Content Marketing – Converting Website Visitors to Leads

Website optimization or SEO drives slae sleads to your WebsiteYou have a website and plenty of visitors arrive; however, few of those website visitors convert. Successful websites use content to attract the right visitors and prompt them to convert. If you’re looking for higher conversions and higher quality leads, it pays to create and optimize content. For example, did you know that content creators are nearly 30 percent more successful at converting organic website traffic into leads than non-content creators?

The Importance of Engaging and Nurturing Prospects
What does creating content mean? It means that creating a website with basic pages about your company and its offer isn’t enough. You need to regularly create relevant, optimized, and engaging content in order to attract high quality prospects and convert them.

Engaging prospects is a must if you want to pique their interest, educate and inform, and earn their trust. If you do this well, you are positioning your solution for success. Publishing engaging content is the first step, but again, it’s not a matter of publishing it and forgetting about it. You’ll need to move from engaging to nurturing your leads. This means segmenting leads and providing them with targeted content in a convenient, accessible manner.

For example, if you publish a whitepaper on a topic your prospect is interested in and require an email opt-in as part of the whitepaper download process, you can then send relevant, engaging content through a series of email messages that build on topics and needs explored in the whitepaper. These messages would be specific to those who have downloaded the whitepaper. If the whitepaper is about online data backup systems, then your email series would need to be relevant to online data backup systems and not about portable hard disk drives or tape backup systems.

Content Marketing Options
The options available for engaging prospects with content are numerous and include everything from blog posts, online videos, whitepapers, newsletters, email marketing, and webinars to social media, podcasting, and more. Whether you pick one channel or several, it’s important to keep your content relevant and informative.

Other content marketing tips include:

  • Maintain a steady pace. While it’s difficult to generate thousands of pieces of content at once, it’s realistic to do so one piece at a time.
  • Use analytics. From Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to bit.ly links, numerous tools are available that can quickly reveal which content resonates the most with prospects.
  • Act on analytical insights. If you’ve discovered that each time you post to Facebook, you receive a flood of high quality traffic, act on that and make sure to post regularly on Facebook. Similarly, if you’ve discovered that some types of posts convert better than others, create more posts like the successful ones and fewer like the not-so-successful ones.
  • Look at what’s popular elsewhere for inspiration. Are how-to tutorials doing well on other sites such as YouTube or Slideshare? If so, posting a how-to tutorial of your own could be a good choice.
  • Learn which keywords your prospects use to find companies like yours. Whether you intend to use paid search or not, paid search keyword tools (which are typically free) can help you gain a deeper understanding of which keywords your prospects use to find companies, products, and services like yours.
  • Take advantage of social sharing sites. Did you recently give a presentation to a small group? Leverage that presentation by posting it on your website, on YouTube, and on Slideshare – and any other social sharing sites that are appropriate – and reach a larger audience.
  • Use social media. Create a Facebook business page and use it to interact with your audience. Encourage conversations by asking engaging questions. Take a long-term approach, post engaging content, and include calls-to-action without being overly aggressive or pushy.

No matter what type of content you create and how you get it in front of your prospects, the goal is to engage, inform, and nurture.

How are you using content to convert leads? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

 

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