Content is King – I’ve said it, millions others have said the same. And while content’s royal status may never change, one thing undeniably has – customer behavior.
Gone are the days when people used to sit and watch commercials on TV, now they DVR their shows, skip through the ads and go right to the good stuff. Online consumers are no different.
No one really cares for banner ads or buttons anymore, to get your product message out to your customers you no longer need just content (no matter how great of a king it is) you need content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
The term is being used a lot on the marketing block these days; everyone seems to be talking about it and why shouldn’t they be, when it leads you right to conversion success. Content marketing may not be new, but its power has multiplied exponentially in the past couple of years.
And while content marketing can be defined from various angles the definition that I find most apt comes from the Content Marketing Institute and goes something like this:
“Your customers don’t care about you, your products, your services… they care about themselves, their wants and their needs. Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about so they actually pay attention to you.”
The above lines may seem abrasive, but they’re ripe with the truth and that’s the kind of marketing I like, straight up with no BS.
Why should Sally Sue care about how much time and money you’ve spent on your service if all she sees representing your service is a badly optimized slow landing page, your landing page is your calling card, make sure that the content you’ve included on it translates your love of your service.
Landing pages are an excellent content marketing tool when used in the right degree and caliber.
If you want to attract your customers you need to come up with content (yes, in all sorts of shapes and sizes), but content that tickles your customer’s fancy, not what you think looks cool.
Have Your Customers Gotten the Content Cold Yet?
Both great content and the common cold are highly contagious, when you produce excellent content it translates into conversions in a snap.
Content + Greatness = Conversions
If your landing pages still haven’t infected your customers with the content marketing bug, you need to think about doing the aforementioned soon – real soon.
Content marketing is all about finding the right balance between the quality and quantity of content that you’re producing.
Creating content just for the sake of content doesn’t work anymore, you need to make sure that every little shred of content that leads visitors to your landing page, be it a blog, an infographic or a PPC ad has the right tone and message to stop your visitors in their tracks and take notice.
What’s coming up next in the post are methods for you to content market your way to conversion success by leveraging your landing pages the right way.
Blog Your Brains Out
If you’re a marketer with an internet connection and a pulse, you must also be a marketer with a blog. Use your blog (or someone else’s) to point your reader’s attention someplace else, someplace relevant – but, someplace else.
Like your landing page!
The blogosphere keeps growing, in fact 46% of people read blogs more than once a day, with most people reading 5-10 blogs.
You need to harness this statistical power and use it to your advantage, by tying your blog content with your landing page content, to lead your visitors straight to your call to action button.
Offer your subscribers something they simply can’t say no to, and get yourself call to action clicks all over the place.
Just remember relevancy is the key. Don’t expect to promote a complicated e-commerce solution on a cooking blog.
Witty Whitepapers get the Job done
White papers are another great tool for content marketing, they help educate your customers (both present & potential) about your product/service and ultimately generate leads for you.
A successful white paper is that which captures and retains your reader’s interest. With whitepapers oftentimes marketers focus too much on the content and leave the marketing out of the equation.
This is a big mistake.
When you write a white paper, never forget to write a landing page to accompany it, because failure to do so will result in your whitepaper getting lost in the sea of all the other unread whitepapers.
When you market your whitepaper on its very own landing page highlighting the benefits that it will provide your readers, its chances of being downloaded and read increases by tenfold.
Use your confirmation pages wisely, get your visitors to your landing pages and then lead them smoothly to your call to action button.
Don’t ask your visitors for too much of their personal information on your white paper lead capture form, you’re looking to capture your leads not lose them.
Go Viral with Infographics
Infographics are great for content marketing, why? Because, they have the potential of going viral, being shared across multiple channels increasing the chances of deeper user engagement.
After you’ve come up with your infographic all you need to do is act smartly.
Create a short lead capture form with an attractive call to action button to extend the conversation that you can have with your visitors.
The perfect time for the nice old upsell.
Make sure to include a social sharing call to action button with your infographic, make it easy for your visitors to share your content.
If you’re not going to do that, who do you think will?
Go Wild with Webinars
Webinars are effective because they combine both the visual and verbal aspects of your product promotion.
The difference between webinars and all the other content marketing tools that I’ve mentioned above is that webinars are generally gated; not everyone can just view them, there’s a whole registration or sign up process in place.
Webinars and the slides that are created as highlights for better public consumption are both great ways to get your hands on some good lead generation.
Embed a nicely optimized lead capture form with these highlights and slides and get a better chance of increasing your customer engagement.
You can also use the slides as bait to get an upsell. And embed the slides onto landing pages to get increased lead generation.
No matter what you’re designing your landing page for, make sure that you have optimized it for every size screen, just doing this increases a lot of your conversions.
Content marketing is really easy to execute, once you get over yourself and start centering your content on your customers.
Always connect all your ads to personalized post-click landing pages to lower your cost per customer acquisition. Start creating your dedicated post-click pages by signing up for an Instapage Enterprise demo today.
