Hits And Traffic

Lead generation is generating or initiating curiosity in the consumer about a certain product, is one of the most important marketing strategy in this digital era. Chris Smith, co–founder of Curaytor, a social media, digital marketing, and sales coaching company, pretty much understands the concept and how to benefit from the right content generation. Most of the books written on digital marketing hold true for US and Europe marketing however, there are very few that I know of, which have content relevant to Indian market, . The Conversion Code is one of them. In his book, Smith calls out to all the digital content sales and marketing strategists and tells them to go back to basics and relearn them.

Upon reading a few pages, you realise that you now have access to the summary of all available content on ‘digital marketing’ throughout the web and a really good one at that. As a co-founder of a company, I had to learn the basics of digital marketing. Going through tonnes of poorly written blogs and articles on the subject, burning money on A/B tests, landing pages, blogs and articles, paid ads was a painful process. And then, it feels almost unfair that you get all of those learnings and more, put together in a structured and ‘completely doable’ manner in less than 200 pages.

There are three parts in the book subdivided into chapters. Part 1 Capture Internet Chaos talks about the infrastructure of a website and the right way to build one.

Part 2 is Create Quality Appointments deals with the tools to be used in capturing more footfalls and converting leads into customers. Part 3 Close More Sales explains the skillset required to make your website profitable.

Sure, Smith’s book is not a page turner , which you want to finish overnight. It isn’t meant to be. The book grows on to you. Each and every topic come with host of examples, which can be applied immediately to your blog, landing page, Facebook posts, advertisements or any other lead generation content. For those who think that they cannot write so well, there is even a short chapter dedicated to the purpose of writing blogs. How they generate ROI and the chapter it ends with a list of topics on which you could write. That’s a good starting point for anyone.

When we learn things from scratch, taking small steps, making mistakes, it is the best learning. A book can’t completely replace that. However, Smith’s book falls under the new genre of ‘Do it now’ books. The ideas and hacks mentioned in The Conversion Code are relevant now and is sure to help in rolling the sales engine. The online world is evolving and hence the hacks need to evolve too, points out the author. The best way to use this book is to practically test and iterate and come back to it.

For instance, the marketing team at our company has been doing almost everything mentioned here for a couple of years. Most of the lessons we learned resonate well with the ones mentioned. Even though they are the experts in what they do, I would still want them to refer The Conversion Code to debug what went wrong with a campaign. Everything is written from ‘first principle’. Sometimes we need to unlearn and get back to doing things the way we did it the first time.
We tried everything when we were kids without the fear of consequence and then learnt our lessons from experience. As a grownup, we have our baggage of learnings. At Happay, we learned the basics of lead generation and sales from scratch, but with time, the pace of iterations and innovations is slowed down by the baggage of learnings. This book prompted us to revisit the basics, and question ‘Why don’t we do that anymore?’

Despite the fact that the first few pages start on a sluggish note and try to oversell the content, this is a must read for CXOs, sales and marketing professionals or anybody looking to learn the subject from the scratch. What clinches it for me is that this book doesn’t assume that you already know the basics. \