What’s the Key to Creating Successful Conversion Content? and Grow Sales!

If you want to understand the world in which you live and then write about it, then you’re on the path to creating better conversion content. Accept that readers have a maximum of a few minutes to spare. More often, they have only seconds to read content. Make your words count. Understand Your Customer The […]

  • If you want to understand the world in which you live and then write about it, then you’re on the path to creating better conversion content. Accept that readers have a maximum of a few minutes to spare. More often, they have only seconds to read content. Make your words count.

Understand Your Customer

The rules for how to maintain good content on your site change each day. When you’re creating content, consider what your website visitors need. You don’t want to introduce content that doesn’t affect their buyer’s journey. The best content introduces issues or ideas that affect readers directly or will affect them soon. Some pieces of content also deliver solutions.


Some content persuades people to take an action, and others leave people thinking about an idea. This piece prompts you to explore the logic behind writing brand-reinforcing content. Not every piece that you write will prompt an action, but it could contain an idea or a link to a tool that will benefit readers. Conversion content may remind readers why they need to return to your site, but it doesn’t directly pitch them.



Here’s an Example

In this post, content writers can see how to develop an idea into a piece of conversion content. Let’s say you own a startup business that markets laundry and dry cleaning services, but the angle is that drivers handle pickup and drop-off for customers. This is a dry topic on which to write. Users want fresh clothes for their professional and personal uses. On the buyer’s journey, there are customers who know they can afford the service and customers who need it but who aren’t sure they can afford it.


Conversion content should address both types of readers. I Googled the phrase “how pressed shirts look more professional AND 2017” and discovered a top link to a GQ article category. Another click led me to the article, “When It Comes to Casual Suits, You Should Copy a Frenchman.” One Google search gives me the angle I need for a blog post. I could write briefly about the sleek look of the Frenchman Vincent Cassel in the story or take a more broad look at fashion. I could compare his look with other actors (French or otherwise) or connect the piece back to needing expert laundry and dry cleaning services.


This angle gives readers concerned with their professional image something to read about while relating to their buyer’s journey. I could write a similar piece targeted towards professional women. I could turn this into a series of posts. This writing approach indirectly represents what my brand sells without appealing to readers for their business.



Why Pick a Concept

Writers want to develop conversion content around a concept. It could be a branding concept or an idea that matters to buyers. Sit with your laptop and tell yourself that you will communicate only the ideas that readers need to know (perhaps with examples), and you’ll be fine.


However, your writing product could be boring. When you reread a piece of content, ensure that there’s a hook to capture the attention of readers and a theme or a storyline woven throughout the text. Take readers through the points without losing their interest. Make your edits. Eliminate sentences that don’t support the theme or storyline (unless you’re refuting them for instructional purposes). Remove sentences that introduce other subjects. These are topics for future content writing.


Some writers maintain their focus by following an outline while other writers develop ideas in a more fluid process. They see ideas unfold around a paragraph structure, adding more details below their topic sentences. In the end, read the piece aloud and see if it answers the reader’s questions without exceeding the target word count.



Write Words That Matter

Placing yourself in a reader’s shoes, you can determine if a piece communicates a concept. Did you write words that matter? Did you babble on about the keyword phrase and turn readers away from the site? We live in a world in which consumers decide whether to keep reading content in a matter of seconds. Does the piece benefit them? Should they read more? Readers click away to other content if the writer wastes their time. For more details on converting readers into brand consumers, please contact us for more information.

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How to Use Conversion Content to Turn Site Visitors into Qualified Leads

If you own a small business, trying to boost sales of your products using content marketing, you know it can be hard to get traction. You spend a lot of time (and money) struggling to generate leads with the content you create, but aren’t seeing the results you’re hoping for. Fortunately, there’s a simple formula […]

  • If you own a small business, trying to boost sales of your products using content marketing, you know it can be hard to get traction. You spend a lot of time (and money) struggling to generate leads with the content you create, but aren’t seeing the results you’re hoping for. Fortunately, there’s a simple formula to increase leads using content.

Consumers Want Content

According to a Hubspot survey, consumers on average will read between 3 and 5 pieces of content before they’ll speak with a sales representative. Said differently, offering valuable, relevant and informative content is critical to the buying process. Unfortunately, most marketers, including those who allocate substantial resources to content marketing, don’t know if their content marketing efforts lead to increased sales, and many don’t even have a formal plan for their content marketing campaigns.


In that same survey, B2B marketers report allocating almost 30% of their total marketing budget to content marketing, but more than half say they don’t know what content marketing success would look like. Only 30% felt their content marketing efforts were effective, and only 32% have a documented content marketing strategy.



Translation: Most Marketers Don’t Understand Why They Push Content

This isn’t to say that marketers are flying completely blind—certainly most are careful to link their content to specific marketing objectives, and many create buyer personas and target content to different market segments. What most don’t do is tie their content to specific stages of the buyer journey, from prospect to lead to qualified lead and, finally, to buying customer.



What Is Conversion Content And Why Do You Need It?

The goal of conversion content is to convert a window shopper into a buying customer—in other words, a visitor to your website into a qualified lead, actively considering buying your products or services. Certainly, not all conversion content appears on your website—some will appear in social media posts, for example, that link back to your site.


But once someone is on your site—whether what got them there is organic search results or sponsored adds or social media posts—you need to create a conversion path that moves site visitors from prospects to qualified leads. The first step on the path is a content offer, one sufficiently engaging that site visitors will click on a call to action to get it. That takes them to a customized landing page where you ask them to complete a form in exchange for the content. You then allow them to download the content.



How Conversion Content Is Crafted

Earlier you read that there’s a simple formula to generate qualified leads with your content. Here’s that formula, in 4 critical steps:

  • Create Your Content Offer: The content you choose must be appealing to the market segment you’re trying to convert—for example, if your goal is to sell accounting software to small business owners, you might choose a blog about new tax deductions for small businesses. Your content could be a white paper, case study, video, or eBook. In some cases, that content will already exist. At other times, you’ll need to brainstorm new content ideas. The bottom line is that however your content is created, it must be sufficiently engaging to make prospective customers want it.

  • Create an Action-Oriented Call to Action: The words you use in your call to action should be action-oriented and attention-grabbing, include keywords which match what’s in your content, and appealing enough that site visitors will want to click on it. For example, the seller of accounting software might have a call to action like, Read Our Blog to Get the 5 Small Business Tax Deductions You Don’t Even Know About.

  • Create a Customized Landing Page: The sole purpose of the landing page is to collect visitors’ contact information by persuading them to fill out a form. The landing page should be customized to a specific market segment (or buyer persona) as well as to where prospects are in the buying cycle.

  • Create the Form Which Gates Your Content: If you’re new to creating forms, you can get help from online forms tools resources. Using these tools, select your form. Choose fields for your form—in general, limit the number of fields to a maximum of 4 or 5 (prospects are reluctant to fill out excessively long forms), including first name, last name and email address.


Conclusion: It’s a Win-Win

In creating conversion content and an effective conversion path, you’ve demonstrated the reason inbound marketing is so effective—you’ve pulled customers to you by giving them something they want and need—and everyone’s a winner. Visitors to your website get information that helps them in their businesses, and you get the contact information you need to continue the conversation and move the buying process one step further. In the process, you establish trust and authority.

You need to ensure that your website is helping you achieve all of your business goals, from generating qualified leads to nurturing those leads to closing sales. To learn more about the ways we can improve your sales process and make your website work for you, contact us today.

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