A content first approach to user experience and

optimisation

Director of Content and optimisation at Funding Circle

Head of Social and Content at PayPal UK

Head of Social at Gumtree / eBay Classifieds

And yes I am South African but please don’t ask me about Oscar!

£50 million £100 million £150 million

763

224138

£235 millionLent in 3 years

$37m funding round

70k+ Investors

4000 loans

Days

First, we build the content machine

To take a content-led approach to onsite optimisation and positioning, you first need to build up content assets

This was the homepage when started at Funding Circle

Of the many things this

home page was lacking,

trust, vibrancy and

social proof were the

main concerns for me

Trust creates conversion

Trust:

Consistency

Credibility

Transparency

Friendliness

Beautiful / professional

Vibrancy

Pride / making a difference

We needed to portray more trust

amongst our users:

Data-led transparency

So we created

transparent, data-led

content on the

marketplace dynamics

of Funding Circle

The naked company

We took the naked

company approach

and opened up the

doors to our

business by

interviewing teams,

being honest about

the tricky sides of

the business etc

Become a thought leader

Building up premium, genuine case studies

We put in a huge amount

of time and effort into

sourcing and creating top

quality, genuine customer

case studies, using

professional

photographers and

videographers to tell our

story through our

customers

Then we used that content

to help build trust and pride

amongst our users

Actual business customer

A little product

exposure!

Explaining our value prop in one sentence using a

genuine example

Social proof

News coverage

helps with trust

Genuine testimonials

Testimonial videos showing a number

of different businesses we

helped

Content best practice: The 20:1 ruleOne case study of Bramley & Gage has been seen on:

Blog headerMagazine inserts Home page Slide share

Blog post x2 Facebook album G+ album Youtube x2

This is a great method for creating content cost effectively and also building brand consistency

Content best practice: The 20:1 ruleHe even appeared on the tube!

Then we test and optimise

Who are these

people?And this guy?

Why should

I?

Forgot password as important as

join?

Why not

live?

Home page A/B/C test

25%

26%

The revised homepage

increased overall

conversion rate by 26%

11.6%9.9%

Test and test again

Don’t stop there, we tested

different CTAs and increased

the conversion rates for

each customer group again

Improving advertisingwith content

Content approach to advertising

Creative A – Control version Creative B – New version

60% reduction in CPA

Transactional content

Mining opportunities through data:

Only 8% of the businesses on our business email list had taken out a loan with us. Adjust to appeal to these businesses

Transactional content

Sep-13 Oct-13 Nov-13 Dec-13 Jan-14 Feb-14

So, very simply, we moved the loan CTA to the top of the

email in Nov 13

Revenue generated from email

Transactional contentAnd improved the CTAs on

the blog post the email link sent traffic to

Thank you

Jon Bishop – Online Marketing Consultant

@jonin60seconds

jonmichaelbishop@gmail.com