Content Marketing Guide for Higher Conversions – Content is an enormous part of your online marketing efforts. It covers everything from traffic generation to emails, product promotions and more.
The unfortunate truth is that many marketers never learn how to properly create content that converts well for them.
Instead, they do the bare minimum to create content that includes keywords or a call to action and are left baffled when it doesn’t end in the results they had hoped for.
Below, you’re going to find a comprehensive guide to help you create content that has mass appeal to your target audience so that you will reap the rewards of your efforts.
In order to achieve higher conversions, you have to understand your audience and know what your goals are for each piece you intend to publish. Your approach to content marketing has to be rooted in value for the reader as well as a strategy that overcomes objections.
Each Piece of Content Should Have a Measurable Goal
Whenever you are sitting down to create a new piece of content, you want to have a goal in mind about what you hope to achieve. This will help you develop content that converts better.
For example, if your aim is to boost conversions through content marketing, you might want to set a goal that you will build your list with a piece of content, such as a “Content Marketing Guide for Higher Conversions.” So, your call to action and everything leading up to that point will make people want to become a subscriber.
Or, you might be developing a piece of content for your emails that is meant to help retain your subscribers or customers if you were concerned that they were not responding as well to your messages as they were before.
You also might be developing content with a specific goal of putting a new prospect into your sales funnel, which would begin with getting them on your list, followed by presenting value to them via emails, and ultimately converting them into a sale.
Include measurable Specifics
You always want to have specific things in mind that you can measure whenever you create content to see if you have achieved your goal or not. For example, you want to track and know when a certain blog post is resulting in more signups to your list.
Or, you want to look at the conversion rate for an email that went out to your list with the specific purpose of getting them to convert for an affiliate offer that you were promoting. Knowing which metrics to track, whether it’s traffic, engagement, or purchases, can help you make improvements on your content as time goes on.
What you don’t want to do is simply create content and publish it for the goal of consistency or volume alone. While those are both important aspects of content marketing, they’re not the ultimate goal you should be striving for.
These aspects do help to increase brand visibility, so if you are aiming for that as a goal, you can specify that before crafting the content and then sharing it on social media and elsewhere.
Analysis and Planning for High-Converting Content
When you start to create content for a specific purpose, you want to do two things. The first is to conduct an analysis of both your target audience and your competitors. This is just as important as being creative and innovative with your content.
Not only do you have a goal for your content, but you need to know what the goals of your audience are so that you can make sure your content meets their needs. You can start by analyzing the demographics you are going to be creating content for
This not only includes basic information such as their gender, age, location, income level, and other items – but other factors, too. For example, you can dig down into their lifestyle and behaviors and find out what pain points they have so that your content helps to alleviate those.
You want to be looking at your target audience and analyze them to see what obstacles are in their way of achieving the goals they have in their life. Some people like to create a buyer persona or a customer avatar so that they can see a representation of who their content will be addressing.
In addition to analyzing your target audience, you want to analyze your competitors. It’s important to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie so that you can pinpoint gaps in their content marketing strategy and fill the void for the same target audience.
Don’t just look at the basic information such as whether or not they have an article on their blog about the same topic. You want to analyze it in more depth so that you can see how well they cover the information and where you could do a better job for the same audience.
Create a Content Calendar
The second thing you want to do is create a content calendar ahead of time period this is part of the planning process that will assist you in meeting the needs of your target audience by making sure you have a varied approach to what you are sharing with them.
By using a content calendar, you’ll be able to see if there are any trends or even seasonal slants that you can use that will make your content more relevant to their immediate needs.
You can plan your content directly in WordPress or by using a tool that will help you track the content that you have created and plan to create in the future. You need to be flexible with your planning process in case something pops up that needs to be covered in place of and evergreen that idea that you had scheduled.
3 Areas Where Content Will Have a High Impact
There are three primary areas where content marketing is going to be a strong focus in your business. The first is with your blog. You should have a highly optimized niche blog and place where you can share your insight with your target audience.
But the key is have high converting blog posts that get ranked well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and which get the results that you want whenever a visitor lands on the page.
This has to start with a strong headline or title of the blog post. You need to understand how to capture the attention of your target audience, but it has to also play to the search engine optimization (SEO) factors like the use of keywords in order for it to be the most effective.
Try to slant your content in a way that immediately shows the reader what they have to gain by clicking on the link. Use the space meant for your introduction area to hook the reader and pull them into the content immediately.
Everything from the content you share to the formatting you use can have an impact on whether or not it converts well for you. Obviously, you want to provide value to your readers. But you also want to be mindful of things like breaking up large blocks of text and using sub headings to help them navigate the information.
Address All the SEO Aspects of Your Content
Make sure you are addressing all of the SEO aspects of your blog content. In addition to using keywords and header tags, you also want to use meta descriptions, alt tags, and abide by any guidelines Google gives you, such as providing helpful content to your readers.
Every time you complete a piece of content for your blog, you want to share it online, whether that’s on social media platforms or directly to your email list. Then, monitor the results of that blog post to see whether it converts for you in terms of traffic and list building purposes.
Another place you want to focus your content marketing efforts on is social media platforms. This can be anywhere that your audience is active, whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram or something else.
Each Social Media Audience Will Have its Own Preference
Understand that each social media audience will have its own preferences for how they absorb content from you. You’ll need to test the waters and do some research to find out what works best in your niche.
You might find that certain content goes over better on another platform than it does on one you were originally using. If you were to create a 10 minute video and put it on YouTube, you might get stellar results compared to disgruntled viewers who found your video on TikTok.
Content marketing on social media is not just sharing value, but also paying attention to analytics that show you when people were most likely to respond to your content, what kind of engagement you got, when your audience is most active, etc.
You also want to pay attention to -mail marketing content that you are releasing. This should be a mix of highly valuable information and promotional materials. You can use your emails to drive traffic to your blog posts or content on social media.
Take a Multimedia Approach to Content Marketing
Content that you create for your marketing purposes online comes in four different formats. Five if you include live streams. But that can also be grouped under video marketing – it’s just not always recorded.
Most content is done in text format. You don’t want people’s eyes to glaze over with long, boring text. You have to keep it engaging and persuasive or informative to hook them if it’s long-form content.
Otherwise, try to master the art of short-form content and don’t beef up content just for the sake of increasing word count. With text, you need to know about titles, header, the body of the content, and call to action statements.
You also want to begin using video in your content marketing efforts. Video is the second most widely-used content format online, and it’s in huge demand in some niches and demographics.
You’ll find video being used on social media platforms, in blogs, as products and on sales copy. You can either choose to be on camera or not. You can use screen capture recording software and create slides to record, or record your screen as you go through a process.
Don’t Overlook Audio
Audio is also a popular content marketing format. The use of audiobooks and podcasts is growing in popularity. People often prefer this format because it doesn’t tie them down to one place.
They don’t have to have their eyes glued to a screen in order to consume the information. They can put in their earbuds and multitask like on a commute or while working out, doing chores, etc.
Don’t neglect the importance of images and graphics for content marketing too – specifically infographics and social quote posters. These can sum up a concept without someone having to read through large blocks of text.
Part of leveraging multimedia formats with your content is being able to repurpose it. You might start with text, but you can turn it into an infographic, a podcast episode, and a video.
Or, start with another media format like video and turn it into a transcribed text blog, infographic and audiobook instead. This gives you a wider reach with your content marketing efforts because it caters to the personal media preferences of your demographic.
You also want to be on the lookout for multimedia formats you can curate and pull into other forms of content. This is a great way to freshen up old posts, such as finding a video you can embed into a text blog post.
Tips for Improved Content Marketing
Once you know the ins and outs of a solid content marketing strategy in terms of messaging, location and impact, you want to take it to the next level so that it performs better for you.
Enhance your abilities with content marketing by learning concepts like storytelling. This inserts a picture into the mind of the reader so they can have a better reaction to the content than if it were just a list of facts.
If you use a ghostwriter or some sort of online tool, you need to make sure it isn’t compromising your unique style and tone. You’ll have to polish it up to make sure it matches and doesn’t sound disjointed from everything else you’ve published in the past.
Work on your optimization strategy – specifically for conversions. Test and tweak your call to action statements everywhere – on landing pages, in emails, on blog posts, social media, etc.
Use a split testing approach until you know exactly what your audience is craving. This may not be the same everywhere. Your YouTube audience may have very different needs from your blog readers.
Content marketing is a long-haul process that has to be continually nurtured to grow into something formidable. You’re not usually going to see amazing results on day 1, but as you get to know the needs of your list and test strategies, you’ll be able to get to a point where every piece you publish is in high demand.
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