7 Tips to Increase Your Content Marketing Conversion Rates

Creating a compelling conversion-oriented content is important for an effective content marketing campaign. This kind of content writing attracts and engages new and potential customers. It makes them take action and turn visitors into loyal customers.

The Hubspot research found that 79% of marketers believe in the effectiveness of content marketing, but only 6% know how to use it effectively. Conversion-oriented content should focus on your customers’ needs and reinforce your brand trust through the copy itself.

Instead of monitoring your calls to action, you need to create content itself to drive conversions. Fortunately, optimizing your conversion-driven content strategy isn’t too difficult. There are some effective tips you can use to engage readers with your content and increase conversions.

1. Make your CTAs persuasive

If you want your website visitors to take some actions, you should be more persuasive and exact in your CTAs. The best way to show your persuasive is in your calls-to-action. The CTA is where you expect people to take action, whether it’s signing up for a free trial, watching a video, subscribing to a blog or buying a product.

Try to clearly convey what you want visitors to do. If you want to make a sale, just say it. For reaching maximum effect, you can include some case studies or social proof when it makes sense. For example, take a look at the CTA on Lorenz & Lorenz,L.L.P. They rely on simple bullets to show clients some benefits and details.

Many things depend on what marketing goal you are pursuing. Make sure that your calls-to-action are detailed and exact to successfully drive conversions. Sum up your target action in a few words and put it inside a button.

2. Mention authority figures

Many customers trust recommendations from recognized authorities because they can offer a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a certain situation. Hence, influencer marketing becomes so effective, and a lot of brands connect with influencers to promote their products.

Every marketer should know about the Cialdini’s classic principles of persuasion and put them into practice. People will tend to weight the opinion of authorities more highly than others. They seem to be like social proof based on their power, status or variety‐seeking expertise.

Take advantage of this persuasion approach by pointing to industry leaders or authority figures in your writing. For example, you can drop a quote, publish a testimonial from experts or link out to an authority figure or publication.

The homepage at Backlinko is a great example of this:

3. Optimize content for purchase-intent keywords

Once people find and visit your content, they will come with the intention of converting or not. If you want to persuade them to convert, creating and optimizing content for conversion-oriented keywords will result in encouraging conversions.

Start with long tail keywords as people who search for these keywords are 2.5 times more likely to buy. SE Ranking keyword suggestion tool will help you identify all relevant long tail queries.

Use trigger words such as “free”, “new”, “now” and others to catch more potential customers who’re already interested in making a purchase or signing up. Try to test and figure out what trigger words convert more customers based on your key metrics and include them in your content.

Follow these tips to optimize your content for conversion-oriented keywords:

• Include your keywords naturally in your header, subheaders and within your content. Avoid misspelled keywords and keyword stuffing.
• Focus on user preferences. Pay more attention to the types of content your target audience needs the most – pricing charts, videos, third-party comparison reviews or product pages.
• Optimize your SERP snippets. Write an appealing SEO page title and meta description that will show up in organic results.
• Include target keywords in every single piece of content. Your purchase intent keywords related on a certain topic should be targeted in subsections within your content and in each FAQ page that helps customers get answers to their questions before making a purchase.

4. Answer questions for your content strategy

People are constantly asking questions online that are related to your products and key topics. These questions can be a powerful weapon that helps you write conversion-oriented content. It’s of great interest to your target audience to get detailed and informative responses.

Answering the most common questions will develop an effective content strategy for you and trigger a natural answering reflex that will result in a higher probability of a conversion. Include simple questions to set up your content that can grab your customers’ attention. For example, Yeargan & KERT LLC uses a question in the title to hooks more readers in.

5. Leverage clever headlines

Headlines are one of the most powerful ways to make people read your content and increase your conversions. Headlines should be your starting point when writing conversion-driven content. If your titles encourage people to click to read more, they’re more likely to subscribe and read the content you want to offer.

Here are a few useful tips to create high-converting headlines:

• Create numbered list headlines. Headlines with numbers are clear winners in click-throughs.
• Include between 5-9 words. Based on the Guarding research, headlines that have eight words performed the best.
• Add power words. Sensory power words in your headlines can attract more attention and take them to a new level. For example, words like “secret”, “danger”, “killing” will get readers interested in learning more by activating the imagination of them.
• Analyze your headlines. The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer will rate the ability of your headline to result in conversions.

6. Create a sense of urgency

One of the best ways to increase conversions is to tell that now it’s time to buy. Creating a sense of urgency in your content will make your audience worried that your product might not be available in the near future.

According to Entrepreneur, the power of urgency can enhance your sales by 332%. Focus on offering limited-time deals, low-stock alerts, and countdown timers for sales. Make sure to use urgency periodically, but not all the time. Otherwise, people will stop taking your deals seriously. Here’s a good example from Victoria’ Secret:

7. Use compelling visuals

Images speak louder than words. Do you know that 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual? That’s why using images is an effective tactic to increase conversions of your content.

Make sure that images can really make a difference. Simply including meaningless images within your content won’t make sense. Try to convey your message through conversion-driving images. You can also add an infographic to your content as they are easier to digest and understand than text copy.

The visual information can hold your audience’s attention longer and boost the chances to convert them after engaging with your content. The Neil Patel’s blog does a good job by using different, engaging images to get more people to read the content.

Bottom Line

Creating conversion-friendly content can be challenging for each writer. Make your boring copy more exciting and live. Want to result in more customers, higher conversions and better sales? It’s time to produce the content that converts.

To reach maximum effect, you should experiment and see what content performs the best in your content marketing. Once you continue to develop conversion-driven content, the result won’t be long in coming. Using these seven killer tips will speed up the overall process.

Irina is a marketing specialist, blogger, guest writer and social media expert for SE Ranking. Find her on Twitter at @irinaweber048