Apr 18, 22 | 10 min read
Converting readers into leads
Reading time: 9 minutes
Let me start by being very direct: your content must convert people into customers.
Yes, I know, most of us would rather just write and make beautiful and useful content. Or are we not going to consider all the lives that knowledge has transformed by the simple fact of existing?
Well… after all, we are professionals, working in companies that if they don't sell, they won't invest in our educational content and they won't even have money to pay us.
So, we better do our part to help our businesses increase sales and make sure we can pay our bills too.
How can you ensure that your content not only educates, entertains, or solves readers’ problems, but also brings them one step closer to becoming part of your customer base?
I'll give you some tips based on my experience trying to convert the 7 million readers from around the world that Rock Content attracts to their blogs every month.
Keep reading!
Organizing the workspace
To know what you can offer your readers, you need to be fully aware of what you have available.
At Rock Content, the world leader in Content Marketing , we have:
four content solutions;
a talent network of 80,000 freelancers;
global presence, especially in the US, Brazil and Mexico (i.e. we work in three languages).
So, to make sure all content editors working on our blogs know how to promote our lead generation resources:
we document everything about them;
We augment this solomon islands email address documentation with all the promotional materials available to them.
This can be a super simple task or a Herculean task.
At Rock Content, it was more like the latter: in the end, we found that we have over 300 landing pages for ebooks, webinars, spreadsheets, demo requests, etc. in Portuguese. We also have around 150 in Spanish and 120 in English .
Now we have all these resources documented in a big table like this:
Language Content Name Content Type Landing page link Link to all promotional images HTML code to insert the banner
At Rock Content, anyone who publishes content is already crafting it to be loved by Google. SEO is in our veins.
Since 2019, we have begun our internationalization process in the United States, where we are growing 30% quarterly in traffic and today we have hundreds of thousands of monthly visits.
But, in Brazil and Mexico , where we have more maturity, Rock Content has millions of visitors and is positioned in the first places of the SERPs for important keywords such as SEO, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, etc.
But to be honest, sometimes our blogging team forgot to think about the rest of the day – the offers we could make to get the reader one step closer to becoming a lead .
To solve that problem, as a Lead Gen Manager, I trained the Marketing team, showing all the possibilities they have to promote lead generation resources in a blog post.
With that, we have increased our lead generation by 30% quarter over quarter in the North American market and maintained 5% growth in Latin America.
Below we are going to share some tips with you. Keep reading!
You need to know your audience
Think about it: If you had to ask your mother for a loan, how would you go about it? Would you use the same tactics and words if you had to make this request to your father? Probably not, right?
Well, that's because you know them intimately: habits, behavior, likes and dislikes. And that's what you need to know to make sure you can ask your reader for something (email address or any other type of data sent through a form).
To get to know your audience, you need to talk to them! Go to events where they are, reach out to some of them to gather feedback, create a routine of weekly or monthly interviews. On top of that, you can also:
study web analytics data;
create easy-to-interpret click maps or heat maps;
use session recording tools;
conduct frequent surveys to collect proprietary data;
run A/B tests to understand what brings better results.
Understanding what the visitor wants in that blog post
A good content brief will likely highlight the keyword, the buyer persona , what stage of the customer journey you're planning for (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel), and a table of contents with the topics you should cover to successfully satisfy the reader's intent.
All of this information is also important when choosing the lead generation offer you will showcase in your blog post.
If the offer doesn't match the context, you'll probably have a sadly small conversion rate (if any at all!).
Diversify the offerings and the paths that lead to them
We know that our content is not read completely most of the time. Depending on the reader's needs, they will simply scan the text, eager to find what they are looking for with minimal effort.
With that in mind, we need to make sure we have a call to action ( CTA ) and an offer for each type of reader.
If your text is about "Interactive Content" and you have a strong and in-depth ebook about it, for example, add CTAs more than once and, if possible, in different styles:
Text CTA;
banner;
short introductory video to the topic.
Everything counts!
Follow good practices on copywriting and UX
Readers tend to scan content, looking for sections that pertain to their research.
So, if you are sure that your lead generation offer is related to the context of the text and can help them, make sure to highlight it properly.
You can use bold, italics, bullets, larger fonts, or different colors. The important thing is to know what works for your audience.
Whenever possible, work with mental triggers to increase the chances of attracting leads. These triggers are stimuli received by our brain that directly influence our decision making.
