Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Morning Catch can be made successful by growth hacking the living daylights out of it.

I see the point of giving this pop-up away as a way to raise overall visibility (and therefore links to) Morning Train, which is a wise move.

However, pop-up boxes on websites are generally thought to be annoying because they pop up the second that the site user's cursor goes anywhere near the exit button, which in many cases, is also dangerously close to the scroll bar.

So, what can Morning Train, with its small army of highly-talented and multi-skilled coders and engineers might have to consider doing is to have the pop up action and functionality of the product be less annoying and for it to be less intrusive.

That's the first question you need to answer: how can THIS website pop-up become the benchmark by which all other website pop-ups are measured, both from the end-user's point of view, and from the site viewer's point of view? The experience of interacting with this thing needs to be EQUALLY pleasurable and productive for site owners and site visitors, while also remaining relevant and functional in terms of effective SEO. How can you engineer and growth hack this issue? Crack this question and the pop-up becomes ten times more desirable to install and to use.

Next, Morning Train has what appears to be a social media credibility issue in terms of presence and content. I've looked at the translated versions of the company's Twitter and Facebook pages and LinkedIn. There's a certain amount of duplication on all three platforms which may not be serving you or your followers. And when a marketing, SEO, and social media advertising company has a fairly low number of followers on Facebook and Twitter, could that point raise a red flag or two for potential users?

One other point is a that a lot of your social media stuff talks about the company. While a certain amount of self promotion is OK, you'd do well to talk more about the clients you've helped.

As much as this next idea might be a pain to complete, it may be worth your time and trouble in the longer term.

I realize lots of people in Denmark speak English as a second language. I'm not sure if it's one of the issues of Google Translate or not, but the Danish-to-English translation via Google Translate of your main .dk site isn't doing the company too many favors.

So here's my suggestion: duplicate your entire website and set the site up with a .com domain name and have a native English speaker go through the entire layout, page by page, paragraph by paragraph to pull syntax, spelling, and grammar into line for British English and American English speakers as two distinct customer bases.

You may also want to do the same for all your social media posts. Have one post in Danish and a similar post in English, with the respective language link pointing to the respective language version of your website.

OR, if the goal is to bring in more subscribers, consider having stand alone English versions of each of your main social streams. Yes, I realize this is a huge challenge and that it's a lot of work. But the idea here is to make life as simple as possible for your end users.

In terms of growth hacking, the point is to test, test, test and to fail, fail, fail and to do so in multiple arenas as quickly as possible, WHILE LEARNING from the mistakes, and THEN APPLYING what you learn and what works to the next iteration. This way, your process streamlines the workflow and improves the outcome.

You'll probably benefit from running split-tested, geo-targeted social media ads to get the fully functioning, native English version of the landing page for Morning Catch/ Morning Train in front of the people best suited to make use of it.

When I typed Morning Train into Google (I live just outside Philadelphia in the USA), page 1 is dominated by Sheena Easton's pop song from 1981. Your company shows up near the bottom of page 2 of Google (again, this is for the American English version of Google). Is your aim to reach more native English speakers, or to drum up awareness (and business) in Denmark and for Danish clients?

Morning Train owns the top three spots of the Danish version of Google, but Sheena still owns more spots (via YouTube videos). What can your company do to counter this visibility and to get yourselves higher up the English speaking versions of Google?

Taking over YouTube with your own versions of videos will help.

I hope these viewpoints are of value.

Good luck to you.

One other question: does this pop up work with ALL browsers and with all website design platforms?

Does it kick ass on Google Chrome and does it suck big time on Safari? Does it work equally well with Drupal and Joomla as it does with Wix, SquareSpace, Webflow, Weebly, and WordPress? Will it work with Adobe Muse and with Adobe Dreamweaver?

I hope this helps.