After producing a series of excellent stories, videos, or social media posts, you may think your job as a content marketer is done. But high-quality content — no matter how much effort went into creating it — doesn’t automatically equal success.
Whether you’re crafting a blog post, developing a white paper, producing a video script, writing a piece of product copy, or anything else for that matter, keeping the wants, needs, and desires of your prospects in mind is paramount. Failure to do so will dilute your content and render your efforts futile.
Is the content you’re making increasing sales? Visits to your site? Growing your audience? To put it simply: Is your marketing achieving your business’s goals? One of the biggest challenges any content marketer faces is coming up with a way to determine whether their content is actually working.
There may be some easy marketing wins hidden in plain sight that you are overlooking in your strategy. With that in mind, here are six ideas to refine your content marketing — and create the desired effect on your target audience.
10 Tips to Create Content That Converts
1. SEO Optimization
Consider this: 40% of consumers regularly receive irrelevant content, according to a 2024 report by marketing platform Marigold. That leaves a lot of room for your content to break through — if you can get it in front of the right eyes. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the way to do that.
It may sound complicated, but good SEO practices are simple. Think about which keywords your audience will use to search for what you’re making — then research them on SEO software platforms such as Semrush to see which words and phrases are the most effective. Use those prominently in the content. Ideal places for these keywords to appear are in the page and site titles, headers, first few paragraphs, and metadata.
Make sure the keywords match both the content and your business. After all, if someone clicks on your story, then immediately decides to go do something else, how can you possibly say you’ve given them an experience that will inspire them to think differently about your brand? Search engines like Google see that behavior and punish you for it, too.
Start with the low-hanging fruit. Look for articles that are almost ranking in top positions, and prioritize updating and promoting those first. Then you can move on to other content on your site.
Finally, how your site is structured and how transparent it is matters, too. If you optimize keywords, but still are struggling to get search traffic, check your site’s loading speed, mobile friendliness, and “About” pages.
2. Click-Through Rate Improvements
One way to measure how relevant your content is the click-through rate or CTR — i.e. how often someone goes from the content or ad to your site. A high CTR — generally hovering at the 2% to 5% mark— can deliver impressive results at a lower cost than other forms of advertising. Look at CTR in these three ways.
First, think about how a customer is encountering your brand and work to make that encounter as seamless and engaging as possible. This includes repetition, as people tend to have more favorable views of brands that are already familiar to them. It also includes being platform friendly: The vast majority of people use the internet through their phone, so make sure all of your content (and the websites they link to) is optimized for that experience.
Next, ask yourself which medium is best for your message and audience. For example, video content continues to work well across platforms, with a 2019 study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau reporting nearly 80% of digital viewers are willing to watch advertising in exchange for free video content.
Then, focus on which strategies increase CTRs with your most loyal visitors. Typically, super users are the ones most likely to check out what your brand offers when it’s time for them to make a purchase (and perhaps recommend it to their friends).
As MailChimp, a leading email marketing platform, states: “A high click-through rate means that the [copy] was engaging and relevant, the call to action was clearly defined, and the overall engagement was good.”
3. Calls to Action Geared to Your Audience’s Stage of the Buyer Journey
So you got a customer’s attention. What’s next? The call to action (CTA). Instead of strictly focusing on sales, think about whether a piece of content is effective in moving a consumer along the path to purchase.
Along a buyer’s journey, there will be big and small CTAs. Did one of your readers sign up for your email newsletter? Did they click a link to a product landing page? Did they watch a product tutorial video? All of these actions can make a consumer more likely to make a purchase once they are ultimately targeted with a direct sales offer. That’s particularly true if the CTA is personalized to where the customer is in their buyer’s journey.
When and how you make the CTA is important. It’s helpful to think of your audience as coming to you through a funnel: The majority of people may see an ad or piece of content and never click through. A smaller amount will click through, but never shop. A still smaller amount may put stuff in their cart, but never buy. And at the bottom of the funnel are the golden eggs — the people who go through with a purchase.
Make sure your CTAs aren’t overly aggressive for the top-of-funnel users — and, conversely, that high-intent visitors are given clear CTAs to purchase.
4. Increased Scroll Depth
Once the reader makes a decision to visit your page, every second matters. So, the next step is to optimize scroll depth — often measured as the percentage of the page or content a person views before clicking away. A good scroll depth is considered to be 60% or more, according to researchers at UXtweak, although it depends on your specific content and medium.
Even if your user is not at the 60% point yet, this measure can still help you. Look at how far users are scrolling and make sure sticky elements and CTAs appear just before the average person exits the content. Quality matters here, too. Put your biggest effort into making these messages aesthetically beautiful and frictionless.
5. Engagement Leading to Loyalty
Research shows it takes just a minute for users to engage with content enough to understand the thesis and recall important information. That’s why it’s important to look at the engaged time and finish rate — ie. how long someone stays on the linked content and whether they read or watch your content all the way through.
This tells you whether the people you’ve attracted to your work are enjoying it enough to stick around — and indicates how likely a customer is to read your content again in the future. Tracking pixels can help you analyze which of your target consumers are making a habit of engaging with your brand over the long-term.
6. Brand Lift Analysis
Consumers usually do not make a purchase immediately after watching or reading a piece of content, so you may have a harder time showing impact than, say, a direct-response marketer (who can just point to their sales conversions). Measuring brand lift gives key insights about the impact your work is having on your audiences and helps you home in on what you should do more of.
Brand lift looks at how much your relationship with consumers has changed as a result of your content. It’s common to hire a survey firm to perform this work. The survey will ask two groups of people what they think of your brand — one who hasn’t seen your content-marketing work, and one who has. For example, they may ask: “Would you consider purchasing Brand X cookies the next time you’re shopping for snacks?” or “Do you see Brand X as trustworthy?” This comparison allows you to see how much — and which type — of your content is moving the needle with your target audience. (If you don’t have the resources to hire a survey firm, you can conduct your own research among your customer base.)
Keep in mind: Analytics alone don’t tell the whole story. Today, researchers can look at a host of physiological reactions — from eye movement, to brainwave and heart rate, to nonverbal facial expressions —to understand how content and customers interact. If the project and budget are big enough, you can hire researchers to actually test physiological responses to your messages. Then, make sure to implement what the researchers suggest!
7. Add authenticity to your copywriting
In a world rife with jargon and buzzwords, many marketers overlook this essential copywriting principle:
Always make your copy authentic.
Even back in the ‘Mad Men‘ days, copywriters fortified their claims with statistics, testimonials and studies to breath authenticity into their words. It’s a notion known today as, social proof.
Today’s consumers crave transparency, credibility and authenticity from brands. This means that honesty, coupled with verified information, is key to convertible content.
Acclaimed copywriting pioneer Gary Halbert helped to develop a print-based fat-burning ad during the 1980s. It outlined the benefits of the product in question while offering a clear-cut incentive of losing 98 pounds — within the copy, medical expert and ad author, Dr. Don Schwerdtfeger verifies these claims.
While the precise conversion metrics for this particular advert don’t exist, this is widely used as a working example of age-old authenticity in marketing.
Adopting a similar approach to its copywriting initiatives, UK-based mental health charity Mind creates hard-hitting, researched-backed content to raise awareness and encourage its audience to fundraise.
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By speaking to its readers directly and injecting authenticity into its content, Mind enjoys a steady rate of growth year-on-year, communicated in its engaging, data-centric annual financial reports.
8. Be specific
To write effective copy, you must know your audience.
By gaining a deep understanding of your audience, you’ll know where to direct your efforts. This brings us onto our next age-old copywriting principle:
Specificity is the key to striking a chord with your readers.
If you’re too generic, you will not grab attention, you will not engage, and you fail to convert.
In 1923, pioneering copywriter Claude C. Hopkins stressed that specificity is a vessel for persuasion.
A metropolitan coffee shop, for example, could state: “We make the best coffee in the city.” A bold claim, but how many other vendors are saying the same thing in the same locale? A lot, probably.
Rather than making such a generic statement, said coffee shop is far more likely to attract caffeine-hungry city dwellers by using the phrase, “Our Americanos have won awards…” or something to that effect.
Take eco-friendly fashion brand, VETTA, for instance:
This excerpt from the retailer’s ‘about us’ page communicates its dedication to producing ethical garments. It uses specifics on its processes and a statistic on its solar-powered initiatives. This copy is specific, authentic, and persuasive and, ultimately, one of the primary reasons for the brand’s exponential growth.
9. Murder your darlings
The original writing advice, offered by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, officially read: “kill your darlings,” but I feel the term ‘murder’ really drives the message home.
Today’s digital consumers scan web pages, rather than read them in detail. They want to know how your product, service or message benefits them immediately.
Be ruthless with your words. We all like to showcase our poetic edge, but when you need to grab attention and get results, simplicity is key.
To help in your quest to produce simple, effective, punchy, jargon-free copy, here’s a framework to use:
- A word in lieu of a phrase
- A phrase in lieu of a sentence
- A sentence in lieu of paragraph
- A paragraph in lieu of a page
Exercise: Armed with this ‘murder your darlings’ guideline, explore the copywriting efforts of your direct competitors, cherry-pick notable examples for inspiration and find instances of over-egged or redundant phrasing, then consider how you’d improve it.
Doing this regularly will help streamline your copywriting and help you build more engagement with your content.
10. Eyes on the prize
In the words of Shirley Polykoff:
“Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer.”
Our fourth and final age-old copywriting principle is about empathy and focus.
Keeping your eyes on the prize means never getting distracted from your goals and never speaking down to your audience—as explained here by the iconic David Ogilvy:
Fail to speak to your consumers conversationally and on their level and you lose their trust straight away. Showcasing empathy and understanding with your content is an essential component of copywriting success.
Remember: never patronize your audience, you’re the one that’s looking for the sale, after all.
Here’s an excellent example of conversational, empathetic copywriting from outdoor apparel brand, Moose jaw:
Not only is the copy here simple and punchy while delivering direct value to its audience, it’s also humorous and showcases a genuine level of understanding. It’s communications like this that make Moosejaw one of the US’s most popular outdoor retailers.
Effective copywriting focuses on connecting with your audience on a personal level, while being as direct, honest and understanding as humanly possible. The rest is fodder.
We hope these tips propel your copywriting success and produce more content-based wisdom. Now explore our guide to millennial marketing.
Key Takeaways
As a content marketer, you’ll always need to prove your work’s value if the company is going to give you the budget to create more in the future.
When discussing content marketing with your peers and supervisors, it’s important to remember that the purpose of content is to build relationships for the long term. Even if content does not deliver immediate ROI, it very well could pay off exponentially over several months or years.
By using these five tips, you should not only increase the efficiency and value of your content, but also be able to communicate your success to the relevant stakeholders.
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