Content Marketing 101: How to Create Content That Convince and Convert

Remember the last time you tried to sell something to someone, whether physically or online; The first thing you thought of was how to construct the words to basically make them buy right? that is where your content marketing strategy should come in.

Every day, we seek a better way to communicate what we sell so people can buy, but it just seems to become more difficult to create content that sells, especially considering that the internet is quite saturated with irrelevant content.

You’ve been wondering

Why is my content not bringing home leads, not to talk of converting? Well, the thing is, you’ve not been creating what appeals to the audience that seeks what you offer and it is also likely that you failed to conduct the necessary research before putting out content online.

Because of this, I want to show you: How you can create content that will Convince and Convert your audience to Buy. I know you really want to dive into the real deal now but first, we have to cover the basics of content marketing… just read along 😏😏

What is Content Marketing?

According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a marketing technique that focuses on producing and delivering valuable, relevant, and consistent content in order to attract and maintain a specific audience, with an aim to eventually drive sales.

Content marketing allows you to gain authority in a niche, promote brand awareness and keep your products evergreen in the minds of your buyers.

Examples:

Content marketing can take various forms, below are examples:

• Blogging
• Social media marketing
• Visual content marketing
• Video marketing
• Ebook and resources
• Other content marketing

What Makes a Good Content Marketing?

Good content marketing has a purpose it seeks to achieve, this allows you to map out a strategy that aligns with the business goals, whilst creating valuable content that, convinces and turns leads into actual customers.

How to Start and Implement a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing works best when you have a strategic plan in place while creating your content. It allows you to create relevant and engaging content that is guaranteed to convince and convert prospects into actual buyers.

Don’t Make This Mistake!

Having worked with several businesses to implement a content strategy, I realized that a lot of business owners do way too much without a single strategy attached to what’s been done hence, they have less or no results.

Creating content without a strategy is a total waste of time, it will never pay off and it takes you much more effort and resources to run because you’ll eventually try to do everything within sight and in the end get frustrated. And your business will never get results till you realize this.

So What Are You Supposed to do?

• Establish your purpose: The first step in your content marketing strategy is to understand why you are creating the content – Is it to drive awareness? is it to get more leads? is it to grow a mailing list? You should decide this first. Once you’ve figured out your objectives, you will need to set some goals. These goals would help you assess the success of your content marketing.

• Know your audience: There’s something called your audience persona – have you figured out what it is? you cannot be selling something to someone who you are sure of what their needs are, then how do you pitch it to them? First, you’ll need to know what interests them, what they like, need and even would be ready/willing to buy. Also, you need to know their demographics in most cases (age group, location, gender and income etc) – these will help you predict their response to your content and help you create better content.

• See what your competitors are doing: The next step is knowing the type of competition you will be faced with while trying to attract your target audience. There will be other sources giving the same content you’re creating so find out what they are doing differently and how this is helping them reach that goal – then tweak yours to follow suit in a unique way.

• Do your topic and keyword research. Once you’ve defined your audience and set out your objectives, the next step is to find what your audience is searching for online – I made a video on how to sell through trends, see it here. You may need to use the google search engine to see what people are searching for and other search engines. Investigating the search volume for the specific keywords will give you an insight into how many people are searching for the keyword and related terms which will give you an idea of what your content should look like.

• Track metrics & review: It’s not enough to put content out there and relax, this isn’t going to work like magic dearie! You still have to track what you’ve put out and see how well it worked/ is working. What are people engaging with the most? Are there any leads yet? if yes then what is bringing in the leads? Do you need to make some corrections? Where do you need to improve? Have you gotten valuable insights to inspire your work? The overall performance metrics will help you build a picture of the type of content that interests your target audience.

• Improve on what you started and note down the strategy: Everything listed this far is already building your content strategy, so what you need to do now is to note down the patterns you’ve seen with your prospects, note down what the next action points will be, at this point, you can even improve on the initial purpose you drafted, this is because you definitely have gotten more clarity and might want to get more realistic with what the goal is.

• Consistency sells more than any other strategy: After doing all the above, you will lose out on getting reasonable results if you are not consistent with your content marketing. You need to always show up to actually convince (Conviction isn’t a sure bet on one-time) so please always put content out there. I’ll suggest you work with tools that aid auto-sharing like scheduling apps, so you need to create your content at a certain frequency which you can keep up with and then schedule.

• Monitor every step: As I said before, it’s not magic. You need to understand the metrics and use them to improve your strategy. If you are not improving according to the message your metrics are portraying, then don’t expect to convert or get sales anytime soon. Tracking performance metrics and how your audience responded to your content will help you in creating and optimizing the next for maximum success.

Recommended for you: 5 Truths No One Would Tell You About Starting an Online Business

In conclusion

From the aforementioned above, you will realize that content marketing is a cycle, you will need to learn about your audience and the content that works for them as you progress. Also, you need to refine your content marketing strategy as you progress. I hope this gives you the help you seek to start creating content that sells.

Create content that appeals to your ideal customers using my CSR Framework Template

This template will help you derive your audience persona, address the most common sales objections that are stopping them from buying from you and finally, help you build a content marketing system that attracts, convinces and converts.

Grab the Free Template

This is a gentle reminder that “IT ONLY GETS BETTER AS YOUR PROGRESS“

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