Prime goal of content marketing is to increase company’s sales. Website traffic is used as one of the major indicators of content strategy’s success. Many marketers stop at this point and think they achieved their prime goal. Having a great content, which creates high number of leads is definitely a good thing, but if your sales funnel is to narrow, and only few prospects and customers come out at the end, you definitely need to improve your conversion. This can be done in three easy steps.
Step 1: Create Conversion-oriented Content
Conversion-oriented content creation is necessary, for acquiring more prospects and customers. This type of content entices your audience to take action. It shouldn’t be too commercial, but unlike regular informative content it should have a call-to-action subtext, which can be emphasized with some of these techniques:
- Use of action words in describing your products or services – Action words like: stunning, thrilling, free, exciting etc. paint a vivid picture of the product or service and influence visitors to buy them.
- Explain all newsworthy info in the first paragraph – Many visitors don’t have enough time for reading long articles. They want to pick up all the information in just a few seconds, and if they like the first article, they will definitely to continue reading.
- Use more visuals – Readers process visuals much faster than plain text, which is why you should replace words with photos and graphics whenever you have the chance.
- Make your articles more specific – Readers don’t like vague articles. They prefer exactness and high attention to detail.
- Use more videos – Advanced tech and fast internet enabled content creators to easily shoot and post HD videos. Use this opportunity and engage you audience with the most conversion-effective type of content.
Step 2: Improve your Website’s Design
Overall design of your website strongly influences its conversion rates. Different design features can attract more prospects and customers. These are some of the measures you can take:
- Introduce sharp-looking buttons – Simple hyperlink text looks boring and unnoticeable. Desired action shouldn’t be hidden behind hyperlinks and simple buttons, instead you should use ‘sing up’ and ‘purchase’ buttons that are begging to be clicked.
- Improve website loading – Slow loading drastically decreases website’s conversion rates. In order to improve your website’s loading times you should: compress images, delete or compress gifs and various types of flash animation and make its code simpler and more effective.
- Improve website navigation – Your website should be clean and easy to navigate.
- Improve your on- and offsite SEO – You can do it yourself, or you can outsource your website’s optimization tasks to reliable SEO consulting agency.
Step 3: Promote your Website
You should continue to increase your reach, with the help of social networks and link building. Contact other bloggers and webmasters and exchange content with inbound links. When it comes to social networks, you should use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other niche-specific networks and forums. Regularly post your content on these networks and indulge in conversation with your fans. Social networks can also be used for providing support to your buyers (Twitter especially) and for targeting your audience. These are some of the things you should take into consideration during your social media campaign development:
- Optimize your social media posts with keywords – When it comes to keywords, social media posts are not much different from regular articles. They should contain the most important keywords and some of them should be posted as hashtags.
- Improve your timing – Time when you post your content is very important for improving your posts’ reach.
- Use advanced insights – Customize your social media campaign by following your social media insights and analyzing campaign’s results.
Conversion improvement measures are not written in stone. Different changes might or might not work for your website, which is why you need to conduct frequent conversion rates’ analysis and A’B testing to determine, which one of these measures is the most effective.