“I can’t tell you why our business is growing”
That’s Ben, the founder of Huckleberry Bicycles, who has no clue why his bike business is booming.
Just like Ben’s bike business, there are countless offline businesses that lack the technology to track their conversions, even if they buy ads.
However, many of these businesses have remarkable success stories.
While they couldn’t explain the growth of their businesses, most of them relied on the same thing that Ben did with Huckleberry Bicycles:
caring about what success means for customers and providing them with the best possible experience to achieve that success.
Can online businesses do the same without obsessing over conversions?
It turns out that some of today’s most successful web businesses already do.
Ditching the conversion funnel
Ahrefs’ blogs and tools attract around 1.6 million visitors each month, generating a $10 million acquisition channel.
Yet Tim Soulo, the CMO of this SaaS-based SEO suite, isn’t interested in pushing leads down funnels that convert strangers into paying customers.
“There is no single identifiable ‘Aha!’ moment that we can push new leads towards and expect a conversion,” .
According to Tim, their customers have various motivations and goals, resulting in the different paths they take:
“Marketers usually prefer to build straightforward funnels, but I don’t agree with this generalization…..To me, each lead represents a unique person with their own customer journey.”
Those who oppose funnels argue that focusing too much on optimizing conversions is a short-sighted strategy used by businesses living quarter by quarter.
Most of these anti-funnelists, however, share one common characteristic: they don’t pursue leads. Instead, they focus on serving their audience and empowering them.
Empowering audiences for free
Ahrefs’ Tim takes an alternate path in empowering his SEO audience.
SEO is complex, and there are dozens of identical SEO tools out there.
Instead, Ahrefs content and tools focus on educating and empowering anyone to do SEO for free. This has led them to build a $10M content moat and an unmatched acquisition channel.
“..we try to promote the idea that SEO is not some kind of secret, technical, black magic, but something that can be learned by pretty much anyone,” says Tim.
Ahrefs’ content flywheel:
- Determine what customers are searching for in Google, as related to a problem they solve.
- Publish an article on how to solve the particular problem, while demonstrating our product as the ideal solution.
- Promote that article until it begins ranking on Google for the topic.
- Receive a perpetual stream of visitors from Google; all of whom may, potentially, become customers after reading about their product.
- Enjoy word-of-mouth publicity, as their “educated” customers tell others how their product solved their problems.