Six Tactical Tips For Creating Content That Converts

Is your content garnering significant engagement but failing to convert?

You stumbled upon this post in the hopes that it has the magic solution to your content problem. I’m confident that it does. See, I’m willing to bet that you’re either just getting your feet wet with content marketing or you’ve put together a rather impressive strategy but aren’t seeing the gains that you sought to achieve.

Am I right? Good, because I created this post with your needs in mind.

The thing is, content marketing is praised for it’s ability to help brands connect with their customers in ways that drive sales and improve customer acquisition and retention all while building brand awareness and authority.

This is likely the packaged deal you thought you were working with.

By now you realize that, unfortunately, not all content is equal. Content doesn’t always achieve the results you want just because it exists. Each piece must be created with it’s own purpose.

The opportunities you’re chasing are very real. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads [Demand Metric]. However, when it comes to generating content to fulfill your strategy, you can’t lose sight of your main objective – to sell.

We know that 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it [Demand Metric]. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re leveraging this opportunity with the content you create.

To help you do this, I’ve compiled six tactical tips for creating content that converts.

1. Know your audience

Create buyer personas to help identify the people you are targeting with your content. Create content that appeals to the needs, desires, and concerns of your audience in order to achieve the conversions you crave.

Once you have a solid understanding of whom your audience is and what their unique needs are, write relevant content that adds value. Writing for your reader is one of the most important lessons in content marketing and the most valuable tactic for creating content that converts.

2. Write great headlines

The headline is the most important part of your content. Great headlines attract more readers, which lead to more sales.

There is a bit of science behind developing effective headlines. When creating headlines for your content, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it create urgency?
• Does it create intrigue?
• Does it demand attention?
• Does it offer a solution or address a pain point?

Ideally, your answer should be yes to at least one of the questions above.

Easy tips for creating great headlines include, incorporating simple direct language, numbers and lists, keywords that reflect the content and resonate with the reader, and powerful language. Here is a great guide for creating captivating headlines for more information.

3. Use emotion to drive action

Once you get readers’ eyes on the page, you need to make your readers feel something. Not just any emotion, but emotion that drives action.

When using emotion in your content, focus on eliciting happiness and desire in your audience.

Sales professionals have been tapping into techniques that evoke emotional responses for years in effort to build stronger relationships with clients and ultimately improve their sales.

How do they do it? They leverage specific emotions that drive behaviors.

Similar to the research that suggests happiness as an effective driver for social media sharing, joy can also be a driver of sales. Simply put, happiness is a driver of action. What that action is depends on the situation in which the emotion is felt.

Here are three approaches to eliciting happiness and desire in your audience:

• Use storytelling – Tell a story your audience can relate to. People like to feel connected to something and someone else. People like to know that others share their experiences, and that they are a part of something larger.
• Create content that helps others self-improve – People want to be the best they can be. They want to succeed. Create content that gives them the tools and information they need to improve their own lives.
• Create FOMO – People don’t like missing out on something awesome. A great way to get people to act is to create content that people won’t want to miss out on. Share secrets, loopholes, tactics for success, or hacks for winners. Use this approach to create desire in your audience to read on and take action.

4. Share the voice

It’s not uncommon for content marketers to collaborate with influencers in order to achieve better results. In fact, I’m a huge fan of it.

Influencer outreach is an important tool in content marketing, whether collaborating on content, accepting guest posts to your channels or offering guest posts for others’, or co-authoring an e-book or manifesto. Adding a credible voice to your content is a great way to increase readership, build trust, generate new leads, and ultimately acquire new customers.

Furthermore, testimonials remain a powerful tool in driving sales. Identify a few key influencers to use your product/service and provide written testimonials that you can incorporate into your content marketing strategy. Another effective approach is to offer product discounts or free gifts in exchange for new customer testimonials.

Word of mouth marketing still exists and still works, so use it!

5. Advise; don’t pitch

No one likes to be the victim of an aggressive sales pitch. People buy from people they like and trust. Content marketing is all about nurturing relationships and satisfying consumer needs, not pitching or selling.

High converting content informs, advises, and offers solutions; it does not pitch products and services. In fact, in most cases a company and its products aren’t even mentioned in the content.

Some content marketers believe in a 90% rule, where 90% of your content is not promoting your own company, rather it focuses on the unique needs of your audience. While I’m not held to 90%, I do agree that a large majority of your content needs to reflect the interests and issues of your customers.

The more genuine your content is, the more respect you’ll earn from your audience and the more shares your content will receive.

6. Choose a strong CTA

Choosing the right call to action is critical to achieving conversion.

You successfully got your audience’s attention and they consumed your content and now they need direction on what to do next.

What do you want your audience to do? Is it to sign-up for your monthly newsletter, download your free e-book, request a product demo, or share your content on social media?

The key is to ensure that the CTA you choose effectively contributes to your sales goals. That is, your CTA should help you move leads further down the sales funnel but should not be “buy now”. Save the hard sell for landing pages and direct sales tactics.

Some effective CTAs include:

• For more information on [subject] download my free guide [title of guide and link]
• What are the top three issues your start up is currently facing? Hit me up to chat, I’d love to help you achieve [subject] success!
• If you liked this post, you should check out [another blog posts related to subject]
• The key to achieving the desired CTA is quid pro quo. You must first deliver something of value to achieve something in return.

Bonus Tip: Distribution

Don’t forget about distribution – it’s just as important as the content you create.

A lot of people believe that content is king but it isn’t. Distribution is king

Creating great conversion content is only beneficial if someone reads it. It's important to create content that is aligned with your target audience’s interests, but you must also strategically place it in front of them. While most things in life aren’t delivered on a silver platter, your content must be the exception.

For more on distributing content that converts, check out my latest ebook: Stand Out – The Ultimate Content Marketing Guide for Entrepreneurs. It’s filled with insights that will help you create a content marketing strategy that drives results along with examples of tactics that you can start implementing immediately.