Content marketing remains one of the most crucial parts of any type of campaign. It's the art of attracting potential customers by creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. But simply putting out blog posts or Instagram posts often isn't enough. To succeed in today’s extremely competitive world, your content needs to be strategically planned and crafted to convert viewers into potential paying customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss 6 steps you can start taking today to help you create content that drives sales. By following these steps, you'll learn how to attract the right audience, nurture leads, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.
Before you even think about content formats, put yourself in your ideal customer's shoes. Ask yourself:
Conduct thorough audience research through surveys, social media listening, and competitor analysis. Understanding your audience's needs, desires, and content preferences is the foundation for creating content that resonates.
Make sure to explore different survey distribution methods and how exactly you can use social media listening tools to get the best out of your audience.
Although this step is often overlooked and underestimated it’s the most important one as it serves as a foundation for all your promotional efforts. If you don’t know exactly who your target is figuring out how to attract them is a mission impossible and you can forever say goodbye to attracting the customers that you need and that need you.
What do you want your content to achieve? You have to know what the goal of your content is to know exactly what type of content to create how to use it to achieve said goal.
Some common goals include:
Brand awareness is a basic need for any brand, but especially those that are not fully established in the marketplace yet or are just starting their journey. If you want people to know about you, whether you offer a car loan or provide marketing services, you should create content that is insightful, reliable and helps you establish an authority in the industry.
To streamline the process of potential buyers finding you consider using the best inbound marketing tools as without them your inbound marketing efforts will not only take too much time but also be less effective.
Create content that enhances your lead generation process. Include clear CTAs and capture leads through email signups, downloadable resources, or free trials. Make sure that you’re content is promotional and leads users to certain actions but not too promotional as that might backfire and have the opposite effect on your brand.
Work on the process after they click your CTA to convert leads into paying customers. The content here should also be extremely clear and encourage leads to continue their journey with you and end up becoming a paying customer. Make sure to explore different conversion funnel optimization strategies to help you streamline your acquisition processes.
Don’t let it go after one user has successfully become a paying loyal customer. Nurture existing customer relationships and encourage repeat business.
Once you define your goals make sure tto also identify key metrics to track progress. These might include website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, or lead generation numbers. By measuring your results, you can adjust your content strategy accordingly for maximum impact.
The buyer's journey is essentially the stages potential customers go through before making a final decision and completing a purchase. These stages include:
This is usually the first interaction a customer has with your brand. They don’t know much yet and are in the process of trying to learn more and finding out whether your solution is what they need or not. In this stage, your main focus should be educating your audience about their problems and introducing your brand as a potential solution.
You can do this by publishing insightful and honest blog posts, infographics, and using social media content as they are all great channels for this stage.
Make sure to use a logo generator if you don’t have one yet and create eye-catching branding before launching your products as this is the foundation of any successful brand awareness strategy. If you don’t have branding elements that the audience can easily identify you with your efforts will most likely fail.
Here the customer already knows your brand and what you can offer and they are starting to consider you as a possible option and a solution to their problems.
What you can do to help them get to the next stage is provide in-depth information about your product or service. This can be in the form of case studies, white papers, webinars, and product demos that will showcase your value proposition even better.
This is the final stage where the customer already has all the information they need and might need just a little push to finally make a purchase.
At this stage of their buyer journey, you should offer compelling reasons to choose you over competitors. Anything from customer testimonials to product comparisons, and free trials can nudge them toward a purchase.
It’s also important that at this stage they communicate with skilled sales professionals from your brand as every piece of communication can impact their decision. So develop a hiring strategy where such professionals are a top priority as without them you’ll be stuck where you started.
Offer them a competitive salary, exceptional benefits including corporate health insurance or gym memberships and once you’ve attracted top talent do everything in your power to retain them.
So, back to content marketing - make sure to develop a content calendar that maps out various content types across the buyer's journey and ensure that you're delivering the right message at the right time to further improve the buyer's journey.
There are som many content formats to choose from and it can be pretty overwhelming. So, let’s go through a few popular options and see what exactly each of them are.
Blog posts are simply informative and evergreen content that establishes your expertise. It should be about the news in your industry, your experts' opinions or tips and tricks, or even discuss any tools that you use and how others can use them more efficiently.
You can also repurpose such content into LinkedIn carousels or Instagram posts to raise awareness in your social media as well and use the same content to get leads from different sources.
In-depth guides that offer valuable insights in exchange for contact information. As we’ve mentioned before this type of content is usually used during the consideration stage and might not be relevant fro other stages as it is quite specific.
Visually appealing content that simplifies complex data. This can be used to back up any facts you want to present in a visually appealing way. If you offer great referral marketing software you can use such infographics to prove exactly why it should be considered great.
Engaging content that educates, entertains and demonstrates your product or service. Nowadays, videos have overtaken so many parts of our lives that it’s become impossible to imagine a world without them. And you shouldn’t do it either, so make sure to create engaging videos and incorporate them into your content strategy.
Real-world examples of how your product or service benefitted customers. Make sure to include these on your website or provide them per request so that potential customers can see exactly how your product or service can be beneficial to them as well.
Consider using Typeform alternatives and send surveys to your loyal clients, collect their feedback about your service and use it in your marketing material. But do this after asking for their permission to use it to avoid any issues.
Interactive sessions that allow you to connect with your audience in real-time are a great way to boost brand awareness, network and identify people who need your solutions but don’t know it just yet.
Experiment with different formats and track what resonates best with your audience. But don’t just focus on one type as a healthy mix of content formats is what will keep your audience engaged and cater to different learning styles.
Your content should provide genuine value to your audience and not just be there for you to tick a box.
To avoid this from ever happening focus on problem-solving and make sure to address your audience's challenges and offer practical solutions.
Additionally, be informative and insightful. The content you publish should deliver valuable knowledge, data, or industry trends.
It’s also crucial to maintain a clear and concise writing style. Ensure that your content is easy to read and understand, doesn’t have any grammatical errors or anything of the sort as that can be a red flag to potential customers. Consider using a ChatGPT Chrome extension to help you ensure such quality content and make it pitch-perfect.
Another good trick might be incorporating storytelling. Doing this will help you engage your audience emotionally by weaving stories into your content. And believe me, such emotional connections are what last and become meaningful collaborations.
In addition to all this, ensure your content is well-formatted, mobile-friendly, and visually appealing because if it’s not users may not even read it in the first place. Moreover, consider investing in mobile app development to reach a wider audience and provide an even more convenient user experience.
Remember, your content shouldn't be a constant sales pitch. It's about building trust and establishing yourself as a reliable
resource.
Content marketing is an ongoing process. It’s not a task you do once and forget about. Regularly analyzing your content performance using the metrics you defined in Step 2 are what will help you improve and quickly identify any gaps in your strategies.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Based on your analysis and the answers of such questions you can adapt your content strategy and optimize results.
And why do all this? Because by continuously monitoring and improving your content strategy, you can ensure your content remains relevant, engaging, and drives sales.
It’s no secret that content marketing is a powerful tool for attracting, nurturing, and converting leads into customers. By following the steps mentioned in this article, you can create a content strategy that delivers real business results.
Remember, focus on providing value to your audience, building trust, and establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. With continuous effort and strategic optimization, your content will become a powerful piece if your strategy for driving sales and achieving your business goals.
