LazyTrips
As any other strategy consultancy, there are times when some members of the team find themselves sat in the office without a project.
In many consulting firms, this can be around 40% of the time when you take into account the process for winning new work and time taken to move from one project to another.
At Strategy Desk, we like doing things a little differently and so we frequently start side projects which we do in this spare time. LazyTrips was one of these side projects.
What did we do with LazyTrips?
LazyTrips was our first major foray into building a content marketing business from scratch. We have long worked across different marketing channels, but did not previously see out our own brand of content marketing.
The concept with LazyTrips is very simple. We picked one of the only niches we knew that were even more competitive than Finance (as Finance is where we do our consulting work) and set out to build a content website that would be optimised for SEO to drive prospects through the door.
The way we would attract people to visit the site is simply by producing the best quality content on the topic that we write about and the chosen topic we went with was road trips.
A lot of people have a lot of preconceptions about blogging, how it works and what it takes to succeed.
We didn't and applied analytics and an extensive testing methodology to steadily learn what does and doesn't work.
After watching every "SEO Expert" we could find on YouTube and listening to a myriad of podcasts, we eventually realised that the vast majority of the advice you get on content marketing plainly doesn't work.
Over time we have built up a great understanding of how content marketing really works and the fine intricacies of different ways in which you can optimise your traffic.
What is the science in content marketing?
The entire substance of the science behind content marketing is on how to get a genuinely interested audience to consume your content.
To get an audience to your content you have to:
- Generate amazing content
- Figure out your distribution channels
- Optimise your performance for the distribution channels
- Build monetization and back-end conversion of your audience into customers
At LazyTrips, we tackled the hardest and most interesting model out there - pure SEO.
Through months of testing and learning and testing some more, we have developed unique strategies for structuring content, building out the website framework, driving traffic to our content and converting this traffic that we are growing month on month.
During 2019 our LazyTrips traffic grew 50% month on month on average.
As 10s of thousands of visitors began coming to our content and we built proven ways of ranking #1 for progressively bigger and more competitive keywords, we realised that this is something we can replicate.
Towards the end of 2019, we have began building more content marketing websites which are still in the early stages of growth and we consult on content marketing topics with our clients.
What are we planning to do with LazyTrips?
Starting out as an SEO experiment, we are continuing to learn from LazyTrips as it grows.
There are new challenges and learnings to be had as the website scales and we benefit from continuously being in the game - the world of SEO is a rapidly changing one so it pays to constantly be on your toes.
We are expecting to continue our work on LazyTrips for some time to come - it may even provide a decent revenue stream as it scales in the future.
As a large part of our work in the retail banking and financial services sector includes marketing work, this is an amazing way for us to advise our clients based on real current knowledge that other consultancies may not have.
