Robert Rafferty
Digital Marketing & Sales Ops
Let’s get in touch.
Competitors.
Our marketing stack.
Company timeline.
Growth Strategy.
Statrys was originally a sales-oriented business with a team of 4 sales persons reaching out to newly registered companies on the Hong Kong Company Registry to offer it’s business accounts. With the launch of the platform, there were clear opportunities to grow in digital marketing using SEO, SEM, and Content marketing. Since payment platforms are abundant, there was a lot of success references we could use to dictate our content, keyword research, design, product offerings, and more.
The strategy essentially meant that we can identify competing content, write our own content, and then work out what we can do to make that content better, resulting in SEO success and a remarkable increase in brand trust.
Marketing Cadence.
Website Articles
Lead Generation
Social Media
Ads
SEO/SEM
Content ethos.
Competitors should be your guiding light in the beginning of any content strategy. Competitors, especially larger ones, have already done the research for what keywords or what content works. With tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you can spy on their work and identify articles to tackle from top-to-bottom. Once you have an idea of the content you need to write, simply write content that emulates what your competitors have, and once this is complete, now you need to think how you can improve the content so that it beats your competitors.
Content process.
1. Research
Just punch in your competitors to your SEO software of choice and identify their highest performing content.
2. Research
Emulate that content so that you hit all the topics that your competitor has. You’re not copying, you’re writing it in your own words. AI can’t help you here.
3. Improve
Now that you have something similar to competing content, now it’s time to think outside the box, what can help us beat their content?
4. Migrate
Migration time, use this moment to drop your content into your CMS of choice and start adding all the features and SEO requirements.
5. Publish
Publish it live, and make some fan-fare around it. Share it on social media, push the URL to Google Search Console for crawling, and add it to your newsletters.
6. Revisit
Put a task on your calendar to revisit the content 3 to 6 months later to assess it’s performance and see whether it needs updating, or whether the competitor has upgraded their content since then.
SEO ethos.
Search Engine Optimization is not a clear-cut formula that can be copied or “figured out”. SEO is a set of best practices that when used appropriately, improves the user’s experience which can result in exponential growth in traffic, lead generation, and engagement. SEO is a long term strategy that must be taken seriously, with patience, and probably more patience.
SEO growth.
At Statrys the SEO strategy began as a content-heavy strategy on an outdated website with an inadequate onboarding experience. As the content began competing with our top competitors and user acquisition started to grow quickly, we then redesigned the website and the product to meet a modern user’s expectations for a modern payment platform and increase conversion rate.
Results.
Monthly Organic Growth ~183%
Referral Page Growth ~388%
Domain Rating Growth ~89%
Avg. Traffic Value ~$109,636
Keyword Rankings.
Top 3 SERP ~3,301
Top 10 SERP ~17,504
Top 20 SERP ~30,313
SEO Today.
(as of April 15, 2024)
Top keywords.
It’s very rare for our audience to search specifically for “business bank accounts” when their immediate need is to transact money cross-border to or from their new small business. It was key for Statrys to capture customers in the midst of their frustrations with old-school banking headaches. Trying to remember routing numbers, figuring out what a proof of address was, or which banks are best are common search terms a small business might use in order to meet their early payment challenges, which is where Statrys can help quickly and efficiently.
Yes, we nearly consistently beat the banks at their own keywords.
We just had better content and a user-friendly website.
How did we achieve this?
We blogged. Hard.
Of the 166,000 organic traffic Statrys gets every month…
Roughly 147,000 arrive at the blog first.
Time for a refresh.
Once consistent organic growth was achieved, the new challenge was to improve the user’s experience both on the website, and on the platform. A major reconstruction was put into place to rebrand Statrys and rethink the entire UX/UI of the company. Heatmapping, peer studies, and a new CMS led to a renewed website experience that offered more engagement with visitors than the previous website had. In-line with the website, UATs and Beta testing led to a more modern and streamlined user experience for both the platform and the onboarding environment.
Here’s what the brand refresh looked like.
Old and busted.
New hotness.
A new design is half the battle, here’s what powered it.
Conversion Rate Optimization.
With a new CMS and a larger marketing team, we took apart the user journey and improved everything we could piecemeal. Utilizing analytics, customer surveys, listening in on account management calls, and studying competitors, we were able to identify areas for improvement and tackled them one item at a time.
This is a process that will never end.
Here’s just a few examples of things we did to improve user engagement.
(and therefore conversions)
Meet the dream team.
As mentioned in the beginning, SEO is not a skill nor a formula than can be replicated, it is a set of best practices that everyone in the organization should adhere to at some level. Therefore, SEO is the summation of best practices across multiple disciplines and teams.
That being said, meet the growth team at Statrys.
(when I was there)
Alex Santafe.
Creative Director
Alex was previously my manager at Glue Up, after joining Statrys I convinced the company to hire Alex onto the team as he had the vision and skills needed for a proper brand refresh and extensive leadership experience to take it beyond. Everything you see on the website was designed by him. He’s also a top-notch HTML and PHP developer.
Reports
Digital Marketing Executive
Product Marketing Manager
Frontend Developer (MKT)
Djon Ly.
Product Marketing Manager
Djon started off as a performance marketing and media manager, launching paid campaigns and engaging with PR and media networks. Later promoted to Product Marketing Manager when the new platform and sister app launched, she now owns all product information and works closely with the product team to launch product-oriented marketing campaigns.
Reports
Content Writer
Paid Media Manager
Robert Rafferty.
Digital Marketing Executive
Robert (that’s me) managed all the SEO content and growth initiatives for Statrys. The scope of the role grew larger to encompass all future front-ends and user acquisition touchpoints. I managed a team of 4 content writers to produce content at an accelerated pace and was heavily involved with product development and CRO initiatives.
Reports
Content Writer
Junior SEO Manager
Pankaj Verma.
Chief Technology Officer
While not part of the growth team, Pankaj as CTO represents the enormous support the marketing team had from the dev teams in regards to marketing development. Even as the marketing team would later hire our own internal developers, the dev team still played a major role in supporting us.
And shout-out to the probably ~20 marketing interns
that were really awesome throughout the years. 👏
Thanks for reading.
This was just a few examples and explanations of my methodology at Statrys. Of course, there was a lot more involved like running marketing automations, email campaigns, social media management, and other typical marketing responsibilities. I see growth marketing as a summation of solid long term strategy and leadership, rather than a string of high-performance campaigns, and I hope that this portfolio shows this clearly.
