10 ways to improve your website conversion rate with content marketing

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10 ways to improve website conversion rate with content marketing

Although you may have different content marketing KPIs, eventually everything leads to your website conversion rate – how well your visitors convert into paying customers and clients. A big deception orchestrated by content marketing is that sometimes it generates lots of traffic and people are quite pleased with it. Of course every website or blog needs traffic but you are not actually looking for traffic when you’re running a business website or a business blog, you’re looking for customers and clients. The ultimate aim of your content marketing is to improve and maximize your website conversion rate.

How can you achieve a higher conversion rate? By first getting the right people to your website and then delivering them the right message. There are two sides to your content marketing:

  1. Bringing people to your website
  2. Convincing them into doing business with you

If you can achieve parity in both these sides of your content marketing, you can maximise your conversion rate. Here is what you need to do:

10 ways to use content marketing to improve your website conversion rate

  1. Totally understand your product or service: What are you trying to promote? A lifestyle? A way of doing business? A service that enables people to manage their business accounting from any device that can be connected to the Internet? Unless you totally understand why people would use your product or service, you cannot create and market content to have a big impact on your conversion rate.
  2. Totally understand your target audience: What moves your target audience? What are your prospective customers and clients looking for? What are the problems and what sort of solutions they want and exactly why they want those solutions rather than some other solutions? What sort of platforms they prefer while interacting with each other and while interacting with the brands that provide products and services they use or plan to use? For consuming content what format do they prefer? What sort of language do they use? What sort of thing puts them off and what sort of thing excites them?
  3. Answer as many questions as possible on your website: When it comes to improving your conversion rate there is no scope for confusion. As soon as people come to your website they should immediately know what problem you’re going to solve for them. Even if it is not a particular problem you’re trying to solve, they should be able to know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to shock them? Are you trying to make them laugh? Are you trying to educate them? Do you want them to become politically aware? Carefully go through every page you have on your website and make sure that it communicates the central message of your website because you never know through which page people are going to enter your website.
  4. Sound professional through your content: Convey to your visitors that you mean business. Being professional doesn’t mean using a particular language or sounding like a snob. It means that you are trustworthy, that they are not going to regret after giving you their hard earned money and you are going to be around when they face some problem regarding your product or service.
  5. Create your content from the prospective of your customers and clients: Whom are you creating your content for? You are constantly creating content for your prospective customers and clients. If you want to create content for yourself then you can have a personal blog or a website but if you are creating content for your business, you are always creating content your prospective customers and clients can relate to. Your first priority is solving their problems and addressing their concerns. Your content should be their advocate, not yours. Instead of trying to convince them, inform them as much as possible and then let them decide. This is the best way of increasing your website conversion rate with content marketing.
  6. Use web analytics tools to streamline your content: Always creating and marketing content in isolation doesn’t help you much. You need to know what sort of audience your content is attracting and the best way to achieve this is by using some sort of web analytics tools like Google Analytics. A careful observation of Google Analytics will tell you what sort of keywords people are using when they come to your website or blog. If they are using certain keywords this means your content is ranking well for those keywords. How is the impact on your conversion rate? If the traffic is increasing for those particular keywords but your sales are not increasing, there is some disparity going on somewhere and you need to take care of it. Similarly, a social networking tool like Hootsuite can tell you which of your updates get maximum reactions from your friends and followers. Keeping track of your audience behaviour is very important for the success of your content marketing effort.
  7. Build your mailing list: 1000 subscribers of your newsletter can often outperform your 20,000 Twitter followers. No matter how mainstream social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook become and no matter how many million views your YouTube video generates, nothing can compete with a well-managed email marketing campaign. The content that you broadcast through email fares far better than the content that you broadcast through Twitter and Facebook. I’m not talking about retweets and likes, I’m talking about the actual conversion – people buying from you.
  8. Be persistent with content marketing: Your conversion rate won’t experience much improvement if you are not regular with your content marketing efforts. This means you need to generate high-quality content on an ongoing basis without getting impatient. You may have to continuously publish and broadcast content for four-five months before you experience any improvement in your conversion rate.
  9. Don’t spread out your effort unnecessarily: More isn’t always better. Better conversion rate manifests when your approach is focused. Whether you are producing content or distributing it, focus on a particular audience and use particular channels. For example, if you are targeting B2B businesses then it is better to put your energies into creating lots of informative and educational content and then creating a strong, vibrant presence on LinkedIn where most of the professionals look for business opportunities and business partners. It doesn’t make sense to target every social media and social networking channel.
  10. Quality should always triumph over quantity: Having lots of content is always advantageous but it can affect your conversion rate adversely if you just focus on quantity while paying scant regard to quality. People don’t do business with you because there is lots of content on your website and because they were easily able to find you on Google, on LinkedIn or on Twitter, they do business with you when the quality of your content is able to convince them.

Many content writers and content marketers get too bogged down by the production and marketing part, totally bypassing the need of the business to convert well. This is why when I’m offering my content writing and content marketing services I’m not offering them as standalone services, I’m offering better conversion rate, better engagement and possibly, improved search engine rankings.

5 ways to make your content social media friendly

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5 ways to make your content social media friendly

5 ways to make your content social media friendly

Do you often worry that your content is not being shared on social media and social networking websites?

Aren’t people paying attention to your content or they are not motivated to share it on their social media timelines?

If this is the problem, are you publishing social media friendly content?

What exactly do we mean by “social media friendly” content?

Although it is very important that people abundant share your content on social media, before going ahead with sharing my other thoughts with you, I would like to stress that don’t overtly worry about the social media. Write and publish useful content and make it easy for people to share it and the rest automatically.

There was a time when people knew of Internet by email.

Many people thought that if you were checking email, you were “Interneting”.

Yes, they were familiar with the concept of websites, but it was mostly email.

The same happens with social media these days.

It is so prevalent that many people, people who haven’t used the Internet much before, think that it’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that are Internet rather than millions of websites.

In rural India, shopkeepers selling Mobile Sim cards or people running mobile repair shops are charging Rs. 50 to install Facebook on mobile phones and many think that Facebook itself is the Internet. They access the web for the first time through Facebook.

This means that social media and social networking websites have grown into a totally separate entity and for the purpose of content marketing ignoring these websites is like ignoring the telephone or the email while trying to do business in the contemporary world.

Just as you need good search engine rankings to promote your content, you also need to optimize your content for social media and this is what you mean by making your content “social media friendly”.

Your content is social media friendly when

  • People feel like sharing it on their timelines (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn)
  • They don’t need to modify your headlines and descriptions in order to share your links
  • Sharing your content is just a matter of a couple of clicks

Why do these traits matter? Why do they make a big difference in the way people share your content on social media and social networking websites?

Most of the sharing on social media is instinctive. Sure, professionals like me take extra pains to share stuff even when it is unfriendly and difficult to share, but a normal user doesn’t take extra pains.

Hence, your content should be very easily shareable, preferably, just through a single or a couple of clicks or taps.

Previously I used to think that why bother with people who don’t want to make much effort to share your content, but then I realized that it is not about these individuals.

Even if they themselves are not interested enough to go to extra lengths, your content gets visibility and it may reach people who are more serious about what you have to say.

Why it is important for your content to get social media visibility?

Take for example Facebook. There are more than 2.45 billion monthly active users over there. On daily basis, 1.62 million people use Facebook actively. 7 in 10 US adults use Facebook (source). 89% marketers use Facebook for brand marketing (source).

LinkedIn has more than 575 million users and 260 million monthly active users (source).

On an average, people spend 3 hours on social media and social networking websites. 54% consumers use social media to research products before buying (source).

Many social networking companies, including Facebook, are taking measures that when people switch on their phones, they log into Facebook in the beginning itself so that whatever activities they carry out, they do them within the Facebook ecosystem.

I’m not saying I endorse such developments, but it shows that an increasing number of people might be doing most of their activities, including communication, newsgathering, product evaluation and buying and selling, within social networking ecosystems.

Advertising and PPC campaigns are always an option, but you can increase your reach by writing and publishing social media friendly content on a regular basis. Interactive posting of content, especially created by brands and businesses themselves, get more attention from social media users compared to advertisements.

For a very long time I have been thinking of dabbling with infographics.

I recently tried to work with a neighborhood graphic designer but although she is good at using image manipulation tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, she was terribly lacking on the creative side.

We were working on a project and I had to tell her practically everything.

The only blessing was that whatever I told her she was able to accomplish it.

Anyway, this is the infographic that I have created titled 5 ways to make your content social media friendly. It isn’t much but it’s definitely a beginning.

5 ways to make your content social media friendly

The five ways are:

  1. Create compelling headlines: Your headlines are, as far as optimizing your content for social media goes, the most important aspects of your content.Compelling in this context means they should invoke strong feelings, so strong that people should be driven to share your content on their timelines.
  2. Publish irresistible content: In my daughter’s social sciences book there is a headline that goes something like this, “one man’s garbage is another’s treasure”.It is about the garbage collectors who make money off the garbage we throw away so thoughtlessly.

    So what is irresistible and what is not, depends on individual need, but catering to your niche, create content that is highly useful and valuable.

    It should solve some purpose and this is why people will share your content.

    When sharing your content people must feel that they are doing a service to their friends and followers.

    Always think: why would people share what you’re writing?

  3. Use social buttons: It’s easier to share content when you just have to click a button.I like the way you can share certain portions of blog posts and articles published on Medium.

    The relevant, share-worthy portions have a Twitter icon nearby. You just need to click the icon to broadcast that particular sentence.

  4. Use social optimization tags: These tags normally reside in the header area of your web page.In a typical web page there are already title, description and keywords tags.

    You can also have dedicated tags for Facebook and Twitter to instruct various social media and social networking channels to automatically pick up customized headings and descriptions rather than using the default ones.

    If you are using WordPress to manage your website or blog, you can easily get plug-ins to achieve this.

  5. Choose publishing time carefully: You will need some time to figure out during what time of the day your target audience is most active on social media and social networking websites.Publish your content when there is greatest chance of it being noticed and shared.
  6. Publish different content for different social media platforms: Content consumption on different platforms have different patterns.Content that is suitable for LinkedIn may not be suitable for Facebook and content that is suitable for Facebook may not be suitable for Twitter. Repeated testing will tell you which type of content in your industry performs better on which social media platform.

 

5 reasons writing or creating content is far better than making a business phone call

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What happens when you make a business call? You have to choose the right time. There is a great possibility that the person on the other side isn’t eager to receive your call or doesn’t have time. Maybe there is lots of action going on on your side or on the other side? You have to make sure that you don’t forget the important facts. The information that is sought by the other person should be immediately at hand. If there is additional information required you have to verbally communicate it. If there is some diagram or an image you have to explain it to the person on the other side.

Image with text 5 reasons writing content is better than making a business phone call

This Marketing Think blog post has an interesting take on why publishing content on your website or blog is far better than making business phone calls. These are the 5 reasons the author has cited:

  1. The content that you have written is available 24 x 7. The time constraint is not there and your content can be accessed from any time zone from anywhere.
  2. You can decide how much you want to say. You can decide whether you want to be brief or you want to expand your point of view.
  3. In case you need to share an infographic or a Slideshare or a video it is not possible to do it over telephone.
  4. In case extra research is needed it cannot be done over the phone.
  5. Your written content connects to your customers and clients on their own terms rather than you deciding when they should have the conversation with you and what sort of conversation they should have.

My personal take is, there is a positive and a negative side to every communication channel. The telephonic conversation is instant and the emotion that you can convey through a telephone call is difficult to convey through text that is mostly one-sided. But then, being a content writer, I have more faith in written word than spoken word.

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10 ways to make your content marketing super effective

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Super effective content marketing strategy

According to the latest Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2015 survey (US-centric) just 38% people think that their content marketing is effective. What about the remaining 62%? The rate of dissatisfaction is so high simply because most of the people don’t understand what exactly content marketing is but they want to use it anyway because other businesses are using it. They have a basic idea. They know that compared to conventional marketing content marketing is multiple times more effective and multiple times less costly but somehow they are unable to crack it.

Content marketing, as I have multiple times mentioned on my blog, isn’t just about publishing content, although content publishing is one of the most important aspects of it. No matter how great your content is, unless people know about it, it is of no use. It is like the gold in a mine that has not been discovered. As the name suggests, a big part of content marketing is, marketing. You produce something, and then you market it. The difference in this case is, you are not marketing content to sell it, you are marketing content to develop your own platform, to develop your own broadcasting channel so that you become familiar to your prospective customers and clients and they develop a habit of consuming your content on an ongoing basis.

According to the link mentioned above, these are the 10 ways you can make your content marketing super effective.

  1. Promote your content:
    Millions of pieces of content is being produced on the Internet every day. This content doesn’t just exist in the form of blog posts and articles. It can be videos, slideshows, animations, infographics, PDFs, social media and social networking updates, online forum threads and comments left by people on various websites and blogs. Any piece of information, any piece of thought, any piece of idea, is content. When so much content is being published how can your content be noticed by people? How do they find your content? Each time you publish something new it is not going to be ranked well by the search engines and it is not going to be promoted by your fans and followers on social media. You will have to do it on your own. You will need to develop a mechanism to constantly promote your new as well as existing content.
  2. Clearly define your content marketing mission statement: What exactly do you want to achieve when you publish and market content? Obviously you want to target an audience, a particular audience. For example, if you are marketing some gadget you will be targeting an audience that is interested in the benefits of that particular gadget if not that particular gadget itself. You also need to know what sort of content your audience prefers and what channels it uses to access its favorite content.
  3. Create valuable content: Your content is of no use if people don’t find it valuable. They are not going to access and appreciate your content simply because you are creating it and publishing it. Only your mom is going to do that. Make your content irresistible. Make it worth-reading.
  4. Repurpose your existing content for many formats: It is not easy to create unique content for all the formats you are trying to achieve. For example, if you have just created a blog post, you can also create a podcast out of it. Pick up the main points of the blog post and create a slideshow. You can also create a small video that goes through all the main points.
  5. Document your content marketing strategy: How are you implementing it? What steps are you taking to streamline your content according to the needs of your audience? What are the stories that you intend to tell? Are you sticking to your targets? If you are not, what corrective measures are you taking?
  6. Don’t go full-throttle at the beginning of your content marketing campaign: In order to make your content marketing super effective, testing is extremely crucial. Publish some content, distribute it and observe people’s reaction. Study the sort of traffic your content attracts. If it is attracting the right kind of traffic then you’re moving in the right direction but if the sort of traffic that your content is generating isn’t going to turn into business, then it’s time to rethink. This is why, if you have a lean approach in the beginning it’s easier to change.
  7. Keep measuring: Evaluate your content marketing constantly. As mentioned above, study what sort of traffic and engagement your content encourages. Use Google analytics to study the traffic pattern.
  8. Have a clear idea of what sort of buyer you’re targeting: The better you know about your buyer, the more effective is going to be your content marketing strategy. Don’t try to target everybody under the sun.
  9. Automate some of the content marketing tasks: Promoting and broadcasting your content can turn out to be a litany of repetitive tasks. There is nothing wrong in automating some of those tasks. There are many services available on the Internet that can help you automate some of these tasks.
  10. Develop a sense of discipline: Accept that content marketing is hard work. Very effective, but hard work. It requires discipline, perseverance, resolve and lots of confidence. At many stages you will feel nothing is happening but still you will need to stick to your ground. You will need to constantly come up with new content writing, content publishing and content marketing ideas to beat your competition.

As mentioned above, in order to make your content marketing super effective you constantly need to be one step ahead of your competition because just like you even your competitors recognise the importance of content marketing. Your competitors are constantly publishing and distributing new content to remain visible so accordingly you have to strategize each and every step. Besides, on the Internet, it isn’t just your competition that constantly challenges you, there is also lots of noise on the Internet that is constantly competing with your content.