around 1500 SEO pages, driving hundreds of thousands of people every day into the account.
Complimenting SEO with traditional paid UA
I don't think any modern company can rule out paid marketing - it is just too much of an enormous channel.
We have a small basket of users we're acquiring through paid user acquisition, but despite the low scale they provide significant value in revenue.
The power of a closed funnel
Our experience at Enhancv is that closed funnels have a great impact. So let's imagine that I'm a user and I'm thinking of switching jobs.
So I searched for something on Google and I find a resume example for my occupation, let's say a product manager resume. And I see a beautiful page with the resume itself and the template, and content that explains how I should write my resume. If I would be building an open funnel here, I would tell the user, well, you can do whatever you want.
You can go to the builder and build your resume, or you can go build a cover letter or start with this template.
What we did at Enhancv is basically have one CTA placed throughout the SEO page, which uses this specific template to build your resume.
With that, we skip an enormous part of the onboarding process. Users choose the template, and not only do we provide them with a specific design on a specific template, we also put content into the resume. This isn't content that's relevant to them, but at least they know what the best practices are and how other product managers have talked about themselves in their resumes.
So they have a much better starting point to be onboarded. And of course, when we test this, the activation, completion and success of these users was enormous. We're talking about easily 40% increase in revenue.
Transitioning users from mobile to desktop
When users first interact with us on mobile devices, we try to transition them into the desktop experience. The vast majority of users want to build a resume and build their career on their desktop. So for us, building a really native experience for mobile is not a priority. What we tried to do is explain as quickly as possible on the mobile device what our value proposition is.
We try to drive you as quickly as possible to desktop, through emails and reminders, et cetera. If we would see a significant user segment that wants to do the entire experience end to end on mobile, we will definitely build a mobile app and give a much more native and smooth experience.
Where growth and product meet, the magic happens
I just came out of a call with our marketing people analyzing some paid marketing funnels that we've been building and testing. Unfortunately, the beautiful design that our talented designer created is performing less well than just putting unedited photos in front of the user.
This is a hard reality for a designer or a quality oriented product manager to accept. And this for me is a perfect example of the interaction between growth and product, product managers and designers.
Many times we will try to think about how to build the most valuable features, how to build the most beautiful, smooth, user centric features and experiences to help users achieve their goals. A growth person will come and say, "it doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is what brings us the highest conversion".
The reality is somewhere in the middle. The question is, how can you build experiences with the highest conversions? And even though you use the ugly photos that perform better, at the same time how can you still build features and experiences that'll give users a good experience and make them use it again and again?
In our case, we separated the paid marketing traffic into a separate page. So the beautiful design goes to the organic users, while the more "converting" design - which was not our first choice - goes only for paid marketing. Because that's marketing you have to get every cent you can out of it.
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