Producing Content That Converts
Chances are you produce a lot of content. That’s a good thing! But not all content is the same or has the same purpose, and that’s okay too. Some pieces, like infographics or long-form articles, are meant to inform your audience while content, such as quizzes or videos, tends to be more entertaining and engaging for those on your website. Ensuring that you have a variety of content types is critical to an effective and all-encompassing content strategy. However, it is one thing to produce this content, but it is crucial that you also make sure it is converting if you’re going to see tangible results.
How to Produce Content that Converts
What does it mean exactly to have content the converts? Well, simply put, conversion means that your audience or consumers are completing whatever goal you have set for a certain page on your site. For example, on a cart page, your conversion is to have customers checkout. But on a landing page about your upcoming webinar, the conversion might be to have people sign up to attend the webinar. The conversion, or the goal, of each page will vary but it is important to know if the page is successful in achieving the intended conversion and understand why it is, or is not, working.
At Power Digital Marketing, we create a lot of content and know how to get it to work for you. Below are some of our best tips for producing content that converts.
Speak to Your Personas
Before you can even begin to create your content, you must identify the audience you are trying to reach with each piece. This is known as persona marketing and will help you put out the best and most relevant content for your customers. Personas are a detailed depiction of who your customers are so you will want to define each one as best you can with a clear vision of their likes, dislikes, and wants. Developing personas allows you to tailor each piece of content you produce to a specific persona, you will probably have more than one, which drastically increases the likelihood of conversions as you focus on the different goals for each type of customer.
Choose Relevant Topics To Your Audience
Once you are aware of and know your personas, it is crucial to use them in order to create content that is both relevant and useful to your audience. When your content is relevant to your audience, or in the case of personas a specific segment of your audience, they will remain engaged and interested in what you are producing. When consumers begin to feel that they are wasting their time with or cannot relate to your content, they will start to look for other outlets. As you create content, it is important to consider which topics will fulfill your audience’s needs. Personas make this consideration much easier to figure out.
A/B Test Content
As you get started with persona and content marketing, you will have a lot to learn about the process and how your customers interact with content. Your first piece of content may not be the most effective, and that is okay, as long as you use it as a learning opportunity and deepen your understanding of your personas based on the results. A/B testing can be an effective way to speed up this learning process. In this practice, you will test different versions of your copy and monitor the results. Maybe your audience responds more positively to formal and professional prose instead of a casual style. Or maybe they engage more with a soft sales pitch as opposed to a hard ask. A/B testing allows you to put variations in a head to head competition so you can modify the final piece of content based on the results.
However, this is not a stagnant process, and you will always want to be monitoring results and adapting your content based on them. If a piece of content is not performing, you must readjust and go in a different direction to remain successful. Let the data guide you through these decisions, and you will be able to create content informed by your customer’s behavior.
Make It Easy to Read
If your content is hard to read, consumers will spend only a few seconds (yes, seconds) scanning it for relevant information before leaving your site in pursuit of a competitor who can better meet their needs. Luckily, only a few simple adjustments need to be made to make your content easily digestible for your audience. Start with an attention-grabbing title, or header, which is discussed in the text or a question that will be answered. This tells your audience exactly what they will be getting from the content. If the piece of content is an article be sure to include subtitles with short paragraphs, bullet point lists, and images to help break up the text. This is especially true for long-form articles which can appear dense and overwhelming if not formatted properly.
Provide a Solution
You want to take care to clearly explain to your audience why they need your product or service. Do not just pitch them on the numerous features and positive customer reviews. Instead, show them how the product will benefit them and solve a specific problem that they have. Focus on how your product or service will make their life easier and how it is different from what your competition offers but do so without explicitly calling it out. When creating content, you want your audience to view you as a credible source of information for your industry so be sure to provide them with valuable information on a specific subject with each piece you produce. If you do, you will give them answers instead of leaving them with more questions.
Close With an Appropriate CTA
Here is where you capitalize on all the hard work you just did, you have to make the ask when the time is right. This can be delicate as you do not want to destroy the rapport you just built with your content by suddenly coming in with a hard sales pitch. Instead, make sure the call to action (CTA) is relevant to the piece of content and is appropriately placed so that it follows the content naturally.
Whether the goal is to get your audience to subscribe to your email list or you are trying to make a sale, be clear and direct with your finishing CTA. You can use the CTA as your opportunity to tell your audience exactly what you want them to do or what the next step is. Craft the CTA with the same care and motivation you used while creating the rest of the content and your audience will be more willing to comply. If you have a successful CTA, you will end up with a conversion.
Producing content that converts is a complex process that, as with most things in marketing, is not quite finished. You will need to take care when creating your content to provide relevant information to the various personas of your customer base. In doing so, you can provide a solution that will make your audience’s life easier and build trust with them so that they will want to continue coming back for more. By continuously iterating on the results of your content pieces, you will stay ahead of the game and be able to see consistent conversions from the content your produce.
