Content marketing is an essential part of marketing your brand to grow brand awareness, drive lead generation, and increase conversions. Many companies who try content marketing struggle with how to differentiate top of the funnel (ToFu) content to create content that converts at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu).
So, how can you go about it?
We had the same question. That’s why we decided to head to the experts to understand what they’re doing to create content that converts.
In our survey, we asked for opinions from digital marketing experts on what content marketing converts into leads, and also asked them to share a few tips for how they create content that converts.
So, let’s dive right in to understand what they had to say.
Goals for Content That Converts
It’s important to understand the goals that you should have as a content marketer to be able to create content that converts. So, before we get to what these content marketing experts have to say about creating content that converts, let’s take a look at the various content marketing goals that you can have.
1. Build Brand Awareness
Content can play a major role in helping you grow your brand awareness. You can publish high-quality guides that are meant to educate your readers and solve their problems. Creating content like blog posts can also help with your website’s SEO and improve your traffic.
2. Generate Leads
You can also use content marketing to generate leads for your business and even nurture them. A great way of going about this is by creating content that drives people to trust your brand further. Such content includes case studies, whitepapers, etc.
3. Drive Conversions
Finally, the third and most important goal of content marketing is to get the nurtured leads to convert and buy from you. For this, you need to create bottom of the funnel (BoFu) content like product demos, customer stories, etc.
In a nutshell, here are the various types of content that you should create for reaching your content marketing goals.
Now that we’ve looked at the various content marketing goals, let’s take a look at the findings from our survey of 25 expert content marketers.
Findings From Our Content That Converts Survey
We asked a wide range of questions to 25 digital marketing experts to get an insight into their strategies. Here’s what we found from our content marketing survey.
1. Content Types
When asked about the type of content created by them, 75% of the people surveyed said that they write content that is focused on direct response. Also, the primary goal of this content is to educate the reader.
2. Content Frequency
We asked our experts about how frequently they published content on their blogs. Most of them said that they publish blogs once a week. However, a small percentage also publish more than two posts per week.
3. Blog Post Length
We wanted to figure out if our experts suggest creating long-form blog posts or shorter ones. So we asked them about the typical length of their blog posts.
We found that:
- Only 15% of them had an average blog post length of over 2000 words
- 18% of them said that their blog posts are in the range of 1501 to 2000 words
- 27% of them said that their blog posts are in the range of 1001 to 1500 words
- 40% of them also said that their average blog post length is between 500-1000 words
So, a vast majority (67%) of them publish posts that are between 500 to 1500 words long. On the other hand, only a few of them concentrate on publishing long-form blog posts. This is particularly interesting when you have companies like Hubspot suggesting that a blog post should be 2100-2400 words long to increase your chances of ranking for SEO.
4. Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important ingredient of any content marketing strategy and it’s recommended that you dedicate some time to it before writing your blog posts.
We wanted to figure out how much time our experts dedicate to this activity to create content that converts. So, we asked them about the time that they dedicate to keyword research.
An overwhelming 74% of them said that they do keyword research for over 30 minutes for their blog posts.
On the other hand, only 20% of them spend less than 30 minutes doing keyword research.
This points to the fact that most content marketers give a lot of importance to keyword research to create content that converts.
5. Types of Blog Posts
There are numerous types of blog posts that you can create for your audience. Some of the most popular types and their examples are:
We wanted to find out if our experts chose a particular type of blog post more than the rest for their content. This would help us understand if these types of blog posts contribute better towards the lead generation and conversion efforts of the brands.
So, we asked them which types of blog posts generated the most number of leads for them. Here are the results:
- Over 70% of the people said that they focus on creating “how-to” types of blogs to drive lead generation.
- 14% of the experts said that their content type is dictated by the goal that they want to achieve or the challenge that they want the audience to overcome.
- 15% of the experts said that they focus on creating content that helps them showcase their industry expertise (thought leadership content). They also said that they create content such that it differentiates them from their competitors.
- Finally, fewer than 15% of the experts said that they put their efforts into creating long-form “Essential Guides” that are longer than 4,000 words.
6. Content Marketing Budgets
Finally, to create content that converts, you need to spend from your marketing budget. So, we felt that it’s important to know how much budget you should have for your content marketing efforts. That’s why we asked our content marketing experts to share their average monthly content marketing budgets.
A vast majority of them (42%) spend over $2500 per month on their content marketing efforts. On the other hand, only a small percentage of them (18%) spend more than $4000 on content marketing monthly.
When asked about the future, about 30% of the people who responded said that they plan on spending $2000 or more on content marketing in 2021.
What Do the Experts Say on Creating Content That Converts?
Now that we’ve talked about the various insights that we gathered from this survey of content marketing experts, let’s take a look at the strategies employed by them. You can employ these content marketing tips to develop and optimize your content strategy and create content that converts.
So, let’s find out what the experts have to say.
1. Michael Njefi from Digital Hama
Michael Njefi shed light on his top 3 methods for writing content that converts website visitors into leads. His content writing tips are:
- Follow the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) principle.
- Use the Keeping It Stupid Simple (KISS) principle.
- He also stresses the importance of using attractive headlines and introductions. Also, he mentions that you need to create engaging bodies and delightful conclusions so that the visitors would be inclined to spread the word.
2. Ognjen Bošković from ContentDistribution.com
Ognjen Bošković also shared three of his top content marketing tips. Let’s take a look at what he has to say:
- He champions the use of backup data along with case studies. Doing so can lend credibility to your blog posts and content.
- Writing a 'direct response' copy to get the readers to take the action that you want them to.
- Introducing irresistible opt-ins to nudge the visitors to provide their information to you and become leads.
3. Shira Simmons from SSC Digital
Shira Simmons stressed the importance of content marketing and shared three of her top methods for writing content that converts. Here are her content writing tips:
- Writing action-oriented content.
- Writing content that has a call to action with it. This can help you nudge visitors to take the action that you want them to.
- Writing tips and tricks for your followers so that they can implement them with ease.
4. Luke Lightning from BIM Designs
Luke Lightning shared his top three content writing tips to help you convert your visitors into leads. Let’s take a look at them.
- Survey clients on their pain points. This can help you get insights into their issues and you can then create content around them.
- Provide tips and tricks to showcase expertise. This has dual benefits - you’ll not only become an expert but the tips will help your audience too.
- Collaborate with industry leaders on articles. This can help lend credibility to your posts and might also help you get backlinks.
5. Max Cohen from HubSpot
When asked to share three of his top methods for writing content that converts visitors to leads, Max Cohen shared these content writing tips:
- Good content gets someone closer to achieving a goal or overcoming a challenge. If your content does not do that then it’s not valuable. So, write your content with those things in mind.
- Create content that helps your prospects such that they don’t need to hire you. The idea is to convey the information so well that they would be able to do everything all by themselves. This helps you become an authority figure for them.
- Make sure the content offer is relevant to the blog post topic and is a logical continuation of what they were learning. If the offer is different, your conversion rate will likely be extremely low.
6. Hannah Wiginton, Freelance Content Creator
When asked about three of her best content marketing tips for creating content that converts, here’s what Hannah Wiginton had to share:
- Create marketing guides that can serve as lead magnets. They can help you drive your lead generation.
- Create more bottom of the funnel (BoFu) content so that it helps you convert your visitors into paying customers.
- Pay attention to SEO research to figure out what your audience is searching for. Based on this, you should answer the questions of your potential buyers.
7. Andy Steuer from WriteForMe
Andy Steuer shared three of his most prized content marketing tips which he has learned through his extensive career in content marketing. Here’s what he had to share:
- Writing long-form content that provides the reader with useful and educational insights about a particular topic. This helps in establishing you as an authority figure in your niche.
- Mapping content to keyword research and asking the questions in each blog post that people search on Google for and answering those questions. This not only drives traffic to you but also helps in generating leads and conversions.
- Providing an easy way for readers to get in touch with you in each post. Andy says that they embed a calendar in each blog post so the reader can book a time with them and ask them anything about content marketing. This helps convert visitors into leads.
Start Creating Content That Converts Today!
Content marketing forms an indispensable part of any marketing strategy. To wrap up, here are the findings from our survey:
- Most experts write direct response content.
- The majority of the experts publish a single blog post every week.
- Most of the experts write blog posts in the range of 500 to 1500 words.
- Keyword research is important for all experts and most of them spend over 30 minutes doing it.
- How-to posts are the favored format for most of the experts for driving their lead generation efforts.
- Most of the experts surveyed spend over $2500 monthly on content marketing.