How to Turn Your Followers into Buyers with Content That Converts

You work hard to create, curate, and share great content with your audience for your business. You’re getting your brand to be more visible out there on social media and traffic to your website is steadily growing.

But there is a problem, no one is buying from you.

You are simply missing some critical elements in your content marketing strategy. The whole effort you put in content is pointless if you’re not converting leads to sales. There is no amount of traffic in all the social media platforms that if driven to your website can help you convert them.

In simple terms, your content should be optimized to turn viewers who are just looking into buyers who close out your store?

If you’re serious about using content that converts like crazy to grow your business, you need to use a little marketing psychology.

Let’s get started…

The First Step to creating content that will convert is knowing who your ideal audience is. Knowing they mind and addressing their pain point with your content then they’ll be eager to click that button.

Know Your Audience

All businesses that have a success story had the ability to meet the needs of their audience.

As a business, your strategy must start and end with your audience. The same thing goes for content marketing, you need to know who you’re trying to convert.

• What’s their demographics?
• Where do they hang out?
• What are their needs?
• What are their values?
• What words and phrases they like to use?
• What makes them happy?
• What frustrates makes them?

You can get answers to these questions using the following methods.

• Join forums relevant to your niche
• Search for niche keywords in Quora and Yahoo Answers
• Search for keywords specific to your niche in social media
• Invite visitors to your website to fill in a survey
• Study the blogs and magazines they read
• Meet them in real life by attending relevant events

Create Relevant and Useful Content

The secret sauce of effective content marketing is in creating content that is relevant and useful to your audience. The more relevant and useful your content is, the more engaged your audience will be and the more they will trust you.

To optimize your conversions you should pick interesting topics that address your audience’s pain points and allow you to demonstrate your expertise.

This is where your knowledge of your audience comes in. After doing your research, you should have a clear idea of what their needs are.

Which of those needs can you fulfill? Those would make great topics for your content.

It’s often effective to be highly targeted with your content. For example, an article about social media strategies will have a broad appeal, but the topic is too general to really engage people. Now an article about social media strategies for solo entrepreneurs might turn off a section of readers, but the ones to whom it applies will be highly engaged.

Remember, engagement leads to conversions.

Grab Attention with Better Headlines

It’s a given that a compelling headline can attract more readers and therefore bring in more customers. But, did you know that experts believe you have five seconds or less to capture your reader’s attention when they land on your site?

You risk them leaving your website to wander around the internet and find someone else, and completely forgetting about your business if you don’t grab their attention from the get-go.

Fortunately, this problem has an easy solution:

Whenever you have a headline you know could be better, try using the 4 U’s to test it out. The 4 U’s are urgency, usefulness, uniqueness, and ultra-specific.

Hook Them with Your Opening

Now that you’ve captured your reader’s attention with your headline. The next step is to give them a hook that pulls them in further into your world.

Statistics show that People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. In fact, our average attention span is now 8 seconds. For goldfish, it’s 9 seconds.

It simply means you need to hook your reader from your first sentence. You need to make them so interested in what you have to say that they don’t even want to blink to make sure they don’t miss anything. If you don’t they’ll just get distracted by the next shiny object and wander off to read or watch some videos.

Here are some great ways of starting your posts with a bait and hook in hand;

Ask a question. When you ask a question, you’re getting your reader pause and think. Thinking brings about engagement with that post. That’s a good thing.

Drop an astounding statistic. Don’t use a statistic that your audience will be familiar with. Make them go “Wow, I never knew that!”

Describe a problem. Go straight to where it hurts the most. Right into the problem your content will be addressing. Don’t just define the problem. Go deep. Layout the pain that the problem is causing.

Build a Connection

Content marketing is about building a relationship with your target audience. To build a relationship, you must form a connection. Now if you’ve done your homework right you should have ideas of the values and interests of your audience. Your content should match with those values and interests.

For instance, if your target audience is entrepreneurs, they priority maybe to save money over saving time. While for an audience of marketing executives, what is most important to them is to save time rather than save money.

Another important point to note is, you should write in a conversational manner. Study the words and phrases that your audience uses when discussing topics related to your business. Use the same words and phrases in your content. You can go further. If your audience demographic is interested in certain aspects of popular culture, you can refer to these to spice up your content.

Once you show your audience that you understand how they think, and how they feel, they will start to trust you. And this is so important in business.

Be Genuinely Helpful

Building rapport is great. But you need to show you can provide value to your audience. If you can’t, why should they buy your products and services? That’s why your content must be helpful. If a reader finds your content to be helpful, they will be confident that purchasing your products or services will benefit them so much more.

Your content can be helpful in the following ways:

Solve the problem. You provide a solution to a common problem your audience is facing. To give the most value, you should provide actionable steps that your audience can take. When they act on your advice and it works, they’ll be eager for more. However, you don’t have to tell them everything they need to know. You can hold something back which will be revealed in your paid products and services.

Educate your readers. As experts in your niche, you’re in a position to teach your audience about niche topics. If you establish a teacher-student relationship with your audience, you’ll be in a position of authority and trust. But remember to use their language. Never use jargon that they won’t understand. And be humble. No one likes arrogance.

Give an informed opinion. In many niches there’s an abundance of advice, many of it conflicting. Your audience is likely confused as to which option to take. They might be spending hours on the internet trying to find an answer. What WordPress SEO plugin is the best? Is cardio or strength training better for weight loss? Clear up your audience’s confusion and demonstrate your expertise. You’ll win a few new fans in the process.

Be emotional

Baby crying for emotional content that converts

No matter how rational your audience is, their emotions still exert a huge influence over their decision-making process. Analysis of data from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising revealed that adverts with emotional content performed almost twice as well as those with purely rational content (31% effectiveness vs 16% effectiveness).

For our purposes emotions can be broadly divided into two categories:

Positive emotions. Joy, happiness, satisfaction.

Negative emotions. Fear, frustration, anxiety.

In general, evoking positive emotions is going to reap the greatest rewards in content marketing. As Psychology Today reports, studies show that positive emotions regarding a brand have a far greater effect on consumer loyalty than any other factor.

You can evoke positive emotions by:

Using a lively, optimistic writing voice.

Encouraging your audience to achieve their goals.

Sharing inspirational success stories.

Now this is not to say that evoking negative emotions is necessarily bad. You just need to be strategic about it. Copywriters have long harnessed negative emotions to sell using the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) formula.

It works like this:

Problem. Identify your audience’s pain point. For example, say your audience wants more traffic to their website.

Agitate. Rub it in a bit. So your audience has low traffic to their website. Describe their feelings of frustration. Describe their anxiety that they’re never going to succeed.

Solve. Now you’ve really amped up your audience’s desire to find a solution to their problem. At this point, you reveal that you’re going to share your special marketing strategies that will skyrocket their traffic.

Make a Compelling offer

Through using the tactics we’ve outlined, you’ve built a connection with your audience, helped them with their problem, and even got them a little bit emotional.

You have an audience that is highly engaged with your content.

Now it’s time for you to convert them into sales leads.