How to Create Content that Converts

Marketers leverage content for a number of reasons, from increasing website traffic, to growing in brand awareness, and generating engagement. One of the main reasons is to get more of their audience to convert into customers. This is easier said than done, especially in a very crowded marketplace where it seems like there is a sea of content to compete with. Writing content, or creating content just for the sake of it, will not get you the results that you want and need. Instead, you need to create carefully crafted content that is highly targeted and offers a high value to the customer or potential customer. That is how you will grow your traffic, engagement, and most importantly, conversions.

Setting Content Marketing Goals

Before we talk about how to create content that converts, it’s important to know what goals you have as a content marketer to be able to create content that converts. 

Build Brand Awareness

Content can play a major role in helping you grow your brand awareness. Creating content like blog posts can help with your website’s SEO as well as improve your web traffic. Publishing high-quality guides that are meant to educate your readers and solve their problems can lead to customers and potential customers remembering your brand on a consistent basis.

Generate Leads

You can also use content marketing to generate leads for your business and even nurture them. A great day of going about this is by creating content that drives people to trust your brand further. Such content includes case studies, whitepapers, etc.

Drive Conversions

The third and arguably 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 content like product demos, customer stories, etc. 

Tips to Create Content that Converts

Now that you know what converting means when it comes to content and the goals that you can have while creating content that converts, here are the tips that you can utilize to reach your goals.

Know Your Audience

When you’re creating content, are you writing for your audience based on their needs and wants? Or, are you writing content based on what you think they need and want? There’s a big difference between the two and it’s easy to forgo this important step when you are creating content.

Content that converts needs to do the following:

• Target a very specific audience
• Solve a common problem or main point of your target audience
• Provide real value to your readers by giving them a solution to the problem

In order to know what your audience has problems, needs, and wants are, you first need to know this audience in greater detail. This can be done by answering certain questions about your audience. For example, what common problems do they encounter? What frustrates them? What gets them excited and happy? Once you get to know your audience and have a clear idea of what they want to know and learn, you can create content specifically targeted to them.

Your goal as a content marketer is to find out what issues and pain points your audience has and then use that to create powerful content that helps them achieve the results. Therefore, this will:

• Increase trust in your brand
• Give readers a reason to come back for more content
• Give them a reason to subscribe to your newsletter and engage with you on your other channels as well
• Give them a reason to convert

It’s All in the Headline

If your headline isn’t getting people’s attention and interest, then they will not read the content below. If they’re not going to read the content below, then you will not be able to increase your conversions. It’s important to not leave your headline as an afterthought. It has a massive impact on your click-through rate in traffic, as well as your conversion rate. 

These tips below can help you write more effective headlines that convert:

• Make sure it’s very clear what your content is about so that readers know exactly what they are getting out of reading it.
• Use numbers in your headlines.
• Use emotional headlines where it is relevant. This can drive a lot of traffic and engagement. For example, phrases like “tears of joy”, “make you cry”, and “shocked to see” tend to generate more interactions.
• Focus on one of your audiences’ problems. Just like your content should solve one of your audiences’ problems, your headlines should also make it clear what problem that specific piece of content will help with. 

Structure Your Content and Increase Readability

While online content has improved a lot over the last few years, there is a lot of content that is simply not readable enough, even if the information provided is good. Creating content is not just about providing value, it’s also about creating content that’s easy to read through and makes your reader want to keep reading. 

Considering that, here’s a checklist use every time you write content in order to increase its readability: 

• Use the introduction to relate to your reader’s problems and/or clearly explain what the content is about and what they’ll get out of it. 
• Use short sentences and paragraphs, as well as bullet points and lists.
• Break down if your content has subheadings, always use subheadings throughout your content. It makes it much easier for your reader to read and skim through.
• Use visuals throughout your content. Visual content, such as screenshots, photos, videos, GIFs, etc., makes your content easier to read and provides good “breaks” within your content.
• Always use language your audience will understand and avoid using jargon.

Write More Personalized Content

Another important step in increasing your conversions from your content is to write more personalized content for different members of your audience. It’s important to remember that, whatever your niche, your audience is not one unified group of people with the same questions, needs, and wants. If you want to increase conversions, then you need to write targeted content for each of these audience segments.

Include Interactive Elements in Your Content

When people actively engage with your content, it means that they are spending more time on your site, they are more likely to come back for more content, and last but not least it can increase your conversions from your content. There are numerous types of interactive content that can make your content more engaging like mini-games and quizzes.

Content Upgrades

A content upgrade is a lead magnet that is created specifically for a blog post or piece of content. This means that you’re essentially creating a highly targeted lead magnet. Because they are so well targeted, it means that readers are more likely to opt in. For example, if you were reading a guide on how to rank high in the first page in search results, then you’ll probably be very interested in getting a checklist with all the steps you need to take to optimize your content and achieve the top ranking. 

Here are some of the best performing types of upgrades that you can include in your content:

• PDF versions of your content, specifically for high-value, long pieces of content, such as how-to guides.
• Checklists 
• Templates 
• Cheat sheets
• Reports
• Worksheets
• Case studies
• Formulas
• Courses
• Infographics

Track and Measure Your Results

In order to increase your conversions from your content, you need to closely track your content marketing results so that you can understand the following:

• What generates the most conversions
• What types of content generate the most conversions
• What common traits are between your best-performing pieces of content
• Which headlines get the most clicks and traffic
• Which content doesn’t generate enough results

You can find all of this information out by using your web analytics, and in order to do this, you need to set up conversion goals in Google Analytics. This can be found in the admin section, under the view column. From there, simply follow the instructions provided to finish setting up your goals. You also need to consider what constitutes a conversion. These could be the obvious ones such as buying your product or making a reservation. Or, this could be more complex conversions, such as visiting your contact page, looking for one of your store locations, watching a video, visiting a landing page, etc. The conversion goals in Google Analytics are easily customizable so you’ll be able to track any conversions that matter to you. Once set up, you will be able to see which content generates conversions and which don’t.

Start Creating Content that Converts Today!

Content marketing forms an indispensable part of any marketing strategy. If you find yourself struggling to create content that converts, contact us today! Our team of content marketers is highly experienced in creating the type of content that converts visitors into customers. We can also teach you how to create great content for yourself.

FAQ:

• What is content that converts?
• What are conversions?
• How do I increase conversions?
• How do I track conversions?
• What does having more conversions mean?