You’re diligently launching new online campaigns, consistently writing engaging blog posts and sending out weekly newsletters. Yet, your sales figures remain stagnant.
Writing new content that aligns with your brand voice and strategically placing CTAs isn’t enough.
Here’s how to create content to help you turn prospects into customers.
Essential Principles to Great Content
Aside from adhering to SEO blog writing best practices, and implementing on-page SEO tactics, the most effective content is content that piques your reader’s interest and encourages them to take your desired action. Whether writing a blog post, or the content for one of the services pages on your website, follow these five principles for engaging content that converts.
Write content that is:
1. Thoughtful and Unique: Are you bringing a fresh angle to the topic?
2. Engaging and digestible: Are you keeping your’ readers attention?
3. Clear and concise: Are you communicating your idea simply?
4. Truly helpful: Does your piece serve your readers?
5. Applicable and actionable: Can your readers apply this to their work and lives?
Measuring Engagement for Meaningful Impact
There are a number of engagement metrics to measure to ensure that your content is doing its job. Improving your content’s engagement is the key to improving how well it performs.
- Scroll depth – This is a measurement of how far someone scrolls down on your page and is a good indicator of how interesting they find your content.
- Pages per session – This is the average number of pages that a user accesses on a website per session. If a visitor explores beyond that initial page, then you’ve got an engaged visitor on your hands.
- Multimedia views and listens – This is the number of views or listens you are getting on the multimedia within your content. Someone clicking to watch a video or listen to an audio clip is a signal they are curious about what you have to say.
- Newsletter sign-ups – This is self-explanatory and often a good sign you’re earning the trust and interest of your target audience.
- Registrations and downloads – This is the number of people that register for or download what is in your content. It is the ultimate goal as it measures the direct success of your campaign.
- Live chats, emails, contact forms, phone calls – This is the number of contacts made through live chat, email, contact forms, or phone calls, depending on what action is called for in the content. Although this engagement metric doesn’t necessarily mean a sale, it is considered a conversion.
Unlocking Conversion Optimization
Always, have a CTA. Full Stop. Conversions vary depending on content but it is essential to ask readers to take your desired action.
Make sure your CTA is:
Timely
Ensure your CTA has a clear and a relevant timeframe. Ask readers to sign up for your offer today. Includes an offer expiry date. CTAs that aren’t timely give readers too much space to browse on and forget about you entirely.
Valuable
Reader’s aren’t going to give you their information out of good will. You have to offer them something that is more valuable than what you need from them. Do you offer free consultations or send out weekly newsletters containing discounts on your products? Clearly state what the reader will gain by contacting you.
Transparent
Your offer should be clear and easy to execute. If your CTA says ‘Sign up for a 7-day free trial,’ users should be able to book a full 7-day free trial by clicking on that button. If they have to jump through hoops for a free trial, they aren’t going to sign up.
Relevant
Your CTA should be a natural progression of the copy and align with the article content. If you’re writing a blog on a topic related to one of your services, don’t place CTA’s asking users to visit a different service page.
Reasonable
Make sure your offer isn’t too big, too expensive, or too time-consuming. Like all of your content, your offer has to appeal to your target audience. Research them, get to know them, and give them what they want.
The Relationship Between Content and Conversions
Content is the the backbone of all marketing campaigns. It influences user behaviour to achieve your desired actions and without it, conversions don’t exist. When your content addresses the audience’s needs, interests, and pain points, it leads to higher conversion rates.
Book a free SEO audit today to find out if your content is having a meaningful impact. At Method and Metric, we know the time that goes into creating content and we specialize in building content strategies based on data, and content that increases conversions.
