Content conversions (typically used in marketing in the meaning of converting through content marketing) is one important marketing concern. It requires you to put together a flawless content marketing strategy.

But, what is the point of your content marketing strategy?

That is a question every marketer asks himself before he dives into creating a strategy.

So, you’ve done it countless times too.

Do you want to increase visibility and create recognition value?

Sure, you do!

Do you want to work on your brand image?

Definitely!

But your ultimate aim is not just to encourage people to consume and engage with the content (although that is a VERY important part of the process). What you want is to encourage people to take the required action.

In other words, you want them to convert through your content – content conversions.

And this is where your expertise as a content marketer comes into the picture.

If you have been having trouble with this lately, fret not – you’ve landed on just the right page. We’re going to share tried and tested Content Marketing Tips for optimizing conversions.

But, before that, let’s take a bird’s eye view of the whole discussion today:

Let’s start with our first tip now:

1- Find Out Where You Stand!

We’ve said it before, and we’ll repeat it: the first step in creating a strategy, no matter what it is for, is to get a bearing on your current position.

If you don’t know where you stand, how will you know which direction is the right one for you and what steps to take next?

Hence, you need to monitor your conversion rate before you can figure out how to improve it.

Here comes the next important question:

How do you do that?

In today’s day and age, you have no reason to worry. There is a solution to every problem before you recognize the problem – a tool, free resource, or other solutions. 

And, monitoring the content conversion rate is no different.

Here, we have compiled a list of some tools to monitor your conversions:

a. Google Analytics

You probably saw this one coming – it is one of the best tools you can use to track your conversions.

b. KissMetrics

This is probably another one that you have heard of in the past, if not used it. It is a paid tool, but it makes the process a lot easier for small to medium-sized businesses.

c. Heap

This tool also allows you to record and analyze all the courses of action your consumers take with ease.

If you want more options to try and choose from, check this list out and take your pick based on your unique requirements:

15 Conversion Tracking and Optimization Tools to Analyze and React to Customer Behavior

Once you have the exact figures and the whole picture right in front of you, design the strategy that leads you the right way to help improve your content conversion.

2- Choose Your Content Type Wisely

There is content that results in high conversion rates. And then there is content that doesn’t encourage your readers to take action at all.

You, understandably, want to go with the former.

But how do you decide which type of content to go for?

Well, first of all, the analysis you just conducted in the previous step is going to come in handy here. 

Why? 

That analysis would give you an idea of the content your consumers enjoy more than other kinds.

And that is the key to finding the right door. 

Therefore, THIS must remain a part of your strategy. You can innovate and try to do new things within that content type but stick to it!

What Next?

Well, you need to take a look at the kinds of content that encourage content conversions for different businesses in general. If they help other businesses, they will likely help yours too.

That said, you do not need to choose content that goes well with your brand image and persona. But more on that later.

First, let’s look at some conversion-boosting content types:

According to the Lead Generation to Increase Conversions survey results, there are seven types of content that encourage consumers to take action. Here they are, along with their respective customer conversion rates:

1. Research reports – 46%
2. Video/motion graphics – 44%
3. Social media content – 42%
4. Webinars/webcasts – 40%
5. Website articles/blogs – 31%
6. Case studies/white papers – 30%
7. Infographics – 17%

Needless to say, there is quite a blend of content here.

Coming back to our earlier point, while it is highly encouraged that you include these content types in your strategy, you do need to keep your particular brand, the products and services it offers, and your target audience in mind.

Keep in mind that you want to play with 3 Es:

• Educate
• Engage
• Entertain

The content should be fresh, relevant, useful, and unique. The remaining decisions are for you to make. How can you ensure the ‘three E’s’ ultimately encouraging a potential customer to convert?

Only you can make an informed choice.

3- Let Your Competitors Help

Wait, what?

Why would your competitors help you?

They won’t do that directly. But, an analysis of their content marketing efforts will directly help you.

There are a couple of reasons why you want to look at what your competitors are doing.

Here are some questions to ask:

a. What Are They Doing Right?

If your competitor’s content is getting engagement and contributing to an increase in their content conversion rate, they are doing something right. While you don’t want to follow them blindly or be a copy cat in any way, determining what content type works best for their audience (and hence yours) is not a bad idea.

b. How Can I Remain Different?

By seeing what the competition is doing, you make sure you don’t put up exactly what they do on their platforms. You ensure that your content is different – and definitely better. It should be more engaging, more thought-provoking, more valuable. Everything, from the topics you cover to the way you cover them, should be better.

While these two points seem to contradict each other, they work hand in hand. You can get an idea of the kind of content or platform that may work better for you, but the content itself should be one-of-a-kind!

4- Design Your Editorial Calendar

When you say “Editorial Calendar,” you mean a planning outline that contains the information of what content you will post on what social channels on what day, down to the precise time. 

But, it is not the kind of assignment that you give your 8th grader when he’s grounded. It is a strategic document that requires extensive research of:

• Your audience.
• Your goals and objectives.
• The most appropriate channels to reach them.
• Your most relevant and useful content to send them.
• The right day and time to approach them.

Based on all this research, you create a workflow re-purpose existing content, create new content, and design & get the content posted as per your schedule.

But why exactly do you need an Editorial Calendar?

Here’s why:

Benefits Of Editorial Calendar

• Editorial calendars give an organized and structured look at what needs to be done and when.
• Therefore, they are a huge time savior. 
• They save you the distress to find worth-sharing content each time it needs to be posted.
• Content calendars also help you reach your targets consistently.
• Getting everything ready beforehand gives you more time to review and enables you to alleviate the chance of mistakes.
• Based on the analysis of your editorial calendar application results, you can reach your targets far better with the best-appropriate content.

These are more than enough reasons you need to consider having a content calendar in place before you randomly shoot more content at your targets next.

5- Build More Targeted Landing Pages

When you say targeted landing pages, you mean the pages that are created keeping a targeted audience in mind. The content of the pages is crafted to persuade that audience. The design of these pages is created to appeal to the same audience.

But, why should you consider target landing pages in the first place?

They offer certain benefits that are too attractive for content marketers to ignore. 

Let’s take a look at the most important ones:

• They speak to a valuable targeted audience and reach them better.
• Targeted pages demand the use of relevant keywords and phrases. Therefore, such pages have a higher chance of ranking high on SERPs for those keywords.
• You are only targeting a specific audience and optimize the content to stick to their minds. This gives you a better opportunity to convert more.

6- Craft Attention-Grabbing Headlines.

No matter what your content is, the first thing your prospects come across or interact with is your headline or the subject line. Great content won’t get the required traction if the headline doesn’t click. Therefore, needless to say, your headlines are amongst the most valuable elements in rendering your content marketing efforts successful. 

To achieve your goals – i.e., arouse the reader’s curiosity enough to get your message read – experts have recommended multiple headline structures, templates, and tips that work like crazy. 

Let’s take a look at what they say:

What Gets Your Headlines Clicked?

• The headlines with numbers get your content read more often.
• Odd numbers have an even better converting effect.
• Shorter headlines get read more. Headlines with eight words have the highest content conversion potential.
• Special characters like hyphen and colon in the headlines draw more attention.
• A question mark at the end of the headline increases the clickthrough rate.
• Strategic use of action-driving power words temps the readers into taking your desired action. 

Bonus:

Once you have crafted the attention-grabbing headlines, check them in headline analyzer tools such as:

• Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule
• Headline Analyzer by Advanced Marketing Institute
• Blog About by IMPACT
• Headline Analyzer Tool by Capitalize My Title

7- Get Your Introduction Read

Created a worth-clicking headline but forgot to put extra effort into your introduction? 

Congratulations! 

You have successfully driven off the incoming traffic. All your content marketing efforts just went down the drain. 

So, what do you need to do to keep your readers on your content, only sliding down the introduction?

How Can You Make Your Introductions Read?

Simply put, make your introduction intriguing. 

But how?

Here’s how:

• Give them a brief taste of the problem they have and the solution you are giving them.
• Be concise and relevant. 
• But, most importantly, be interesting to have them interested. 
• Highlight the benefits of your solution and the impact it has had on the lives of other targets. 
• In the case of emails or blogs, do whatever it takes to make the first 3-4 lines pleasantly intriguing. In the case of a landing page, use the subheading and the following lines to create the same impact.
• Begin with a relevant quote, a fun fact, or an authentic stat to highlight the importance of the topic.
• Use a story that they can relate to or find interesting.
• Using keywords in the first paragraph is a recommended SEO practice. However, keywords overstuffing is a huge pitfall.

Got your introduction read?

Congratulations! 

That’s the beginning of a huge success story with a high return on your efforts.

8- Keep Them Reading Using Bucket Brigades

The use of Bucket brigades is a tried and recommended strategy to get your content read. Isn’t that the aim of your content – getting read through the end? 

Because, how else would you persuade them if you don’t get read?

In case you are wondering what bucket brigades are, here’s the thing:

As Brian Dean says, “Bucket Brigades are an old school copywriting tactic that was originally designed for sales letters.”

He himself and many other marketers have found them extremely useful in gluing your reader to your high-value content through the end.

Some Of The Most Useful Bucket Brigades:

• We know what you’re thinking:
• Let me give you an example
• Here’s the deal:
• Here’s how:
• It gets better.
• Can I be totally honest with you?/ Let me be totally honest:
• Picture this:
• Want to know a secret?
• We’ve all been there.
• Look:
• Here’s the Good News:
• That’s right!
• What’s the catch?
• Do you see where we’re going with this?
• Let’s jump right in!
• First off

The list is long, but we have other tips to get to. 

9- Use Appropriate Visuals 

A picture is worth a thousand words and gets you engraved in the content. However, an image has a thousand forms now, with each kind having a better success rate than the other. Here are more reasons you want to make your content more visually appealing:

Why Do You Need To Make Your Content Visually Appealing?

• They make your content more engaging.
• Visual information has a better retention rate than text information. To quote HubSpot, “People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations”.
• Visuals also have a high content conversion rate.
  • Images convert more than does the text.
  • Videos have a far better conversion rate than still images. A HubSpot 2018 survey declared Video content to be the most in-demand.
• BuzzSumo claims that content with visual information gets more shares than that without visual content.
• Visuals have a direct and better impact on human emotions. Therefore, calling the prospects visually to take action drives more conversions than calling them to take the same action through plain text. 

What Kind Of Visual Content Can Your Content Marketing Efforts Revolve Around?

There are different visuals formats gaining popularity across other platforms. However, here are a few you should not ignore:

• Still Visuals
  • Infographics 
  • Branded Images
  • Charts
  • Graphs & other data visuals
  • Memes
  • Cartoons
  • Screenshots
• Moving Visuals
  • Cartoon animations
  • Whiteboard animations
  • Real-world Videos
  • GIFS
  • Screencasts
• Interactive elements

Strategically incorporate visual content in your content marketing strategy and see a consistent boost in your content conversion rate.

10- Segment Audience To Increase Engagement

All your audiences are not at the exact same level at a given time. 

Some of your audiences have just interacted with you now. They are cold audiences. Others might have already interacted with you, so they know you. However, they still need to be worked on and nurtured before they are ready to purchase from you. They are warm audiences. Yet others have interacted with you, have been nurtured well, and are at the stage where they have attempted purchasing from you or are ready to buy. They are your hot audiences.

You can’t really send the same content to all the audiences and expect them to respond the same way. Some of them are just information seekers and readers. Others are prospective purchasers. 

Imagine sending awareness content to your current customers. Aren’t you irritating them with content that means nothing to them? 

Therefore, based on the level of the funnel each audience is at, you need to have different content, offers, and promotions for them. 

And that calls for audience segmentation.

To segment your audience well, you need to prepare multiple audience personas for different funnel levels. That way, your content puts the required impact on your audience.

This is exactly what is making you make all these efforts. 

In case you couldn’t complete the story in your mind, a better content conversion rate often translates to increased revenue. 

11- Quote The Higher Authorities

Those of you already into content marketing know the power of backlinks. If you know that, you should know the difference between a highly authoritative source from all the rest. 

Backlinks are like endorsements. The more reputable a source of endorsement is, the more authoritative and valuable it is for you. 

So, when you quote an expert with his name, that increases your authoritativeness as well. Your audience would give more weightage to the fact that you are quoting an expert compared to an anonymous source.

Therefore, the more you refer back to an authoritative name, the more would be the efficacy and effectiveness of what you say. 

Make your content more persuasive. Refer back to authoritative sources.

12- Add Testaments To Show Your legitimacy.

Try telling your targets that you are an authentic business and see the response. 

Now, add the voice of another person, preferably your customers, and see the response of your prospects.

Adding the 3rd person’s perspective in your content adds legitimacy and makes your content highly persuasive. 

What Testament Statements Can You Use?

This could include using:

• Audio
• Text testimonials
• Video testimonials
• Reviews
• Analysis and feedback
• Expert endorsements
• Influencer endorsements.

Maintaining a few relationships to get their statements could multiply your relationship’s manifolds and reflect on your content marketing results.

13- Don’t Sacrifice Your Educational Content Over Sales Pitches.

Your content marketing strategy would include various content types – each meant to attain a different objective. Keep each content type dedicated to its goals. 

What this means in practice is if you are producing promotional content, do that by all means. If you have to craft educational material, you have the liberty to do that too. However, don’t mix them both up too frequently. Keep a line of distinction between both to let them both attain their respective goals conveniently.

Also, bear in mind that too frequent sales pitches or mixing your educational or entertaining content up with promotional content too frequently hurt you in the long run.

How, really?

Here’s how:

Repercussions Of Combining Your Promotional And Non-Promotional Content Too Often?

• It renders your sales pitches ineffective.
• It irritates them. Resultantly, they begin to lose interest in your genuinely educational or entertaining content as well.
• You begin to lose your authority.

What does that result in?

That reduces your chances of being seen and heard, thus affects your Content conversion rates.

Is that what you are making all these efforts for? To decrease your conversion rates over lack of attention to the line of distinction?

Certainly NOT!

So, don’t overdo sales pitches.

14- Drive An Instant Action With The Sense Of Urgency

See:

Do you remember what happens when you learn that your most favorite dress is on the 70% off clearance sale?

You instantly check if you can push other needs to make room for this purchase.

Now, picture this:

Not only do you get a clearance sale alert on your favorite dress, but you also learn that the sale lasts only 24 hours.

What happens next is not unpredictable.

You don’t even give it much thought and rush to your nearest outlet to grab the dress. 

Wait, there’s more:

On top of the above alerts, you also learn that only two pieces of your favorite item are left. 

What happens next?

You don’t even wait to get to the store in fear of losing that dress. You immediately place the order online to make sure you get it before the item is completely sold out.

What is all of this?

The sense of urgency that the brand created to drive immediate sales. 

And that’s exactly what the sense of urgency does.

It creates an immediate need for the product/service in question and psychologically renders you unable to think through the situation in fear of missing out. That leads to a quick purchase before the time runs out or the stock ends.

In other words, that leads to an increased conversion rate.

15- Literally, Ask Them To Convert!

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is underestimating the power of the CTA button on the website – the call-to-action.

Your content may be great.

You may have chosen the best platform to reach your audience.

You may have been innovative, creative, unbeatable.

But if, after convincing the individual consuming the content to take action, you don’t actually provide them with a WAY to take action, your efforts will go wasted.

For the most part, you want your content efforts to be subtle – you don’t want to indulge in the in-your-face marketing that irritates your consumers and drives them away – the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve.

But you need to give them an easy way to take the action you have convinced them to take – it is the only logical next step. And that is what an effective CTA button achieves.

Let’s look at this with an example:

You provide cybersecurity consultation services. As a part of your marketing, you have opted for email marketing to get more leads. You build up the fear of cyber crimes and tell the reader that you can help.

And then you say goodbye.

Or you have a boring, dull CTA.

Or you have a good CTA, but too early in the email – where it makes no sense, where you haven’t yet convinced your readers to use your services.

What Are You Doing Wrong?

The reader moved from the awareness to the interest phase, but their interest went to waste because they weren’t guided to the next step – the conversion step.

The journey, thus, was rendered useless.

So, how can you fix this?

Here is what you need to do:

• Ensure that the CTA directs the user to take action (e.g., ‘Sign up today!’ or ‘Get started now’).
• Design the CTA to be bold and attractive.
• Write interactive and creative copy for the CTA.
• Place it where it fits, where it’ll attract the greatest amount of attention, and where it is the logical ‘next step.’
• Have multiple CTA’s within the same piece of content (although this does depend on length, types, and other factors).
• Make sure the CTA stands out from the rest of the content.

Want to learn more about what makes the CTA more likely to drive content conversions?

Give this very useful blog post a read:

6 Characteristics of High-Converting Website CTA Buttons

16- Strategically Design Content Upgrades

Say you own a design agency.

New people come to your website all the time, so you need to keep looking for strategies to keep them hooked to your content for as long as possible.

Why, though?

Because in between this interaction somewhere, you’d get to pitch your paid services to them. If you don’t get a chance or it’s too early to do that, you want them to remember you for as long into the future as possible.

Therefore, you come up with a tactic.

As people land on your services page and read all through the content, you take that as a clue of *highly interested*. For such prospects, you add more meat. You add the link to your premium design portfolio with a few words that give them a sense of exclusivity (for themselves or the portfolio – both would work).

OR

You post on your blog about the features of a highly converting design. To keep them more engaged, you give them the offer to receive an exclusive checklist to make their current design 35X more converting. 

OR

You create a more advanced blog post with better and more valuable information on a topic you already have a blog post about. As readers read through the existing post, you ask them if they would be interested in getting top-class information only meant for a small number of lucky targets, along with the specific benefit that content offers.

What did you just do?

You offered your potentials these Content upgrades.

What Are Content Upgrades Anyway?

Content upgrades – also called opt-in bribes – are the pieces of bonus content that you offer to your visitors of a specific page or post. They share the subject with, add to the value of, or complement the original page/blog they are offered with.

In case you remember, we have already discussed a similar concept – lead magnet.

What Is The Difference Between Content Upgrades And Lead Magnets?

They both share two common features:

• They are both designed to provide value to the targets.
• In most cases, they are meant to get you the target’s email id in return.

However, one small difference sets them widely apart.

Content upgrades are usually highly targeted and build around a specific post or page. On the other hand, the target audience for lead magnets is somewhat broad and relatively more generalized.

Content upgrades offer a massive opportunity to build a uniquely lasting, meaningful relationship with your targets. Make sure not to miss this opportunity.

17- Work On Creating Unputdownable Lead Magnet Offers 

As the name might have suggested, lead magnets are the pieces of content that attract and capture leads. This precisely is why you create content.  

They are basically small gifts you offer your prospects in return for their email ids that you use to build a relationship with them. Lead magnets get your content:

• Created based around a pain-point of the potentials. 
• Distributed to those who need it.
• Get the email ids of your willing prospects.
• Educate them or resolve their pain points while establishing your authority in their minds. 

Interestingly, if created following the best practices around a pesky pain-point of your targets, they are as valuable for your targets as they are for you. Therefore, lead magnets are a potential source for building and growing your business if they are strong and persuasive enough.

That’s precisely why you want to create a highly relevant lead magnet offer – solving something extremely troubling for your target audience. That way, they have better chances of converting for you as this solution would mark the beginning of a strong and valuable relationship between you and your high-potential prospects.

Best Converting Types Of Lead Magnets: 

Here’s are the most successful types of lead magnets with proven results for a variety of businesses:

1. Mini-courses
2. Detailed, step-by-step guides
3. Checklists
4. Case studies
5. Workbooks
6. Cheatsheets
7. Templates
8. Toolkits
9. Free trials

While each type of lead magnet has its pros and cons, each one has a different setting in which it is the most successful. What you pick for your goals depends widely on various things, including what you want to achieve, your target audience, and their needs and stamina to bear you.

If you have made up your mind to create one, Neil Patel gives you great insights into exactly how to craft super-convertible lead magnet offers.  

18- Optimize Your Compounding Blog Posts

Blogs are certainly your most important weapon to keep attracting your prospects, even when they are not buying your products or services.

“But, what’s the use of such traffic that won’t even buy from you?” you ask. 

That’s because not all the prospects convert right away. Some of them need to be nurtured well before they ultimately decide you are the one they want to purchase from. And such prospects are equally important for your business. 

And, these are the prospects that your blog posts attract. 

So, how do you maximize the performance and results of your blog posts? How do you make your blogs appeal to those they are meant for? 

To get the answer to that question, answer this question first:

Have you ever heard the term Compounding Blog posts?

Well, if you are interested in a short introduction, here’s the thing:

The blog posts that keep attracting your prospects and thus keep getting increasing traffic are your compounding posts. That said, rest assured compounding blogs are worth all the efforts because they are a source of increasing your unique views.

(If you need details on the topic, this post on HubSpot explains the whats and hows of compounding blog posts.)

Now, wouldn’t you call them your best posts?

Yes, we thought so!

So, the next logical question in the series is, “why do you focus on improving what is already the best?”

Well, there always is room for improvement. You don’t want loopholes in what is your biggest source of traffic. Because some of this traffic would actually convert as well.

Therefore, pay special attention to your analytics to figure out your compounding posts. Once you have shortlisted them, put extra effort into making them error-free.

19- Be Adaptive And Evolve

If you have to take one lesson from the study of life and your existence, let it be ‘survival of the fittest”.

This is the best applicable excerpt from biology, equally relevant and appropriate in any walk of life – almost as far as we can think of it.

What does that call you to do?

Be the fittest that can never doom. 

But the question here is, who gets to be the fittest?

As per the Darwinian theory, the one who keeps adapting himself to the changing environmental conditions turns out to be the fittest.

Now apply that concept to your content marketing efforts.

Here’s what it could mean for you:

1- All these efforts you are doing to make your content marketing efforts fruitful might not yet be the most appropriate ones to your business model, niche, or might not be the best suited to your target audience. 

You need to analyze them closely to figure out what is working for you and what is not. If you figure out what has not been working over a long time, it’s time to replace that with something you think might work. It is a time-consuming process for sure, but slow and steady wins the race.

2- Evolution doesn’t only mean to keep changing your content marketing strategy. It also means to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest trends in Content Marketing and the business world. 

And, not just that; you need to adapt to the changes around you continuously. That way, you’d be among the top few who have successfully taken the lead and become the fittest.

Let’s Get To Work!

We have found these 19 Content Marketing tips for optimizing content conversions so useful that we use them in our daily operations without failing.

And let us tell you, we see results.

The anticipated results.

Try them out and let us know how helpful they were for you!