Tips to Converting Your Content Audience

There are many different ways to encourage and incentivize your target audience to convert. Below are some of the most common ones that you should be considering:

Grab Your Audience's Attention with Engaging Headlines and Images

We live in an information age and are bombarded with content every day. As a result, we have become adept at quickly assessing — often just in the blink of an eye — which pieces of content we are going to consume and which pieces we will ignore.

Your job as a content marketer is to give your target audience plenty of reasons to consume your content, starting with two of the things they use most often to make these rapid decisions: headlines and images. Pay close attention to both and you will dramatically increase the chances of people clicking on your links, opening your e-mails, and downloading your eBooks and reports. Let’s start by taking a look at headlines and their e-mail equivalents, subject lines.

To be effective, always make sure that they are:

• Concise: Get to the point…fast. Lengthy headlines and subject lines cannot be processed quickly and, as a result,often get overlooked. Many e-mail marketers suggest limiting subject lines to less than 50 characters. Headlines, while a bit more forgiving, should also be kept as short as possible.
• Timely: Headlines and subject lines can be particularly effective when they are tied back to news or current events. Be cautious when using this tactic, however, and only select news that cannot in any way be construed as offensive.
• Informative: With just a few words you have to convey to your audience what your content is all about. Vague headlines are easy to ignore and, even if they do convert someone, can frustrate audiences who expected to find something different than what your content actually delivers.
• Compelling: You have to make your audience want to read your content. Mechanical or uninspired headlines just won’t do. Use active verbs, humor, and wit to engage your audience and get their attention.

Many of the same rules apply to the images you use with your content. You want an image that’s visually engaging and that directly ties back to your content, thus further reinforcing what the audience can expect after clicking through. Stock photos tend to feel like stock photos, so take care to pick images that are unique, stand out, and that you would respond to if you were the target audience.

Most important, make sure that you are using images wherever you can to help capture people’s attention. Include them in your blog posts and on your landing pages, and incorporate them in your reports, case studies, and white papers. Create attractive covers for your eBooks and use thumbnails of the covers to help advertise them. A great image can go a long way toward piquing your target audience’s interest and getting them to take the time to consume your content.

Incentivize Your Audience

Never underestimate the power of incentivizing your target audience. Small rewards, such as a free trial of your service or a free sample of your product, can go a long way toward motivating people to convert. You can even take things a step further by offering gifts such as a free T-shirt (which can be incredibly effective, particularly if you are targeting a tech community) or a gift card. While there is an expense associated with this approach, smart campaigns can be created that drive conversions and make the investment well worth it. Also consider running contests or raffles, both of which can be extremely effective.

Create Landing Pages that Promote Specific Conversions

Another important tactic that will help you maximize conversions is developing targeted landing pages that draw people in and get them to convert. The advantage of driving traffic to specific landing pages, rather than just your homepage, is that it allows you to focus visitors’ attention on one specific piece of content and corresponding conversion goal, rather than the many that may live on your homepage.

To make your landing pages effective, always make sure that they:

• Have clear and concise headlines
• Align with the messaging you used elsewhere to drive people to the page
• Incorporate testimonials or other validation from third parties
• Have a single call to action that stands out prominently above the fold so people don’t have to scroll to find it
• Aren’t cluttered with other links or with too much text
• Contain relevant images
• Are highly focused so that the sole objective is to get one conversion
• Ask for the data you are most interested in collecting in exchange for a piece of content

Develop Compelling Calls to Action that Guide Buyers to a Next Step

Once someone opens your e-mail or clicks on a page of your website, you need to make it clear to them what they are supposed to do next with a compelling, well-placed call to action (CTA). CTAs are the mechanisms that drive conversions, and they will vary depending on the piece of content associated with them and their intended purpose in the buying process.

Top of the funnel content, such as blog posts and videos, for example, might contain simple CTAs directing the audience to additional related content where they can learn more. Content that is intended for a later stage in the buying process, such as a case study, might have a CTA encouraging the user to download a free trial. It’s important to make sure that your CTAs (and conversion goals) are appropriate for the piece of content and the stage of the buying process they are intended to serve.

When adding CTAs to your content, keep in mind that they need to:

• Clearly and concisely articulate the value the user will get from taking the action
• Be prominently placed within the content and visually compelling so that they stand out and catch people’s eye
• Accurately portray what the user will get
• Offer something of value

In addition, avoid crowding pages with multiple CTAs. Have one primary CTA per page and, if needed, a secondary one. 

Conversions should be your content marketing team's ultimate output, and you should be doing everything you can to make sure that your content is optimized for and aligned with campaigns to drive the conversions you need to get a sale.