High-quality content is essential if you want to attract visitors to your website, but just drawing people in isn’t enough.
One of the fundamental goals of content marketing is to convert web visitors into customers, so you should be doing everything you can to encourage people to take further action after viewing a piece of content.
Here are five things you should be doing to boost your conversion rate:
Most customers today – especially in the B2C environment – have limited attention spans and little patience for content that doesn’t instantly grab their attention and offer something worthy of their time.
It’s vital, therefore, that every piece of content you create gets straight to the point. Blog posts, for example, should have a concise introduction that tells readers what they can expect to learn from the content.
This encourages them to continue reading, paving the way for further interaction and, ultimately, conversion.
Relevance is an extremely important part of content marketing, especially for SEO purposes. Google uses more than 200 ranking factors in its search algorithm to deliver the most relevant results to users, so you need to be sure that your content offering is on point and pertinent to your customers’ search queries.
Irrelevant content is much less likely to be found in search and, even if people do happen to stumble across it, they’ll soon lose interest once they realise it carries no value for them.
To make your content relevant, you need to have a close understanding of your target audience’s interests, needs, pain points and motivations. There are many ways to get to know your customers better, such as engaging them in conversation (on social media, for example) and analysing past buyer behaviour.
Adding a strong visual element to every piece of content you produce will make your marketing much more engaging and more likely to generate conversions.
It can prove particularly beneficial to incorporate compelling visuals into long-form written pieces – such as eBooks and whitepapers – to break up the text and make the content more accessible and appealing.
Your content mix should also include some assets that are entirely visual, like videos and infographics, which have huge potential to grab people’s attention and boost awareness of your brand.
A piece of content without an effective call to action (CTA) is essentially a dead end. A website visitor who has taken the time to read a blog, for example, should be given the opportunity to take the next step in their journey, which might be signing up to your newsletter or downloading an in-depth guide.
There are all sorts of CTAs and various things you can do to make yours better, such as:
According to the LIFT model – a framework for conversion optimisation – one of the two biggest conversion inhibitors is distraction, the other being anxiety about committing to the decision.
Before you put a piece of content live, ask yourself if there are other features or elements on the page that are likely to distract viewers and send them off in a different direction, scuppering the conversion.
A good way to minimise distraction is to keep your content clean, clear and to the point, with a well-defined path visitors can follow towards conversion.
Need some more information on content marketing? Check out our content marketing page here for everything you need to know.
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