At this point, you have your content marketing strategy at play: you understand your market, you know who your readers are, you’re getting a feel of what they want and need, you’re changing up your content to give them what they want and need, and you’re gathering a growing readership base. You’ve spent loads of your time and money to get those readers to your site — any one of them can be potential buyers. You’re really serious about growing your business through content marketing. So how do you turn your readers to buying customers with your content?
1). Build up trust by priming your readers to buy.
As a website owner you know that trust is key to converting your visitors to buyers. It’s verified in all customer feedback surveys made: an overwhelming customer response in the range of 93%-97% show that trust is the #1 factor they consider before buying from an online business. The more your potential customers trust you, the more they will buy from you.
You have the attention of your readership base, but you can’t go too straight away to the selling part. To cover all these three bases at any point in your content marketing strategy, mix content up so that it’s continuously at work building the trust and personal and commercial relationships between you and your readers:
- 1st Base: Build up trust as a credible and reliable resource for information by steadily providing content that’s useful and helpful. Keep delivering content that supplies complete answers to their questions so that they don’t need to go anywhere else to find it.
- 2nd Base: Intensify their interest by continually giving out tips and advice, how-to discussions, lists of suggestions through your blog or email comprehensive newsletters that provide solutions to their problems so they’ll regard you as a friend and a mentor.
- 3rd Base: Get them ready to buy with content that progressively adds in some persuasive approach. Bit by bit, throw in some content that gives them a glimpse of what you have to offer, give details about your business to distinguish you from the competition so they can compare and decide that you’re the better one to do business with, put in an ad that triggers their interest to find out more details about your offer.
2). Hit home run
Time to close in on the sale; your reader is ready to buy. From this point, what do you want him to do, where do you want him to go? Give clear and to the point instructions: “To find out more, please visit… or go to… or click here…” to send him to a landing page or web page where he can focus on your up-front selling, weigh up on your killer offer, act on your further call for action, and finally buy your product or service. Take into account the following:
- Make sure the click he makes sends him straight away to your correct and exact landing page or sales page. Don’t waste his time, don’t distract his attention or drive him away by sending him to a home page that he still needs to navigate and figure out where to go to next. Land him straight up to precisely where you want him to be.
- Make sure your purchase forms are easy and quick to fill up. Only ask for the basic personal information relevant to your business like name, contact details, and payment information, otherwise you’ll rouse their suspicion. If you’re selling E-books, you don’t need to know their social security number or tax identification number. Keep the buying process simple and fast, online sales shouldn’t take more than half an hour to complete from the moment they land on your sales page.
- Replies to business emails should be done no more than two days. Speedy customer service turnaround encourages customer loyalty and retention and therefore repeat business for you. Consumers would rather deal with a product/service having minor problems, but with great customer support than with a product/service having hardly any problems, but with lousy or no customer support.
