We talk a lot about engaging your audience—creating websites and collateral that grabs their attention. Engagement is at the heart of inbound marketing. We all know how easy it is to click Delete or simply to ignore the endless flow of meaningless data we must wade through as the price of living in our digitally connected world.
But give us an engaging story, video, podcast—something that’s interesting, relevant, and useful—well, now maybe you have a chance at keeping our attention.
However, as marketers, the ultimate measure of our success is our ability to turn that engagement into conversions—that moment when an engaged reader or viewer completes an action that moves them from their current stage in the buying funnel to the next.
The higher up the funnel we move the audience, the better—and of course, each step can be more difficult than the last. Convincing a visitor to your website to provide an email address in exchange for a downloadable eBook is hard enough; moving them to the point of talking to a sales person and then to a purchase can be a real feat. Creating those actions is especially challenging in the B2B marketplace, where purchase decisions can take months or even years.
Fortunately, these three simple principles can pump up the success rate of all your conversion efforts.
Make It All About Them
Customer-centered content is a must for conversions. If you haven’t already developed customer personas and persona messaging—the useful kind that pinpoints their pains and clarifies how your products or services answers those needs and provides specific business benefits—then that’s Job #1.
Use that messaging to underpin everything you create (even content that doesn’t specifically mention your brand). When your audience can see themselves in your content, they’re much more likely to take an interest in where the story is going and to trust you to take them there.
TIP: Create content and website pages tailored for your top target industries and stakeholders and ensure your navigation makes it easy for people to find the information that matters to them. For one of our clients, elevating the information that matters to their target customers increased on-site content engagement by more than 523%.
Anticipate Objections: Foster Sales and Marketing Alignment
What keeps prospects from making that final purchase decision—or from making it in your favor? When you understand the objections that are most likely to crop up, you can plan an immediate response, or better yet, head off trouble by reassuring the audience before they have a chance to object.
Whether you’re up against better known names, cheaper competitors, or common misconceptions about the value of the type of solution you offer, your best option is to get in front of the problem with content that counteracts audience concerns.
TIP: To get firsthand information about the most common objections and how to answer them, go to your best source: your sales team. Learn how to create strong sales and marketing alignment in our free white paper.
Provide an Easy “Yes” to Customer Conversion
If you’re already chatting regularly with your sales team, you may be familiar with the old sales trick of getting a prospect to answer “yes” to three innocuous questions before positing your real ask. Why? Because after three positive responses, people are more likely to continue agreeing with you.
Make the site of your conversion requests—whether a landing page, an email message, or a linked post—an easy path to the big “yes” by leading the audience through a series of small positive responses.
For example, craft a LinkedIn post to do one thing: generate a click to your landing page. Lead that page with a title that does one thing: gets the visitor to read the next paragraph. Continue in this vein until you reach the conversion point, every positive response leading to that final click. Walking the audience through the process in this way can generate enthusiasm and prevent the rejection that can come when visitors feel overwhelmed or pressured.
TIP: Need some ways to diversify the content in your mix and keep interest high through the journey? Check out these ideas.
Keep ‘Em Coming Back
That’s it: three simple strategies. Applying them regularly and consistently can take some effort and requires a strategic approach to content and strong communication with your sales team. But the results are worth the work.
Offer a Clear Path
Learn more about building content to guide visitors through the buying journey.