The buzz word in digital marketing in the 21st century is content. Good content gets your customer over the bridge from interest to taking the desired action and converting.
You’ve probably heard about content marketing, yet perhaps you haven’t quite understood it or its value. In this article, we’re going to break content down for you and explain why good content is key to conversion. First, let’s define good content.
Content Is…
Good content is key to conversion, but before you start writing paragraph after paragraph of copy, let’s define content and look at how it can increase your landing page conversion rate.
In our overly digital age, most consumers have no patience for traditional marketing. Why listen to radio ads when you can use Pandora or Spotify? Who watches commercials anymore once they have a DVR?
Savvy marketers have learned these past few years that to reach their audience they have to provide something of value – enter content marketing.
When you use good content to drive your marketing strategy, you focus on creating and disseminating valuable, relevant and consistent content to your website visitors. You do this to attract and retain these people.
Your end goal? To obtain the conversion.
Whether it’s to sign up for your email list or purchase your product or service, your content is the driver. If you aren’t actively pursuing ways of providing valuable content to your site visitors, you are missing out.
Boiled down to one short sentence: content lets you communicate with your website visitors without overtly selling them something. It meets their needs, makes their life better or fills a niche.
Your Good Content Can…
When it comes to your content, it should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Good content has a list of advantages, and it can increase your overall reach and conversion rates. Good content can:
- Drive your inbound traffic and leads.
- Nurture engagement with your target audience.
- Increase your pay-per-click success.
- Increase your positive brand outlook. When you provide something of value, customers trust you more and keep your brand top of mind.
- Increase your search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines reward businesses that publish consistent, quality content.
- Combine with your social media strategy for added influence.
- Establish your company as a brand leader.
- Build brand awareness.
- Generate leads, thus increasing conversions.
When you provide good content to your website visitors, you can carefully lead them through your sales cycle. Your content can be set up to meet their needs and usher them through the buying process.
So, how do you create good content that converts? Here are a few tips:
Good Content Starts with the Audience
Get to know your audience. Good content meets the needs of a target audience. Know this group of people so you can create content that appeals to them.
Imagine trying to create either written or visual content for an audience you know nothing about. If you want to boost your conversion rate, you need to get to know your audience.
What should you learn about your audience? Here are a few things you can learn from your site and social media analytics or from surveys sent to your email subscribers:
- Demographics such as where they live, their income, their age, whether they are male/female, own a house, have kids and much more
- Where they shop and what their needs are
- Keywords they associate with
- Their values
- Their brand awareness
Good Content is Relevant
Now that you’ve learned about your audience, you can create content that is relevant and useful for these folks. You can now create content that converts.
When you provide worthwhile content, you generate trust and loyalty. Consider topics that would interest them. Think of the areas where you are an expert. Ask yourself if these topics would engage your audience.
Effective content marketing fulfills a need. For example, let’s say you are a home builder/remodeler, and you want to drive sales.
You might meet the needs of your audience by providing content around home repair tips, cooking, healthy living tips and more.
When you provide this targeted content, you establish yourself as an expert and as someone people can trust. Then, when they are ready to build or remodel a home, your company will get their business and thus the conversion.
The engagement you created with good content leads to this conversion.
Good Content Starts with the Hook
When planning your content, start with an intriguing headline. If you can’t get your website visitor to read your headline, you’ve lost them.
Not only should you captivate with your headline, but you have to follow through in the copy. If you are promising pink elephants, you should write about pink elephants. Nothing destroys good content faster than a misleading headline.
When writing your headlines, mention the benefit. For example, if you’re giving home cleaning tips, consider a headline like this: 5 Tips for Cleaning Your House in 30 Minutes. The benefit is immediately seen, and once they dive into the content, you are well on your way to earning the conversion.
Good Content Makes a Connection
If you’ve written good content that connects and resonates with your audience, you are more likely to increase your conversion rate.
We’ve already mentioned that content is about building relationships. This is what leads to the conversion at some point in the buying cycle.
When writing content and preparing graphics, it pays to again know your audience. Use images and keywords that resonate with them. Strive for the emotional connection as this is one that will keep them remembering your brand into the future.
Use and speak the language of your followers. Talking to teens? Don’t use content geared told the senior crowd.
Final Thoughts
Good content builds a relationship and engages the audience. Good content is key to conversion.
But, let’s not forget that you have to provide something of value to your target audience to elicit the conversion.
There are several ways to provide value. First, you can solve their problem. Consider the cleaning tip above. If you can solve the age-old dilemma of how to keep a clean house without spending hours doing it, you’ve solved a big problem. When they follow through with your advice, and it works, you’ve got a loyal follower who converts.
Second, you can educate your website visitors. This establishes your authority and engenders their trust.
Lastly, you can meet their emotional needs. Consider that 90% of buying decisions are made subconsciously. This means that if your brand can evoke a positive emotional response in your target audience, you’re more likely to have visitors that convert.
Are you ready to create good content that converts? If you’re ready to optimize your landing page conversions with engaging content, we can promise you we’ll do just that. With our guarantee, you can rest assured we will increase your conversion rate through valuable, relevant content.
If you’re ready to work with the leader in landing pages and conversion rate optimization, contact us today.
We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.
Image: Tim Swaan
