Let me start by being very direct: your content must convert people into customers

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Yes, I know, most of us would rather just write and make beautiful and useful content. Or are we not going to consider all the lives that knowledge has transformed by the simple fact of existing?

Well… after all, we are professionals, working in companies that if physician database they don't sell, they won't invest in our educational content and they won't even have money to pay us.

So, we better do our part to help our businesses increase sales and make sure we can pay our bills too.

How can you ensure that your content not only educates, entertains or solves readers’ problems, but also brings them one step closer to becoming part of your customer base?

I'll give you some tips based on my experience trying to convert the 7 million readers from around the world that Rock Content attracts to their blogs every month.

Keep reading!

Organizing the workspace
To know what you can offer your readers, you need to be fully aware of what you have available.

At Rock Content, the world leader in Content Marketing , we have:

four content solutions;
a talent network of 80,000 freelancers;
global presence, especially in the US, Brazil and Mexico (i.e. we work in three languages).
So, to make sure all content editors working on our blogs know how to promote our lead generation resources:

we document everything about them;
We augment this documentation with all the promotional materials available to them.
This can be a super simple task or a Herculean task.

At Rock Content, it was more like the latter: in the end, we found that we have over 300 landing pages for ebooks, webinars, spreadsheets, demo requests, etc. in Portuguese. We also have around 150 in Spanish and 120 in English .

Now we have all these resources documented in a big table like this:

Language Content Name Content Type Landing page link Link to all promotional images HTML code to insert the banner
IN Example 1 Webinar example1.com https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/ <a href="https://example1.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img src="https://example1.png"/></a>
PT Example 2 Ebook example2.com https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/
Transforming our mindset from “SEO optimization” to “SEO for conversion optimization”
At Rock Content, anyone who publishes content is already crafting it to be loved by Google. SEO is in our veins.

Since 2019, we have begun our internationalization process in the United States, where we are growing 30% quarterly in traffic and today we have hundreds of thousands of monthly visits.

But, in Brazil and Mexico , where we have more maturity, Rock Content has millions of visitors and is positioned in the first places of the SERPs for important keywords such as SEO, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, etc.

But to be honest, sometimes our blogging team forgot to think about the rest of the day – the offers we could make to get the reader one step closer to becoming a lead .

To solve that problem, as a Lead Gen Manager, I trained the Marketing team, showing all the possibilities they have to promote lead generation resources in a blog post.

With that, we have increased our lead generation by 30% quarter over quarter in the North American market and maintained 5% growth in Latin America.

Below we are going to share some tips with you. Keep reading!

You need to know your audience
Think about it: If you had to ask your mother for a loan, how would you go about it? Would you use the same tactics and words if you had to make this request to your father? Probably not, right?

Well, that's because you know them intimately: habits, behavior, likes and dislikes. And that's what you need to know to make sure you can ask your reader for something (email address or any other type of data sent through a form).

To get to know your audience, you need to talk to them! Go to events where they are, reach out to some of them to gather feedback, create a routine of weekly or monthly interviews. On top of that, you can also:

study web analytics data;
create easy-to-interpret click maps or heat maps;
use session recording tools;
conduct frequent surveys to collect proprietary data;
run A/B tests to understand what brings better results.
Understanding what the visitor wants in that blog post
A good content brief will likely highlight the keyword, the buyer persona , what stage of the customer journey you're planning for (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel), and a table of contents with the topics you should cover to successfully meet the reader's intent.

All of this information is also important when choosing the lead generation offer you will showcase in your blog post.

If the offer doesn't match the context, you'll probably have a sadly small conversion rate (if any at all!).

Diversify the offerings and the paths that lead to them
We know that our content is not read completely most of the time. Depending on the reader's needs, they will simply scan the text, eager to find what they are looking for with minimal effort.

With that in mind, we need to make sure we have a call to action ( CTA ) and an offer for each type of reader.

If your text is about "Interactive Content" and you have a strong and in-depth ebook about it, for example, add CTAs more than once and, if possible, in different styles:

Text CTA;
banner;
short introductory video to the topic.
Everything counts!

Follow good practices on copywriting and UX
Readers tend to scan content, looking for sections that pertain to their research.

So, if you are sure that your lead generation offer is related to the context of the text and can help them, make sure to highlight it properly.

You can use bold, italics, bullets, larger fonts, or different colors. The important thing is to know what works for your audience.

Whenever possible, work with mental triggers to increase the chances of attracting leads. These triggers are stimuli received by our brain that directly influence our decision making.

Some of the most common triggers for Content Marketing are:

Social proof: “over 10,000 people have already downloaded this template”
Shortage: “Subscribe now! We have limited spots available”
Authority: “Check out our latest webinar on the subject with lead generation specialist Marina Cordeiro.”
There are many more! The important thing here is to use them only when the information communicated is real.

Tools and tactics for conversion
Now that we've shared some guidelines on how to prepare your texts to be conversion-oriented, let's dive into how you can put them into practice on your blog.

Image CTA
Banners can be effective, but we need to know how to work with them to avoid "banner blindness."

The term banner blindness was coined in 1998 in an academic paper by Jan Panero Benway and David M. Lane. It is used to explain that users have learned to ignore content that:

they look like advertisements;
are close to the ads;
appear in places traditionally dedicated to advertisements.
Explain why you will see higher conversion rates from banners strategically placed within a blog post (depending on the context) than from having them in the sidebar of your blog layout.


Use them sparingly, as a way to give your reader a little break from the large block of text.

But if your content is already filled with images, it may be better to use text CTAs instead.

Text CTA
Marketing writers often know the importance of internal and external backlinks for SEO. But they often forget how powerful those links can be for lead generation as well.

Don’t make that mistake! When adding links within your blog post, remember to include some for landing pages of ebooks, webinars, or any other lead generation offers as well.

If you have custom parameters for tracking the conversion path (or if you add UTMs), you'll be able to see how much this can impact your lead generation efforts.

Using text CTAs within content is a great way to avoid banner blindness. To increase visibility, it's best to create hyperlinks at the beginning of paragraphs or at the end of them. You can also take advantage of proximity with H2 headings.


Another suggestion is to implement “Learn More” or “Related Content” paragraphs within the text, including 3 or more links to relevant offers.



Templates
I call this tactic “templating,” but it can be any type of rich content that you think would help your reader.

It's super simple:

look at your Google Analytics and find the most popular blog posts you have;
read each and every one of them taking into account the user's intention;
Spot ideas for new lead generation offers that you can create and promote within that content.
I got this information from this Hubspot blog post and noticed other companies are doing it too when I read this Sleeknote newsletter.