Content marketing is one of the foundations of a strong digital marketing strategy. The key is to create valuable and relevant content for your target audience as a way of building trust in your brand. 

Content marketing is never intrusive, which gives it an edge over the more traditional modes of advertising. Users prefer to receive the content they ask for at the right time and in the right channel, so launching a creative multimedia campaign on social media during off-peak hours may only make your content visible on a few uninterested people.

You can also use content marketing to highlight your expertise or authority in your niche. When you become a source of useful information, it will be easier for you to gain conversions. To be clear, conversion doesn’t necessarily mean closing a sale, although it definitely wouldn’t hurt if you were able to achieve this objective.

Imagine an online shopper who abandons his/her cart. A merchant may send a marketing message to try to bring the website or app visitor back into the fold. The shopper turning into a paying customer is an example of conversion in content marketing (or simple conversion content marketing), where the consumer took the desired action as presented by the brand or business.

In digital marketing, there are many other examples of conversion that let you test just how effective your content is. When someone in your email list clicks on the link leading to your landing page and fills out a form, it is considered a conversion.

Installing an app, downloading your content, or responding to your opt-in SMS—these are all forms of conversion. Even getting your followers to share your content on social media is a type of conversion. In other words, you get a conversion whenever a potential customer responds to your call-to-action (CTA).

Considering the significance of conversion for your business, you need to know the principles that you can use to improve your conversion content marketing strategy.

Principle 1: Conversion is optional

Conversion happens naturally when visitors find your content valuable, so instead of focusing on getting their contact details, aim for their time and attention first. Connecting with your prospects this way opens the door for a more meaningful interaction, which can lead to a long-term relationship between your customer and your business.

As a general rule, you should never ask your prospects for anything if you’re not out to offer value with your content. That said, you should work more toward optional conversion. Whether you have a comprehensive guide or an infographic, you should allow the visitors of your website to access and consume it without any sign-up form.

If they like your content well enough and want more of it, that’s the only time that you can ask them to convert. At this point, you may offer them several options to help them move further along the customer journey. It can be an option to have someone contact them for an in-depth consultation on a particular topic or to sign them up for exclusive content.

Principle 2: Testing your content is mandatory

Creating content and promoting it isn’t solely what content marketing is all about; yet, some marketers fall into this trap, thinking that the goal is to keep producing as much content as possible. The part about testing content tends to be overlooked or ignored.

If you want to have a high-converting blog page, you should make testing an integral part of your content marketing process. From the headline to the copy and the CTA, you should make it a habit to test different variations of your content. Don’t forget the colors, layout, and visuals, too. These elements on your blog page can help in increasing your page views, social shares, and, ultimately, conversion rates.

Here are some actionable tips that are proven to work:

• Integrate power words into your headline. Instead of simply saying, “N Ways to Boost Your Conversion,” a more powerful, compelling headline will be something like “N Smart Ways to Boost Your conversion.” By adding some power words, you’re able to draw readers’ attention to your content, where you can further engage them.
  
• Use odd numbers in your headline. Apparently, headlines that use odd numbers outperform those that have an even number on them by 20%. With listicles, for example, odd numbers like 21 don’t make it look like you’re trying to keep things short at 20, which is an even number.
  
• Go for readability and clarity. Your copy has to be plain and simple enough for everyone to understand it. One way to achieve this style of writing is to use a conversational tone so that it will sound like you’re talking to someone you know.

Remember that testing has a two-fold purpose. For one, testing allows you to gather insights as to what works or doesn’t work and why. With these insights, you can then plan what type of content to offer so that it ranks well on search and drives traffic to your site.

Principle 3: Format is as flexible as possible

Competition is highest in the content marketing space, and unless you bring out your A-game, you may have a hard time catching up.

When creating content, you should be ready to try new formats every now and then. Blog posts are definitely useful for your content lineup, but they may not always offer the optimal value that your audience is looking for.

For example, you may run a series of blogs that focus on small business financial tips to overcome the coronavirus outbreak, but the same blog format may not be suitable if you’re trying to track how fast the virus spreads. For this kind of specialized content, you probably need to invest time and effort in creating a web application that can be used to track the movement of the virus within communities.

Increase Your Content Marketing Team’s Conversion Rates

Conversion is every marketer’s ultimate goal, which is highly achievable if you live by the principles of good content marketing. Get to know your customers and what they want, so you can offer content that delivers the most value for them. Study industry trends and update your strategies.

As you do these things, remember to put consumers first always. When you make your content marketing campaigns all about your potential customers, everything else will follow—organic traffic, brand authority and image, audience engagement, and finally, conversion.