Tag Archives: Conversion Rate

10 ways to improve your website conversion rate with content marketing

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:

Bringing people to your website
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

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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Content marketing strategies to boost your conversion rate

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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

Plan your content marketing strategy with the desired end in your mind.
Clearly define your call-to-action expressions and then use them strategically.
Use simple, jargon-free language when creating content for publishing and marketing purposes.
Follow a consistent path and don’t dilute your content unless it is absolutely necessary.
Be your natural self – don’t try to be something or someone you are not.
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.
Sometimes it’s all right to use unrelated content as long as you can maintain the context.
Don’t ignore social media and social networking websites because most of your prospective customers and clients are there.
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.
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.

Can a web content writer help you improve your conversion rate?

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A web content writer isn’t simply someone who helps you fill up your website or blog with lots of text – the text must also improve your conversion rate. I know it is not possible with every web content writer you hire because just as everybody can write but very few become novelists and journalists, almost everybody can write content but there are very few who can actually help you improve your conversion rate.

Actually, even with a content writer who has no grasp over the concepts of engagement and conversion you can experience a marked improvement in your business but then it is like throwing darts in the dark – one of them may hit the target but most won’t. It’s also like buying a lottery ticket – very few win, rarest of the rare. In the case of a web content writer who doesn’t know the C of conversion, he or she may give you good results by creating lots of content.

Most of the businesses who hire the services of a web content writer do so to improve their search engine rankings and this is something that can actually be achieved by hiring any sort of web content writer. Here is an example.

These days I am trying to improve my search engine rankings after many years. So I was doing some research and checked out the websites that ranks quite well for the term “content writing services”. Some of the websites ranking quite well for this phrase have lots of junk content – not all, but some who shouldn’t be on page 1, but they are due to whatever aberration. They have lots of content centred around the phrase “content writing services” even bordering on keyword spamming but still they are performing good as far as their rankings go. What I’m trying to say is, despite having a web content writer who knows zilch about your conversion rate and who can get you on Google’s first page, there isn’t a guarantee that people will do business with you. In order to do business, you need to convert. For that, your web content writer has to rise above his occupation, properly study your business and the people it serves and then create convincing content.

There are 2 ways your web content writer can help you improve your conversion rate

One sort of method I have already explained via the Google search engine rankings example. Your web content writer creates lots of content around your keywords. So much content that your website, by some fluke, ends upon the first page of the search results, and then you get so much traffic that even if a fraction of that traffic converts, you do pretty well. This is how email spam sustains itself. The numbers are so high that even 0.001% results can be massive.

The other method is that you hire a web content writer who is actually a writer. What do I mean by that? A writer who understands your audience – their pain points, their concerns, their desires, their problems, their expectations – and then prepare content accordingly, in a compelling, convincing manner. Your web content writer should be able to write as if you are directly talking to your customers and clients in the best possible way. Your language should be fluent and it should inspire trust and confidence. It shouldn’t be replete with unnecessary jargon and superfluous sentences.

Once your web content writer has prepared text that can convincingly talk to your customers and clients, he or she will be able to make a big impact on your conversion rate. Otherwise, your web content writer will be simply generating traffic with lots of noise and nothing more.

How do you define “Effective Content” for your business?

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It is all well and good to repeatedly say that you should publish content on your website and you should take content marketing really seriously. I even wrote a lengthy blog post on “20 Reasons Why Your Business Website Needs Fresh Content“. But how do you decide what sort of content you should publish? After all, it’s not merely the targeted traffic that you seek, you seek targeted traffic that converts, that changes your visitors into your paying customers and clients.

The high-quality content that converts is “effective content” for your business and every business has its own definition of effective content.

Although every business may have its own unique definition of what sort of content works for it, there are some universal traits. Effective content has universal definitions that can be applied to any business. Listed below are the most important traits that can accurately help you define what’s “effective content” for your business.

It fills a need or solves a purpose

Why does your content exist? This existential question not just applies to our spiritual lives, it also applies to the content that we publish on our websites (and blogs). Why do you publish content? What is your ultimate motive? The above-linked blog post that gives you 20 reasons why you should publish content on your business website may help you to a great extent, but eventually you have to define the purpose. What purpose does your content solve? Do you simply want to help people who come to your website looking for some advice? Would you like them to buy your product or service someday or immediately? Do you want to establish a rapport with them? Is there a great need for the content that you are publishing?

It communicates on an ongoing basis

Effective content establishes a communication channel. You are communicating your messages, your ideas, your experiences to people who visit your website, and the people who visit your website, your readers, communicate their feedback and there needs to you. They may also communicate to each other if you have established such a platform (such as a comments section in a blog).

Effective content makes you use your unique voice with a human touch

Businesses are normally faceless. Customers and clients don’t get to see the human side of people who provide them products and services. Even at slightest pretext, they give rise to doubts and suspicions. On the other hand your content allows you to give a human voice to your business and talk to your current and prospective customers and clients in a friendly, familiar manner. This is the reason when you’re trying to create effective content for your website or blog, use the language used by your customers. Avoid using jargon unless it is unavoidable. Talk in the first person as much as possible.

Here is what you should do in order to talk with an individual voice: imagine that you’re talking to a single person sitting across you. Don’t worry about your content being read by one person, by 10 people, or even by 10,000 people. Just focus on that one particular individual and write as if you’re talking to him or her. This will give you a conversational style and you will appear friendlier and more approachable.

Effective content expresses a clearly defined, focused view

There should be no ambiguity when you are publishing content on your website. Don’t beat around the bush. Be clear about what you intend to say. Take for instance this blog post – you may think that I’m writing something about content writing, but I’m precisely talking about creating effective content particularly for your website. I have a clear idea of what I’m writing, and I have a clear idea of what you should get after reading this blog post. This sort of clarity must be there in every webpage and every blog post you publish.

Your effective content should be devoid of “sales speak”

When you try to sell, you impose your views on people, and nobody likes that. For instance, if you want to hire me as your content writer, it should be your decision. Although on my main pages you may find me trying to highlight my strengths and hence, trying to convince you into giving your content writing work to me, you will also find 100s of articles and blog posts that plainly talk about how to create direct content for your website. You can create a super effective content marketing strategy just by going through the articles and blog posts published on this website and you may never need to hire me for your business. I’m fine with that.

The quality of your content must be unmatched

This may not be always possible, but whenever you are publishing content on your website, give it your best shot. When I’m writing content for my own blog or website, I write it with same seriousness and dedication as I write for someone who pays me (after all sooner or later, the content that I publish helps me get more business, so in a sense, I’m being paid for this). So quantity is good, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of quality. Publish just one blog post every week, but it should be par excellence.

As a mentioned above, effective content may have different meanings for different businesses, it has a universal characteristic and the points contained within that characteristic are the ones I have listed above. What do you think about the best content for your business? Have some interesting points that you would like me to cover? Do let me know in the comments section.