Obviously the fundamental objective of your overarching content marketing strategy is to boost your conversion rate. But what do you do for that? How do you make sure that you take the right steps that help you create and market content that help you improve your conversion rate?

This Tech Cocktail blog post rightly says that the old Indian saying that “focus on your work and don’t worry about the results” cannot be applied to content marketing because every strategy needs to give you some results, but uses it in the wrong context. You can stop worrying about the results if you’re doing the right thing, that is, if you are following the Dharma – the righteous path. If you are not following the right path then this can be a cause for worry. To elucidate this further I’m going to use another Indian saying – boya ped babool kaa to aam kahaan se hoi? – if you sow a prickly acacia tree how can you get mangoes from it?

Most content marketing strategies have got nothing to do with conversion

Surprisingly, conversion is a word very few businesses are aware of, consciously. Yes, they know what the word means, but how it is applied to their own business, they don’t spend much time on the thought. This is why their content marketing mostly involves achieving better search engine rankings and getting more exposure – these days – on social media and social networking websites. When most clients approach me, their primary concern is improving their search engine rankings. It’s rarely that they talk about conversion.

Okay, what does conversion mean?

Conversion means, you want people to carry out a particular activity on your website and after being exposed to your content, they actually carry out that activity. A few days ago I wrote about the KPIs of content marketing – the key performance indicators that tell you that your content marketing effort is yielding results. There can be multiple KPIs of your content marketing, and the sum total of all the KPIs is your conversion rate – among all your visitors, how many actually do business with you?

Anyway, the above-linked blog post lists 10 content marketing strategies that can help you boost your conversion rate. Some of them are

1. Plan your content marketing strategy with the desired end in your mind.
2. Clearly define your call-to-action expressions and then use them strategically.
3. Use simple, jargon-free language when creating content for publishing and marketing purposes.
4. Follow a consistent path and don’t dilute your content unless it is absolutely necessary.
5. Be your natural self – don’t try to be something or someone you are not.
6. Make an attractive and compelling case for yourself – remember that if you are not excited about your product or service, you cannot get others excited.
7. Sometimes it’s all right to use unrelated content as long as you can maintain the context.
8. Don’t ignore social media and social networking websites because most of your prospective customers and clients are there.
9. Don’t get impatient – content marketing is a prolonged activity. It is not a “campaign”. It has to be a sustained effort over a long period of time in order to yield results.
10. You don’t need to generate all your content by yourself. You can ask the others to create content for your website or blog, provided you can give something in return.