How To Create Content That Converts?

Fantastic content, whether it is insightful, helpful, inspiring, or entertaining, is only worth so much to your brand if it isn’t converting.

Good content will almost always yield increasing website traffic and social media engagement. However, these metrics can be distracting. With content marketing, too often we lose track of the end game goals in favor of the more easy-to-acquire vanity metrics. The real revenue-driving, meaty goals of your marketing strategy are customer acquisition and retention, not your bounce rate and Facebook likes.

How can you frame your content so your leads are more likely to become customers? What is the secret to not just quality content but content that converts leads?

*The first step is Social Listening

Are you listening to your crowd? I mean really listening to what it is they’re struggling with right now?

It’s surprisingly easy to fall into the trap of creating marketing content around what you think your ideal clients want or need to hear. But often there’s a bit of a disconnect between what you believe they need to hear and what they actually need to hear.

It’s so important that you’re speaking the same language as your ideal clients and addressing the issues that really matter to them right now. Those issues might vary at different times so keep listening, adapt your messaging, and don’t keep plugging the same old same old if it's not resonating with your crowd.

So how do you find out what your ideal clients want to hear? Well, it’s not as difficult as you might think …

It’s so important that you’re speaking the same language as your ideal clients and addressing the issues that really matter to them right now. Those issues might vary at different times so keep listening, adapt your messaging, and don’t keep plugging the same old same old if it's not resonating with your crowd.

So how do you find out what your ideal clients want to hear? Well, it’s not as difficult as you might think and there’s no need to be a mind reader…

* Listen to what your existing clients are telling you - chances are you’re having daily conversations with them. Start making notes after those conversations; what questions are they asking? What are they telling you they’re struggling with? What do they say they what to change? What outcomes do they tell you they want?

* Re-read your testimonials - often when clients write testimonials for you, they will spell out where they started, what it was you helped them with, and how you helped. These are invaluable insights! Revisit those words and use them to inform the content you create.

*Listen to your social media followers - just as above, when your followers interact with your posts, they’re telling you what they want. Pay attention to what gets engagement, which posts do they shout hell yes in agreement with, what questions do they post in response to your posts?

?If you need to know more then ask - try to avoid going straight in with really heavy social media posts that ask things like “what’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now?” Those kinds of questions are hard to answer at the best of times but especially on social media where people are mindful of others being able to see their response. Instead, you could use multiple-choice questions such as, which of these things would you like a little help with a, b, c or d? Or super simple either-or questions - for example, if I ask you which you prefer, Facebook or Instagram, and you say Facebook I might ask in reply what you prefer about Facebook over Instagram as this can help me understand your struggles around Instagram. It’s simply about starting a conversation and then really listening to what people tell you.

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Besides social listening here are some steps that you can apply to your content marketing right now to transform your content into a motivational force your target audience can’t resist.

1)??Hone In On Your Qualified Leads

The fact is, only a fraction of your leads is going to ever become your customers. When you look at the?statistics on lead conversion, it’s only reasonable to expect between 25 percent and 50 percent of your leads to ever convert – with some studies demonstrating only 1 in every 5 leads being qualified. The rest will need time and varying degrees of warming up in order to convert.

Knowing this, you know you have an important task if you want to create conversion-worthy content. You need to know the questions, interests, needs, and concerns of your qualified leads, focusing on solving their problems rather than catering to all your leads or your entire customer base.?

2)???Create – or Refine – Your Lead Scoring System

Lead scoring allows you to identify your best-qualified leads. When done well, it’s a never-ending process of scoring the best leads as they change over time. You want to know, not only whom your marketing qualified leads are, but when those engaged leads the transition to be marketing qualified and vice versa.

If you’re not getting adequate clarity from your lead scoring then consider giving your qualifiers a refresh. A lot of marketers set up a lead scoring system and then let it sit for years, even though their content marketing strategy has been continually evolving. For example, you may have a new eBook series that only highly motivated leads are downloading, that didn’t exist when you created the lead scoring system you are working with. So, you need to give more weight to your eBook downloads.

?3)Make Your Unique Value Proposition More Unique

????????One simple step that may help you convert more leads is to rewrite your ?????business’s UVP. The problem with a lot of value propositions is they are too generic. Your UVP should concisely explain how your brand solves your customers’ problems but it also needs to demonstrate why your business is different from every other provider out there.

To give your UVP a makeover, there are different approaches you can take, depending on the personality of your brand and of your target audience:

*Include statistics in your UVP

*Use more power words

*Pair it down to a simpler message

*Ask a question

*Use active verbs when mentioning your product or services

?4)Drive Conversions

Finally, the third and most important goal of content marketing is to get the nurtured leads to convert and buy from you. For this, you need to create bottom of the funnel (BoFu) content like product demos, customer stories, etc.

You can look into my recent article titled” Do you need 1000+ followers to make sales”, in it is the sales funnel and how to apply it to drive conversions.

5)Make Your Content More Visually Appealing

You may be using photos in your content, the occasional video or infographic, but if you aren’t being strategic with your visual content, you’re missing out on the power of high-quality, relevant visuals.

• Be consistent. Establish the color palette, image size, and design style that best express your brand.
• Use more visuals. You do not necessarily have to flood all your posts with visuals, but sometimes instead of using heavy text to explain something, rather use visuals to tell the story.
• Stick with high-quality images and videos. This can be a struggle for small business marketers who don’t have a huge budget to pay for in-house video production and graphic design team. However, the more you put into the quality of the visuals, the better you are presenting your brand on every landing page video, social post graphic, photograph, and infographic. You can use images from sites like Pexels and Unsplash, they are free to use and are of high quality.

?6) Track and analyze all your efforts

And, the final step to creating content that converts is to pay attention. What formats of the content (pictures or videos topics) are leading to more sales? How much of a difference does it make when you post a how-to video or how-to text-only carousel post? Or when you change the personality of your promotional video – for example from professional to casual? Pay attention to what motivates your leads the most and you’ll have a wealth of feedback to help you always publish fantastic conversion material.

Above all, it's not all about just pushing out content, its about putting out quality content that meets your business goals and suits your prospects' needs.