7 Best Practices to Increase Your Content Marketing Conversion Rate

Content marketing campaigns can be used to achieve a variety of goals from getting traffic to audience engagement. For B2C marketers, the most important goal is to drive conversions and it is the top metric that they track.

Image Source: Content Marketing Institute

 

For B2B content marketers, tracking conversions is the fifth most important metric.

 

This clearly shows the importance that marketers place on conversions as part of their content marketing strategies. However, not all of them are actually successful in driving conversions.

 

If you are struggling to drive conversions through your content, here are seven best practices that you can follow to get more conversions.

 

1. Target Transactional Keywords 

Keywords are the focal point of any content marketing strategy as they are used to qualify leads. By optimizing your content for a keyword, you ensure that people searching for that keyword find your page.

 

The kind of keywords that you use determines the kind of traffic that you get.

 

Therefore, if you want to drive sales conversions, then you should focus on transactional or high-purchase-intent keywords. These include words like services, solutions, software, cost, etc. 

 

But, how do you decide which transactional keywords to use?

 

Think from a customer’s perspective. What search query would you use to search for products and services that you provide? 

 

The answer to this question will help you find a list of transactional keywords for your business. 

 

Your existing keyword strategy will dictate how you leverage keywords in your content. Usually, adding keywords to headings and sub-headings works better than simply adding them to the body of the content.

 

2. Use Gated Content 

One of the best ways to get leads from your content is to use gated content. This is a strategy where you offer an exclusive content resource in exchange for details from your website visitors.

 

How does this work?

 

You offer a valuable resource like a study or whitepaper for free, but ask people to provide their name and email address to get it. They get free content and you get information to build your email list.

 

However, not all content is worthy of being gated. You need to create high-quality, valuable, and relevant content to make people want it enough to fill out a form to get it. You can leverage third-party tools to help you write better content.

 

Some popular types of gated content include ebooks, whitepapers, cheat sheets, templates, toolkits, etc.

 

3. Write Persuasive CTAs

If your goal is to convert your website visitors into paying customers or repeat visitors, then CTAs (calls-to-action) are your best bet. Ideally, every page on a website can have a CTA to get people to take the desired action.

 

This action could be subscribing to your newsletter, checking out the services, page, reading similar content, etc. Anything that you want your audience to do, you can make it happen with the help of CTAs.

 

However, your CTAs need to be persuasive enough to get people to click on them. Here are some ways to write persuasive CTAs:

  • Use action-oriented words
  • Use reciprocity, tell them what benefit they will get if they click
  • Create a sense of urgency or scarcity by:
    • Offering a limited-quantity of something
    • Or giving a limited-time offer
  • Make your CTAs stand out by using large fonts and bright colors

 

4. Start a Newsletter 

This is another brilliant lead-generation strategy, similar to gated content. Here, instead of offering a free resource, you first engage your audience through great content and then ask them to subscribe.

 

Newsletters can be of different types and provide a variety of content. There is no scarcity of ideas on ways to use a newsletter.

 

You can use a newsletter to send the latest content, offers, information about new product launches, etc. to your subscribers. This can help you get repeat visitors and also keeps your audience engaged.

 

But, how do you get people to subscribe to your newsletter?

 

As discussed earlier, you should use the reciprocity principle and tell them why they should subscribe. Some of the reasons could be:

 

  • To get access to relevant content without having to search for it on your website
  • Stay updated with the latest content from your website delivered to their inbox
  • Be the first ones to get access to offers and discounts

 

The goal here is to tell them how subscribing to your newsletter will help them.

 

5. Provide Social Proof

Driving conversions is more a matter of persuasion than actually fulfilling a need. After all, people often make impulse purchases even if they don’t really need something.

 

When it comes to persuasion, providing social proof works like a charm. People trust products/services more if they see others using them. This is the whole principle behind the success of influencer marketing.

 

The question, however, is how can you provide social proof?

 

The best way is to use customer testimonials. Let your existing customers convince your prospects that your brand is trustworthy. You can add them to your product or service pages to drive more conversions.

 

Other ways to provide social proof are to leverage influencers or repost user-generated content on your social media profiles. Both of these show prospective customers that your brand is used and trusted by others and that improves their perception of your brand.

 

6. Leverage Internal Linking

If you have a blog, then one of your goals would be to get people to read more of your content. This can be done simply by using internal links.

 

Internal links are links to other content on your website that are placed on relevant anchor texts in your content. These can be used to direct your readers to other relevant or similar content on your website.

 

This tactic does not just work for blogs but can be used by anyone to direct website visitors from one page to another (usually a conversion page). 

 

The key is to make sure that the link is placed on the right anchor text and is relevant to the topic being discussed on the page where it is placed. 

 

7. Create Scannable Content 

Two of the primary goals of content marketing are to get more and repeat viewers/readers for your content. This means that you should be able to attract and engage your audience enough for them to want to return.

 

One tried-and-tested tactic to accomplish this is to create scannable content that allows people to get the gist of your content without reading it end-to-end. Create easy-to-read content and you will see your website traffic increase.

 

You can achieve this by creating listicles, using more visuals, and dividing your content into relevant sections.

 

Ready to Increase Conversions?

These are some of the best practices that you can follow to get more conversions from content marketing. This could be anything from getting more subscribers to selling more using content marketing

 

Use these best practices and see visible results from your content marketing initiatives.