How I'd grow Hitchd

Hitchd is a honeymoon registry that helps couples finance their dream honeymoon by letting family and friends contribute to the plane, hotel stay, excursion, and other costs.

To use the founder’s words: it’s a wishing well, cash fund, and Kickstarter all rolled into one.

I like the landing page. All the basics of a good one are there, plus a series of details that make it pretty good.

I can see a live example of the product without signing up, there’s social proof, the visual is representative of the actual product, etc.

If I had to find something that I don’t particularly like it would be the copy.

Beautiful, fast, simple, modern, meaningful… say too much and you’ll end up saying nothing.

Their positioning would be better if they picked the single most important differentiation attribute.

Their weak spot is the pricing page (they just state the number and nothing else).

I bet many visitors check it out, wonder why other registries are free but Hitchd is paid, and leave.

If you charge you need to convince visitors why you’re better than the competition.

Think about the Hitchd customer journey: this isn’t an impulse buy. Consequently, it requires multiple touchpoints.

Before sending it to dozens or hundreds of people, you definitely want the registry to be just right and you’ll take your time picking the best one.

That’s why it’s strange that they don’t focus on email marketing. They could influence the visitor from the first visit to the moment of purchase.

There isn’t a form on the website, except for at the end of the blog posts. This is definitely something they need to improve.

Customer acquisition is hard for Hitchd. They have a short timeframe; only a few months before the wedding, not sooner, not later.

I’d start a partnership program with wedding planners. Their customers are at the right time to be interested in getting Hitchd.

Affiliate marketing can make these partnerships a win for all the 3 parties involved:

- Hitchd acquires new customers at a reasonable cost
- The wedding planner gets additional revenue with no cost or effort
- The customer gets to know a tool that can be very useful to them

Search is going to be important; Hitchd could rank for plenty of commercial and informational keywords.

First, they need to improve the page titles by targeting a different keyword for each page, and write them more naturally to increase CTR and get more clicks

Hitchd needs to create competitor alternative pages.

They’ll reach users who are actively looking for the type of product that Hitchd offers and dissatisfied with the competition.

Usually these pages convert really well and are an easy win.

Pro tip: sometimes it’s not immediately clear what type of content you should create to rank for that keyword.

What you need to do is to check the actual SERP, try to spot a pattern among the top 5 spots, and replicate the same type of content.

At this point, they need to improve their domain authority with more backlinks (their competitors have higher DAs).

Hitchd is past the “doing things that don’t scale” stage so it would make sense to create a linkable asset and promote it with a digital PR campaign.

For example, they could use their proprietary data to contextualize statistics with important 2021 honeymoon trends.

They could turn it into a visual asset and promote it through email outreach to relevant online magazines that cover that topic.

Performance marketing is going to be the other channel, particularly social.

This is because of the advanced targeting capabilities of the algorithms that will let them reach people exactly when they might need the product.

I'm not a big fan of the creatives they’re using right now; stock photos of couples in beautiful places are generic.

In my experience, the creatives that get the lower CPAs and convert better are the ones taken with phones that tend to blend with the organic feed.

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