Today, your customers get exposed to a tsunami of message blasts across Facebook ads, Google ads, emails, notifications, physical advertisements, junk mail, and so on. According to Forbes, most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.
Whether it’s your homepage content, Facebook ads, or the CTA in your latest blog, any time you converse with people through words, you have a chance to make an impression through your marketing messaging. The stronger, more consistent your messaging, the more people will be compelled to learn more, click around, sign up, download, and eventually convert into a customer.
Regrettably, many brands either miss the target or don’t have the impact they could. Whether their messaging is too inconsistent or too generic, it’s a lost opportunity and they fall short of their goal of getting more of their audience to convert into customers.
Meanwhile, well-written social media marketing messages that provide relevant, readable, and engaging content can bring significant conversion rates. So, how do you write content that converts? How can you get people to take action after reading your content?
Regardless of your marketing campaign whether it is running Facebook ads or creating a message for your homepage, the message needs to resonate with people and do so in a powerful way. To help you get the most out of your marketing content we’re going to share some tips for crafting a marketing message that converts.
Understand Your Audience
The first thing is to understand who you are marketing to. What are their problems, wants, and needs? Are you writing content for your customers and prospects based on their needs and wants? Or, are you writing content based on what you think they need and want? There’s a big disparity between the two.
So, before creating any content, it is imperative to pinpoint your niche and brand persona. Only then can you create the ideal marketing message that converts in your campaigns. As a small business creating a brand persona, the easiest way to create a personality for your company is to envision the type of person you think would be most interested in your products and services and create messaging for them.
Outstanding content that converts should:
- Target a very specific audience
- Solve a common problem or pain point of your target audience
- Provide real value to your customers and prospects by giving them a solution to their problem
- Demonstrate understanding of what frustrates your audience as well as what gets them excited.
Once you get to know your audience and have a clear idea of what they want to know and learn, you can create content specifically targeted to them.
The Headline Sets the Table
Simply put, if your headline isn’t getting people’s attention and interest, they’re not going to read it. And if they’re not going to read it, then you’re not going to increase your conversions either. Don’t leave your headline as an afterthought because it has an enormous effect on your click-through rate and traffic, as well as on your conversion rate.
Here are some tips to help you write more effective headlines that convert:
- Be clear about what the content is about so that readers know what they’ll get out of reading it.
- Use emotional headlines where relevant; they too can drive a lot of traffic and engagement. They don’t work in all situations, but where possible, use emotional phrases in headlines to drive emotional responses.
- Focus on one of your audiences’ problems
- Make it clear what problem the specific piece of content will help with
- Use numbers in your headlines. Studies show that numbers are incredibly powerful and can help you generate more clicks and readers.
Be Consistent
Consistency is everything in marketing. The more regularly you interact with your audience, and the more consistently you tell your brand story, the easier it is to form a relationship with your customers and prospects. Customers like consistency. It creates a feeling of reliability, and subsequently trust.
You can do this by following the same messaging framework that your business uses. The more customers can identify a certain type of message with your brand the more they are likely to trust you.
Write Content to Increase Readability
With marketing, a primary goal is to grab the readers’ attention. Online content has improved a lot over the last few years. Yet, I still see content that’s not readable enough, even when they’re providing valuable information.
Here’s a helpful list to use to increase readability when you write content:
- Use short sentences and paragraphs, bullet points, and lists. Remember that most people are reading your content on small screens, while on-the-go, and also while being sidetracked by other tabs and notifications. If you want people to read through your content, make it easy for them.
- Use the introduction to relate to your reader’s problems or to explain what the content is about and what they’ll get out of it.
- Break down your content with subheadings. It makes it so much easier to read and skim through.
- Use visuals throughout your content. They make your content easier to read and provide good breaks within the content.
- Resist using jargon. It’s vital to speak in a voice that your audience will understand.
- Edit your copy for clarity. Read through it more than once and make it shorter, tighter, and more concise.
Craft Messages to People with Personalized Content
Another crucial step in increasing your conversions from content is to write more personalized content for different members of your audience. Unfortunately, this is often one of the most downplayed and lightly taken strategies when crafting a marketing message that converts.
It’s important to remember that, whatever your niche, your customers and prospects are not one cohesive mass of people with the same questions, needs, and wants. Talk as if you are speaking to people and not about people. For instance, use second-person voice in your messaging. This means using “you” and avoiding using “them.”
Likewise, avoid using complex words and jargon as it can leave people confused and feeling as though the advertisement wasn’t meant for them.
So, if you want to increase conversions, then you need to write targeted content for all of these audience segments, focusing on their needs and pain points, and speaking to them as individuals who aren’t part of some homogenous group.
Use Emotion
A great way to make certain that your marketing content reverberates with your customers and prospects is by appealing to their emotions. If you can stimulate their need to use your product or service then they will be more likely to convert.
The brand persona that you created before composing any content helped you understand peoples’ needs, fears, and wants. Your job is to create copy around those connection points.
When marketing, talk more about the benefits of your products rather than their features. Remember, your customers and prospects probably don’t care about the technicalities that go into creating your product. Rather, they care about whether the product is going to help them, their loved ones, or their business.
Include Content Upgrades to Generate More Leads
One easy-to-employ technique that will increase lead generation from your content is to include content upgrades. A content upgrade is a lead magnet, something with irresistible information they can download for free, created specifically for a blog post or piece of content.
And because your customers and prospects are being so well-targeted, they are more likely to opt-in. As a case in point, if you were reading a guide on how to rank on the first page in search results, then you’d probably be very interested in getting a checklist with all the steps you need to take to optimize your content and achieve the top ranking.
Here are some of the high-performing types of upgrades you can include in your content:
- PDF versions of your content (particularly for high-value pieces of content like how-to guides)
- Checklists
- Templates
- Cheat sheets
- Case Studies and Reports
- Worksheets
- Courses
- Infographics
Final Thoughts
Writing filler content won’t get you the results you want and need. Instead, you need to create carefully-crafted content that’s highly targeted and offers huge value. That’s how you grow your traffic, engagement, and perhaps most importantly, conversions.
Crafting a marketing message that converts is not as difficult as it may appear. Using the tips and techniques outlined above that appeal to your customer persona, you can increase conversions.
Every day at Obsessed With Success we help our clients craft a clear and concise marketing message that converts and we’d love to help you too! Let’s connect and schedule your free, no-obligation, marketing consultation where will take a look at what you’re already doing and make some suggestions on how you can do it better!
