Over the past many years, user trends have changed significantly.
Now companies need to offer more than just a product in order to secure customers.
Understanding the need, companies are focusing on issues such as support, content and user behavior as well.
For example, every other hosting company now claims to be offering “exceptional support“. This is because support is what users demand more than other counterparts. Hence, the usage of this word increases their sales.
This is what we call Copywriting. ( Writing text that persuades readers to purchase )
As an online business, it is important that your content encourages sales. To help you write effective content, below are 6 questions you should ask before creating content.
Optimize Content For Sales by Asking these 6 Questions
#1. How much do you know your target audience ?
You should focus on customers and prioritize them before your company goals. As a business, all your marketing efforts must emphasize the needs of your target audience.
You should have a clear image of the target audience in your mind. It is essential to have a buyer persona. If you don’t have one yet, read about how to create an effective buyer persona from HubSpot.
Your marketing team should know how customers would discover and consume your content.
You should research and target the keywords by which readers associate your products. The point is quite important and I even mentioned in my previous blog post. Information such as who influences them, and where on the web they spend most of their time would be quite helpful.
#2. What targets are you trying to achieve ?
To every new client, I ask this question many times.
“What goals are on your mind ?”
This helps me craft the content more precisely.
For example, a Java programmer wants blog posts that explain the topic well, however, an affiliate marketer or an e-commerce wants the blog posts to bring in sales.
Both of them have different goals in mind and therefore their content needs to be written differently.
If you are planning content strategy, you should be very clear about your goals. Once you have the concept clear, you can streamline every strategy such as content creation, social media promotion accordingly.
#3. How does competition look in Search Results ?
Competitor analysis is essential if you want to rank for a keyword.
After all, SERPs are a big deal and play a vital role.
Take note of which websites are appearing for the desired keyword. Analyze their backlinks and find out which websites and blogs have linked to them.
What results are triggered such as News, Images, Blogs, Books, Products ?
You should also decide which search engine you have to focus on ( most obvious answer is Google )
You also need to note whether a search result is decorated by the competition through structured data or site links. Whether their breadcrumbs are reflecting in search results or not.
#4. What are you going to need to achieve the target ?
Don’t just dive into content production !
Prepare a list of what you have and what you will need.
This can include each and everything that you are going to need, such as digital resources and human resources.
Digital resources : Do you have some blog posts or web content that can be optimized ?
Or do you need content to be produced in the first place ?
In that case, prepare your keyword cloud and note down your buyer persona to produce effective content. Figure what digital resources you already have, like a website and where you would be promoting your brand to achieve your target.
Human resources : Who is going to produce content for you ?
If you have a business that doesn’t essentially require a content marketing team, you might not feel having one. If so, you can have a marketing agency like us working parallel to create content.
Instead of hiring writers and one manager, you can work with us and save on your costs. Not only we can produce content, we can also promote it efficiently.
#5. What tactics would be used to meet the goals ?
If you did the research right, you would be clear about your goals and where you have to promote your brand.
You need to figure out which type of content is most beneficial to meet the needs – web pages, blog posts, press releases, articles, infographics, podcasts or social bookmarking.
You need your writers to be fully aware of techniques such as SEO so that content ranks well. You might also require a monitoring authority that ensures quality.
If you are thinking of ranking your content, you might focus on link building as well.
Your can also think about leveraging relations with existing clients to increase the number of relevant backlinks.
You need a proper plan in hand which you would execute over time in order to get results.
#6. How are you going to measure your success ?
If you are investing efforts in marketing, it is critical to measure how much you have achieved. Once you execute your content plan, you can use make use of analytics to measure KPI ( key performance indicator ) and conversations.
SEO. You can measure how you are performing in SEO from your Google analytics and search console dashboard itself.
In your dashboard, you can analyze which keywords and search queries are yielding visitors. You should also track where your website ranks for the desired keyword
You should also keep an eye on sales as they are the end product of your sales funnel. Other conversions include signups for newsletters and downloads.
Social media. This part is somewhat easier as you can nail down to metrics such as likes, followers, comments, mentions and referred traffic to links.
You can also track down trending topics to create content creation ideas on the go.
Conclusion – Optimizing content for sales isn’t something that you can master in one night. It takes efforts, out of the box thinking and lots of experiments to come up with a copy that works perfectly.
As a marketing firm, we have worked with many clients to help them meet their content needs. One always needs to come up with something extra to outrank the competition.