In this post, we’ll talk about four types of content that will help increase desire and motivation in your prospects to open up their wallets and purchase. We’ll offer some ideas for increasing your conversion rate optimization, and make that cash register ring more.
Marketing your company and encouraging customers to purchase is a tall order in today’s digital world. For some business owners, it can be downright scary.
First, let’s take a look at your website’s sales funnel and take “the scary” out of marketing your products.
The Sales Funnel – Motivate Customers to Purchase
Just what is your sales funnel? It’s your marketing system. It’s the way to take your customer from prospect to lead to customer and eventually to repeat buyer.
What’s the purpose of the sales funnel? The purpose is to filter your customers and point them in a certain direction. For example, you’d like to make your own herb oil. You use a funnel to pour the oil into a skinny-necked bottle. Why? To keep the oil from spilling all over making a mess.
Your website funnel works in much the same way. It directs your customer on a particular path, keeping them from getting side-tracked and leaving your landing page.
Your sales funnel is the way you get and nurture leads on your website. This is all done through your content:
- To get customers to your website, you need content.
- To turn your new visitors into leads, you need content.
- To turn your leads into customers, you guessed it, you need content.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is the process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience. The ultimate goal? Driving profitable customer action.
Now that we’ve defined the sales funnel and content marketing, let’s dive into four types of content that encourage customers to purchase.
1st Type of Content: Product Videos
According to a study, nearly 75% of people surveyed said they are more likely to buy a product or sign up for a service if they watch a video that explains the product. In addition, consider these stats from the same survey:
- 96% of consumers found videos helpful when making online purchase decisions.
- 71% of consumers said watching a brand video left them with a positive impression.
- 58% consider brands that produce videos more trustworthy.
When you use product videos in your sales funnel, you give your customers a clear idea of what the product does and how it does it. Video encourages the purchase because customers can see the product in action.
Here’s an example of how well video works in converting customers and leading them to make a purchase:
- Internet retailer, stacksandstacks.com added product videos to their website, and tests show that website visitors who watched a product video were up to 144% more likely to add the product to their cart than visitors who don’t watch a video.
In our digital age, video helps consumers make a purchasing decision because videos are visually appealing and usually quick and to-the-point. Moving into 2016, video will become an increasingly important part of your content marketing.
2nd Type of Content: Customer Review
Social proof (or informational social influence) is the phenomenon that makes people believe the actions of others and take a similar action themselves. Social proof is a type of conformity – because someone else says it’s so, it must be so.
This type of herd mentality works great when it comes to your customer reviews. Include a variety of reviews for each of your products or services. Customer reviews or testimonials are often the tipping point when it comes to content that encourages customers to purchase.
Customer testimonials are much better than you touting your products because they offer social proof. Econsultancy explains that 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision. This makes customer reviews essential content for your eCommerce site.
3rd Type of Content: The Discount
What happens to all of your customers who add a product to your shopping cart and then leave your site? Are they gone forever?
They don’t have to be.
The Baymard Institute did a study and found that nearly 69% of people abandon shopping carts before making their purchase. To encourage customers to purchase, you need to have a system in place to deal with abandoned carts.
This is where your content comes in. You can send an email to your customers and offer them a discount to come back and complete their purchase, but this assumes they have already created an account with you.
Alternatively, you can create content in a pop-up box that immediately offers them a discount before they leave your page. You can also offer them the chance to save their cart by creating an account. You can then go back and remind them at a later time because now you have their email.
4th Type of Content: The Guarantee
The final type of content that encourages customers to purchase is the guarantee. This is where you include your exchange and return policy.
Make this content easy to find. Consider adding a guarantee to let your potential customers know that returns are easy and always accepted.
You’ve most likely seen those 100% satisfaction guarantees – the ones that say, “If you aren’t satisfied, we aren’t satisfied.” Successful companies stand by their products and services and include content that says so.
Great content on this page of your website reassures customers and lets them know upfront you’ll do what’s necessary to ensure their satisfaction.
To Conclude
Now that we’ve discussed four types of content that encourage customers to purchase, it’s time to put your content into action.
Make an outline of your sales funnel, and create content that makes sense and is relevant along the way. Steer your customers to the purchase point with videos, customer reviews, a discount and policies that make purchasing easy.
Your goal is to move your customers along a guided pathway – one that moves them from visitors to leads to paying customers.
You move them along with your content. And, remember, the closer you get them to the end of the sales funnel, the more apt they are to buy. But, just in case, create content to take care of those abandoned shopping carts.
If you’d like more information on how to create content that encourages customers to purchase, we can help. Lead generation and conversion rate optimization are our specialty. We can help you improve your content to increase the likelihood your customers will make a purchase. Contact us today.
We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.
Image: Sonny Abesamis
