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.