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You’ve already spent hours creating great content for your audience. But as a marketer, you know that creating content is the beginning of the process. Now you need the content to convert your visitors to customers. However, that’s challenging to achieve.
The goal of content marketing is simple: create high-quality content that attracts visitors and converts leads to paying customers.
But with the buyer’s journey so drawn out, it could take months to get the desired results. I mean, look at how complicated the cycle is!
B2B buying journey as illustrated by Gartner
Source
Moreover, if your content is not rightfully optimized—you might never see the results you want—leading to a waste of time and investment.
But what makes a piece of content successful? And how can you ensure conversions?
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the key strategies to consider when optimizing your content.
Conversion optimization is the process of ensuring that your content is designed to generate revenue. By optimizing your content for conversion, marketing teams can improve their ROI, generate more leads, and increase sales.
It can also involve testing different versions of your content to see which converts more visitors into leads or customers. It’s imperative that sales teams need optimized content, as their success depends on the content’s ability to generate revenue.
Conversion optimization can mean different things depending on the stage of the conversion funnel that you’re targeting.
Stages of the sales funnel and what the goal of the content should be
For example:
To optimize the impact of sales content, you must use a data-driven approach. Marketing teams need to track how users interact with their content and make changes based on what works and doesn’t.
By studying your conversion data, you can learn what type of content is most likely to result in a sale or sign-up and then use that information to improve sales enablement content.
If it’s not getting traffic and is sufficiently supported by a distribution strategy, I’d question whether the topic or angle doesn’t resonate with my audience. If it’s getting traffic and not converting, then the topic and angle were correct but either the value wasn’t enough to warrant a conversion or the CTA didn’t make sense.
Here are a few ways you’re missing the mark right now:
There are many ways to optimize sales content performance. Here are some of the few tried and tested methods to do so:
By aligning your content with the buyer’s needs at each stage, you can increase the likelihood of a sale. Try creating a simple matrix that maps your existing content to various stages of the buyer’s journey. Once you understand your content better and where it fits, you can start developing new content that fills any gaps. Ultimately, it leads to sales teams serving up the most relevant content to the buyer.
Segregate your content based on buying stage cycle and optimize using the mapping fundamentals
Plus, it helps sales teams offer the right content to buyers at each stage of their journey. For example, buyers in the awareness stage may be interested in blog posts that describe their problems. In contrast, buyers in the consideration stage may be interested in case studies that show how other companies have solved similar issues.
If you want your blogs and landing pages to rank well in search engines, ensure it’s optimized for your target keywords and user experience. That means researching related terms people are searching for, identifying gaps and resolving these issues.
Additionally, implement on-page optimization like changing page titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text, keywords, etc.
Michael Sena, Founder and CEO of SENACEA, also adds that bounce rate is a metric to consider. He says, “We aim to keep the bounce rate from 26% to 50%. If the bounce rate is too high, it could show that the content is irrelevant to our audience, so the asset needs to be discarded or rewritten.”
As a marketer, keeping an eye on how your sales team uses your content is essential. By monitoring their activity, you can identify what’s working and isn’t. Once you do, you can tweak your strategy to close those gaps.
Additionally, if you find that certain sales reps aren’t using specific pieces, you can ask them why it’s happening. Perhaps they find it irrelevant, or they don’t know it exists.
Content Camel’s analytics feature that helps you monitor views and shares
“Make sure you’re writing about something people care about. You can’t just write about what’s on your mind or what you think is interesting—you have to know what’s going to interest and inspire your audience. This means doing some research! If you’re writing a blog post, check out the trending topics online and see if there’s anything you can add to the conversation.”
By addressing these pain points directly, the company can show potential customers that they understand their needs and have a solution that can help.
Plus, it helps you establish trust and credibility with your customers. And once you have established yourself as a trusted source of information, you can close more deals and shorten the sales cycle.
Here’s a checklist that Nadine Heir, Head of Content at Aument uses to optimize her content library:
The whole point of creating content is to appeal to your target customer. To ensure it does, dig into your internal branding and messaging documents.
By doing so, you ensure that your content is optimized for your target buyer persona. It means including the right tone of voice, buyer stage mapping, customer lingo, pain points, and desired CTA.
As a result, you’ll be able to create content that truly speaks to your audience—and drives conversions.
Over time, what was once relevant can become irrelevant, and what was once a high-converting asset can become a drag on your conversion rate.
That’s why it’s important to regularly review your assets and remove anything that no longer aligns with your current messaging, positioning, or goals. It can be anything from a page on your website that is no longer relevant or a case study created for an irrelevant ICP.
Phoebe Noce, Director of Content Marketing at Knotch, says that focusing on the customer journey can offer critical insights during the audit.
“I look through our customer journey data and see what content came up most frequently in journeys that ended in conversion. You’ll quickly find some key outliers here that really move the needle for your company. Conversely, the content that never shows up in journeys that convert either needs to be reworked or receive few to no resources in the future.”
By keeping your assets fresh and relevant, you can ensure that you’re making the most of every opportunity to convert visitors into customers.
You can monitor usage and performance within a single tool such as Content Camel and then modify/remove underperforming assets.
It’s crucial to analyze the level of engagement your content receives to determine whether it resonates with your audience. You can examine metrics, like the number of likes, shares, comments, click-through rates, and time spent on the page.
Also, we don’t necessarily mean engagement on your website but with the content specifically. For example, if you’ve sent a case study, how much time does the customer spend reading it? Are they passing it on to other team members? You can track these using shortened links.
If you notice that your content is not receiving much engagement, you need to rework the asset or leave it out altogether.
Content Camel’s engagement analytics feature
With newer channels coming up every day, identifying where your customers hang out and what formats they prefer can help you curate a tailored content strategy.
One way to ensure your target audience sees your content is by repurposing it into different formats. For example, consider turning it into an infographic or video if you have a blog post that performs well. If your prospects spend a lot of time on social media, create shareable images or posts that can be retweeted or reposted.
An example of how repurposing can bring life to your unoptimized assets
When optimizing your content’s call-to-actions (CTAs), consider how frequently customers will see them. Too often and they’ll become annoyed. Too seldom and they may not have the opportunity to act.
Finding the right balance can be tricky, but it’s important to get it right.
In addition to frequency, it’s also vital to ensure that your CTAs are specific. Include only one CTA and ensure the copy that speaks to them directly—not at them.
Also, consider what you’re optimizing for. Are you optimizing for fast, medium, or slow conversion?
Here’s what that looks like:
Tip: Don’t include a fast CTA on a page meant to create awareness (slow conversion).
It’s crucial to ensure that your content is easy to read and digest. If it contains large blocks of text, your readers will likely skip over it. Instead, you should aim for a balance of visuals and whitespace, making your content more skimmable. You also need to ensure that the text is conversational and not robotic so that it creates a sense of resonance.
Here’s a quick checklist from Bill Gaule, SEO Specialist, to make your content scannable:
By taking these steps, you can ensure that your content is informative and visually appealing. You can use tools like Hemmingway Editor to ensure it’s at an appropriate grade level.
Content is any information that helps move a prospect or customer through your buyer’s journey, so it’s crucial to have various types of content and optimize them for different stages in the journey.
Creating great content is only half the battle—you have to continuously monitor and update it to ensure that it’s having the maximum impact on your business goals. That’s where Content Camel comes in.
We’re here to help you manage your content library so you can monitor and optimize it to reach its maximum conversion potential. Sign up for a free trial today and see how we can streamline your content management.
Personalize follow up. Easily share content. Track results.
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.