Enter your text herTop-of-funnel, informational, and awareness content are an important part of your content strategy. But so is convincing readers to take your next desired action. How can you make sure your content will not only teach, entertain or solve the issues of your readers but also leave them one step closer to being part of your customer base? Here, you’ll find content optimization tips proven to turn everyday blog content into an irresistible lead magnet, with examples of who’s doing it right and precisely how it’s done.e...
Inventory Your Lead Gen Content Assets
What content assets are already available to you? Auditing and documenting your lead-generating assets can be a super simple task or a Herculean job, depending on the volume of content you’re dealing with. Inventory Your Lead Gen Content Assets PERFECTLY OPTIMIZED CONTENT: FROM START TO FINISH 133 For example, we needed to inventory over 300 landing pages for e-books, webinars, spreadsheets, demo requests, etc. in Portuguese, another 150 in Spanish, and 120 in English. Here’s an example of how you could organize your lead gen assets in a simple table: Language Name of the Content Content Type Landing Page Link Link to all promotional images HTML code to insert the banner EN Example 1 Webinar example1.com https://drive. google.com/ drive/u/0/ PT Example 2 Ebook example2.com https://drive. google.com/ drive/u/0/
Get To Know Your Audience
If you had to ask for a loan from your mother, how would you do it? Would you use the same approach and language as if you made this request of your father? Probably not. Because you know them deeply – their habits, preferences, likes, and dislikes – you would appeal to each one in a different way How can you get to know your audience in such a way that you can craft a compelling ask for them, too?
Talk to them! Go to events where they are. Reach out to them to gather feedback through surveys or interviews. Besides that, you can also:
Analyze web analytics.
Capture easy-to-interpret click maps or heat maps.
Use session-recording tools.
Do frequent surveys to collect first-party data.
Make A/B tests to understand what brings better results.
Build A Creative Brief To Meet Their Needs
A good content brief will include: Keywords and phrases real customers use in searches and conversations about your solution and the problem they’re having.
A persona that identifies what stage in the customer journey the reader is likely to be in, who they are, what matters to them, and other demographics.
A summary of the topics your blog post must cover and questions it must answer in order to successfully catch the reader’s intention and fulfill their need.
Your desired next step for the reader which will inform your call to action.
Diversify Your Offers & The Paths Leading To Them
We know our content is not fully read 100% of the time. Depending on the reader’s needs, they will only scan the text, eager to find what they are looking for with the minimum amount of effort. With that in mind, we need to make sure we have a call to action (CTA) and an offer for every type of reader. If the offer doesn’t match the context, your content is destined for a sad, small conversion rate
If your text is about “Interactive Content” and you have a deep, strong e-book about it, for example, add CTAs to it more than once, and, if possible, in different styles:
Text CTA.
Banner.
A short video introducing the subject.
Everything counts!
Follow Copywriting & UX Best Practices
Readers tend to scan the content, looking for relevant or interesting content to jump out at them. Once you are sure your lead generator’s offer is contextually relevant and useful for the reader, be sure to highlight it properly. You can use bold, italics, and bullet points, with larger letters or different colors. The important thing is that you test variations and get to know what works for your audience. Whenever possible, use psychological triggers to increase the likelihood that the reader will have an emotional reaction and feel inspired to convert. These mental triggers are stimuli received by our brain that directly influence our decision-making.
Some of the most common triggers for marketing content include:
Social proof: “More than 10,000 people already downloaded this template.”
Scarcity: “Subscribe now! We have limited spots available.”
Authority: “Watch our latest webinar about it with lead gen expert Marina Cordeiro.”
There are many more! The important thing here is to only use them when the information communicated is real.
Tools & Tactics For Conversion
Now that you’ve learned how to prepare your text to be conversion-oriented, let’s take a look at specific lead gen optimizations for your blog content
Image CTAs
Banners can be effective, but we must know how to work with them to avoid banner blindness, a term coined in 1998 by Jan Panero Benway and David M. Lane.
It is used to explain that users have learned to ignore content that:
Resembles ads.
Is close to ads.
Appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.
This is why you will see higher conversion rates from banners strategically placed inside a blog post (according to the context) than the ones you can have in the sidebar of your blog layout.
Use them where they fit cohesively and augment the written content, as a way to give your reader a little rest from the big block of text. If the content already contains several images, it may be more effective to use text CTAs instead.
Text CTAs
Marketing writers usually know the importance of internal and external backlinks for SEO. But they often forget about how powerful those links can be for lead generation, too.
Don’t make that mistake! When adding links inside your blog post, remember to link to the landing pages of ebooks, webinars, or any other lead gen assets that are relevant to the reader’s need.
If you have personalized parameters to track the conversion path (or if you add UTMs), you will be able to see how much this can impact your lead gen efforts.
Using text CTAs inside content is a great way to avoid banner blindness. To increase visibility, you can try to create hyperlinks at the beginning of paragraphs, or at the very end of them. You might take advantage of the enhanced visibility of H2 titles, as well.
Another suggestion is to implement “Get to know more” or “Related Content” paragraphs inside the text, including 3 or more links to relevant offers.
Templates
I’m calling this tactic “templates,” but it can be any type of rich content you feel can help your reader.
Look at your Google Analytics and find the most popular blog posts in your inventory. Now, review each one through the lens of user intent. What new offers can you create and promote inside that content to enhance its value to readers?
Take this Portuguese blog post about SWOT analysis, for example, which was one of our top 10 blog posts in terms of sessions.
Analyzing this blog post through that lens of user intent revealed that readers didn’t just want to know what SWOT was. They were probably trying to do a SWOT analysis by themselves.
So, how could we help them?
In this case, it was through a new template created using Google Slides. After reading the blog post and learning all steps necessary to do a SWOT analysis, readers could quickly create a presentation with their main insights.
Within a month of optimizing the blog post with this additional template, we received more than 500 form submissions to download the template. This value kept growing in the following months, improving the overall conversion rate of this blog post drastically.
We replicated this for “marketing plan,” “brainstorm activities,” “promotional email marketing” and many other blog posts. All of them achieved satisfactory results.
Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are annoying, but you can’t say they aren’t effective. The trick here is to take context into consideration when you use them.
We found success in grouping blog posts according to the main theme, then creating a specific pop-up for that topic. In this way, we managed to scale without leaving personalization by the wayside.
For example, we have more than 50 blog posts about Instagram. They cover topics like “what is the perfect size for Instagram posts,” “how to create an Instagram business account,” “how to acquire followers,” “tips to increase engagement,” “the most famous accounts,” and so on.
We have a really strong ebook about marketing tactics for Instagram, so we grouped all those blog posts in our pop-up tool (Hello Bar) and started testing different pop-up formats and copies until we found the best conversion rate for the whole group.
We replicated this tactic for Facebook, LinkedIn, sales, content marketing, SEO, and several other topic clusters that we have in our blogs.
Before implementing this conversion tactic, we had just one pop-up with a generic offer for all blog posts, which was converting around 1.8% of blog visitors into leads.
The creation of personalized pop-ups grew that conversion rate to 9%, on average. Impressive, right?
A Lead Generation Optimization Checklist
Refer back to this checklist as you plan, create, optimize and publish blog posts to ensure each one is prepared to convert:
Inventory and document all lead generators and offers.
Take the blog post context into consideration when choosing which CTAs to include.
Add more than one offer.
Add more than one path to the main offer
If the keyword is educational, see how you can create a lead generation offer specifically to augment the content in that piece (for example, by adding templates or quick step-bystep guides).
Make sure the blog post has a personalized pop-up promoting content related to its main topic.
Now, you’re ready to press “publish” and make the lead capture process feel like a natural next step for the reader.
Your reader is satisfied and you’re building highly motivated leads to drive new revenue, too. That’s a win!
Rock Content has worked with Salesforce, IBM, Cisco and +2,000 of today’s leading brands to bridge the performance gap between content and demand generation strategies. Reach out for more personalized recommendations about how you can create or optimize your content for demand generation.