The goal of just about any business blog should be to create more customers for your business. You can have sub-goals of this that contribute to growing your customers base; these can include greater pageviews, more people linking to your site, more comments on your blogs, more subscribers to your blog and more interaction with the blog posts you share on social media. These are all great goals to strive for, but ultimately your blog should drive interest in your products or services and be effective in converting blog readers to buyers. To make the most out of your content marketing efforts, follow these steps to turn your blog into a customer-creating machine.
Make Your Content Authoritative, Easy to Digest and Visually Interesting
If your content doesn’t grab and interest your readers almost immediately, it doesn’t have a lot of chance of converting them. Ensuring you have a great looking blog is one thing to get out of the way before putting too much effort into creating great content. The look of your blog is equivalent to a first-impression in a business meeting, and its effect is just as strong.
Once you’re sure your blog gives off a professional air, work on creating the same professionalism in your content, while also making your posts skimmable and engaging. Test your content on others in your organization to see if they can get the important points of your writing and if they feel compelled to learn more even after scanning the post briefly. Images and videos are another way to make your content easier to engage with.
Write for the Right People and the Right Situation
People aren’t usually interested in consuming content that has nothing to do with them. It might be a long process, but figuring out what your customers want and how to speak to their needs and pain points is a key goal in any content marketing plan. Once you know how to write for the people that purchase your product (as well as for the stage of the buying process they’re in) you’ll have a better chance of convincing those readers to become customers.
Also, give away some, but not all secrets of what you do. Your goal is not to enable your customers to figure out how to do your job better than you, but to highlight how what you sell can make their lives or jobs easier. Provide information but find a way to link that information back to how your solution is right for your audience.
Provide Ways for Customers to Move Forward, but Don’t Be Pushy
Aggressive, overly salesy content really doesn’t work that well on buyers anymore. Frankly, they’re too evolved and smart to be fooled or forced into buying something. Make it your goal to inform your buyer, help them throughout their pre-purchase research phase and hope their they’ll decide to work with your business. Use real-life results and statistics from your customers to prove why you’re worth the investment, then let buyers make the decision themselves.
To help them take next steps, make it easy for them to learn more about your business and potentially make a purchase with a well-designed and intuitive website that gives ample opportunities to buy or sign up. This can include strategically placed in-text links, unobtrusive timed pop-up ads, attention grabber bars at the top of your blog pages and more.
Be Creative and Compelling With Your CTAs
If your content is sufficiently interesting and engaging, your readers will make it to the end of your posts and want to take next steps. Look over your blog posts. Are you giving your readers direction about what to do next? If you aren’t, you could be missing a huge opportunity to convert readers. Go beyond simple CTAs and experiment with things like special offers or downloadable content to move readers further along in the buying process.
At Searchbloom we want to help you improve marketing ROI. While it’s important to strive for having a popular blog that gets lots of traffic, links and engagement, it’s also important to bring in the right kind of traffic and focus on turning those readers into buyers. High quality content can be a powerful tool in your marketing, but only if you’re connecting it to your bottom line and proving its ROI in widening your customer base.
