Content Creates Conversion Opportunities

If you’re able to reach a critical mass of quality content, you can use that to actively develop more ways to connect with customers. These touch points can then be leveraged into opportunities for conversion. More points of conversion create more opportunities to nurture leads. Someone might not sign up for your free-trial right away, but instead give you their email for a newsletter. At every step, what’s important is that you nurse them further along the funnel. At Kissmerics, we had 60+ infographics, 70+ webinars, and 30+ marketing guides. The navigation landing pages alone for each type of rich content saw the most overall traffic, and were extremely high converting.

Ebooks and Guides

Putting together guides is one of the easiest wins you can add to your long-term content strategy. Use series of posts that have performed well and already been tested, and repurpose them into long-form ebooks and guides (4,000 - 9,000 words). From a conversion perspective, there are two main possible outcomes for guides:

• Email capture
• SEO juice

You need to pick one, based on your goals. If you’re trying to build an email list, a tried and true tactic is to put up a lead-gen gate before giving away the PDF that asks at the very least for a name and the email. On the other hand, if you’re trying to amplify SEO, you should format ebooks and guides for the web, with dedicated landing pages—and just give them away. Because they’re so long, they’re perfect SEO fodder, and Google's search algorithm ranks them higher—and they also have a higher average time-on-page than other forms of content. On the Quick Sprout blog, two out of three of the all-time best pieces of content for backlinks were both guides. The brand value of guides and ebooks is also enormous. They’re an opportunity for you to make yourself the definitive voice on a topic or problem that plagues your readers.

Webinars

As a marketer, your inbox is probably filled with webinar invitations. There’s so many out there that you could probably spend all your time in webinars without even trying that hard—which is one reason why marketers can be prejudiced against them. Your customers don’t see nearly as many. Start doing one webinar a month, and then, like any other part of content, put more out there. When someone signs-up for a webinar, create a lead-gen gate that at the very least captures their name and their email. You can then enroll them in your newsletter or email list.With webinars, audience's intent to learn is higher than that of those just reading your blog—feed them with more content. At Kissmetrics, we host two webinars a week that get anywhere from a couple hundred to several thousand attendees. Each webinar page leads to a separate landing page behind a lead-gen gate that has a little opt-in option, where visitors can check a little box and get a free demo. We’ve found that webinars can lead to a 20% conversion rate. The reason for this is pretty simple. With a webinar—or an ebook or guide—the intent to learn is higher, and conversion is also higher as a result.

Calculators and Tools

Creating rich content, like calculators and tools that you can give away for free, is another good strategy for conversion. Use them to analyze and diagnose problems that your customers might have, and that your product can then help solve. Moz ’s Open Site Explorer is a great example of this. It analyzes your site and shows you the quantity and quality of backlinks on it. They also implement a pretty basic conversion tactic—you can only do about 5 searches a day for free. Signing up for the plan gives you unlimited search as a Pro feature. Free tools help your customers, which helps you. They nurture repeat visitors to your site, who bookmark it, and come back again and again just to use the tool.