This article is not intended to sell you on the importance of content marketing. After all, if you're reading this guide, you probably already know that content marketing is an important part of any successful digital marketing strategy.
Our content marketing efforts usually have a specific conversion goal aimed at achieving the larger goal of engaging visitors. Content marketing is important because it introduces your brand and builds trust with potential customers before they make a decision to purchase or your sales team reaches out to them.
The specific goal might be lead generation or building e-mail lists. All the best content marketers aim to provide relevant and valuable content, including blog posts, video guides, e-books, podcasts and more, that are designed to deliver not only traffic, but leads (and customers) as well.
However, there needs to be a healthy balance between content and promotion to achieve the desired outcome. Your offer can't be too prominent because it will reduce the efficiency of your content if your subscription offer is right out front. As a result, the subscription rate of most blogs is only a few percent. Fortunately, there are some actionable steps you can take to improve this rate.
Let's take a look at 5 little known ways to boost your content marketing results by getting more conversions without sacrificing the user experience, and being too pushy. We'll see how you can let your content shine and still get the engagement you need to drive sales.
1. Use exit-intent pop-ups
Before you get frightened hearing the word 'popup', let me tell you that the exit-intent pop-ups are different. Exit-intent pop-ups provide you a second chance to convert visitors before they leave your site. More importantly, they don't disrupt your visitors, disable or block anything, and Bing and Google are fine with exit-intent pop-ups. When it comes to increasing engagement on content, exit-intent pop-ups can prove very useful.
Exit-intent technology, also known as 'onsite retargeting', is a great way to keep visitors on your website right as they are about to leave. Exit-intent technology works by monitoring the behavior of your visitors and when it seems that they are about to leave your site, i.e.-, they try to click on the 'X' button to close the window, a popup is displayed with an offer or incentive to keep browsing our join your email list to receive more information later.
Onsite retargeting expands on exit-intent technology to monitor other behavior on your site, for instance when visitors are browsing a page on your site for too long without taking any action. You can even send separate messages to repeat and first time buyers. Exit-intent technology and onsite retargeting can double your chances of converting your visitors. That's why high profile sites such as Digital Marketer use exit-intent pop-ups (see below) to convince abandoning visitors before they leave their site.
2. Use nanobars
To boost your content marketing, you can promote your best pieces with an eye-catching nanobar. As you can see below, it provides a great way to attract your visitors' attention to your best lead magnets and even to increase your number of newsletter subscribers. With nanobars it's best to use them based on engagement in order to achieve results. In general, a nanobar should be displayed only for those visitors who show an interest in your product or service For example, they are browsing your site for at least 20 seconds or they scroll down to the 80% of your page.
The following figure illustrates how Neil Patel uses the nanobar technology on his blog. It does not matter where the visitor is currently, after some clicking, the nanobar can be seen continuously on the top of the screen.
3. Use a sticky call to action
While there are many specific conversion goals for content, most people have at least one piece of content that is used to convert your prospects into leads or customers. Whether it's a blog post, an educational presentation, or an infographic, in order to maximize the number of conversions, you should use a clear and actionable call-to-action, or CTA, that further engages and qualifies your prospects.
Clear and compelling CTAs are the lifeblood of your online business. To help your visitors find your best converting content easily, use sticky CTAs that will be permanently visible on each page of your website. If you have long content pages, make sure you have multiple CTAs so that users don't have to hunt them down once they're ready to act.
The figure above also presents a good example of a sticky call to action that is clear and compelling as well. The banner on the right side of the screen, promoting one of the Quick Sprout's giveaways, is a sticky banner that can be seen after scrolling down. It's like the offer follows visitors to the site.
4. Personalize your messages
Most visitors are not ready to buy or sign up the first time they visit your site. When someone visits your site, they can be in any stage of the buying process - and as a result they'll respond differently to the same message depending on how far along they are towards making a purchase. Therefore, you should try to communicate messages that are relevant to your customers in each stage of the buying process.
For instance, you can push your sales messages to your visitors at more advanced stages, when it's clearer that they are considering a purchase. You can build on this traffic with an onsite retargeting campaign aimed at your early-stage visitors. It helps to have specific messages for each step in the buying process of 'purchase funnel'.
You can also set specific messages to meet the needs of different groups of potential customers. For example, Digital Marketer generated 2,689 leads in 14 days using personalized onsite retargeting messages. They achieved these results by tailoring their messages to visitors depending on their needs. When their visitors are interested in Facebook advertising, Digital Marketer suggests Facebook-related content. When their visitors are interested in blogging, they will see blogging related content. And when the interest of a visitor is unknown, Digital Marketer tries to convert them by using universally relevant content.
5. Test your messages with advanced A/B testing opportunities
The conversion rate of the content pieces you use to generate leads might be different. To make your content marketing strategy more effective, it's best to improve or eliminate your weak offers, and create new message based on your best performing offers.
By creating and running 2 different exit-intent popups simultaneously with 2 different message, you can test which one converts better. You can test more than your marketing messages, you can test the graphics, download forms, etc. as well in order to boost your results. Conversific.com shows perfectly how to put this strategy into practice. They tested two different headlines in their onsite retargeting campaign to see which was best. The winner outperformed the other version by 47%.
Summary
The essence of the content marketing strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they will ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty. As a content marketer, the best way to improve your content marketing strategy is to continuously improve your specific conversion goals for each piece of content.
About the author
Csaba Zajdo is an ecommerce specialist, founder of OptiMonk and several other projects specializing in conversion. He's been involved with web marketing including content marketing, search, CRO, PPC, analytics and usability for over 10 years.
Main image via Shutterstock