sales - Express Writers

How to Connect Your Content Marketing to the Sales Funnel (Without Being Sleazy & Turning Off Your Audience)

June 19, 2024September 4, 2018 by Adam Oakley

Here’s a truth for all content marketers: connecting your content marketing to the sales funnel is easy to ignore, but important to do. You need a sales strategy for your content if you’re trying to generate brand awareness, increase engagement, or sell more products or services from the content you publish. Have you heard about my all-NEW writing course? We’re about to open enrollment! See more here. And now, to continue my habit of staying brutally honest with you, here’s a second truth when it comes to content marketing and a typical sales funnel… Written online content, when done well, is valuable, relevant, and attractive to your leads (a.k.a real humans) Many “sales funnels” are sleazy, downright annoying, and sometimes paint a false picture just to gain your money So, today, we’re not talking about the sleazy kind of funnel built inside of software with a surrounding campaign of 15 annoying emails and a “timer” on your money. (See my vlog on the Content Strategy & Marketing Course site to learn just how anti- sleazy sales funnel I am.) We’re talking about the physical strategies behind attaching your content marketing to sales. This sales funnel is critical. Having a low or zero connection from your content to sales can mean low or no sales. And that’s something you (or/and your boss) definitely don’t want to experience after investing in and publishing content. Never fear, we’ve got you covered today with a new, engaging way of looking at how content marketing drives sales, sure to help you achieve your marketing goals. Ready for the big reveal? The Bucket List: 3 Way to Stronger Sales Through Content Who doesn’t love a bucket? Buckets are fun! You can fill them with sand at the beach to build a sand castle, use them to carry your shampoo into the shower, plant them with flowers, or use them in any number of creative ways to enhance your life. But in content marketing and sales conversion, buckets are critical. Using our unique three-bucket strategy to fill in your online strategy and built a well-developed intricate castle of content will help supercharge your sales and boost your content’s ROI. Read my full post explaining the three-bucket topic strategy. Each bucket represents a goal you need to achieve for outstanding keyword research and online content success. As the image shows, you’ll want to work on filling your buckets with strong content for three main goals: SEO rankings Sales and connections Brand awareness This is the step that most brand strategists gloss over in a hurry to get out there and start creating content. But skipping the bucket step would be a mistake. This is the foundation for your content marketing sales process and the one that’s going to make sure your return on investment (ROI) is sky-high. Let’s look at it this way. According to Wolfgang Digital’s 2017 report on e-commerce, the average conversion rate was 1.56%. That means in order to get high ROI content out there, you must assist your visitors at every lifecycle stage — even the one that comes before the funnel! So, let’s see what we should put in each of our buckets. [bctt tweet=”Discover a new, engaging way of looking at how content marketing drives sales that is sure to help you achieve your marketing goals in today’s blog via @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”] Bucket #1: SEO Rankings At this stage, you’ll want to fill your bucket with all the keywords you want to rank for. You don’t have to be super-focused, but you do want to have a good understanding of keywords that are hot in your industry. Want to learn the ins and outs of SEO content writing? You need to check out my new writing course! After you get a solid number of keywords, you can fill your bucket to the brim by including broad match or broad stem keywords for this task. Broad stem keywords are relevant variations of your keywords that will help your website attract more visitors. They’ll also save you time on building lists of keywords before you get a good persona in place (more on that later). These keyword variations include singular and plural forms, synonyms, stemmings (such as make and making), related searches, and even possible misspellings. You can generate these on your own or use a Keyword Variation Tool, as shown below. Once you’ve filled this bucket, move on to the next step. Bucket #2: Sales and Connections Here’s where you start to delve into the area where sales and content marketing become fully integrated. This is where you’ll build the kind of engagement and connections that drive sales and keep clients coming back for more. Take time here to focus on how you’re going to build trust. To do this, you can put a wide variety of things in this bucket, including: Company announcements and product reveals Interviews with top influencers Spotlight on how your employees work as a team A case study focused on customer success Customer-focused interviews or articles There’s really no end to this kind of content that focuses on developing a personal relationship with your prospects. A personal relationship is going to give a tremendous boost to brand awareness — which brings us to the final bucket. Bucket #3: Brand Awareness This is one big bucket. Brand awareness helps your content generate more sales leads per impression and leads to enduring customer loyalty, which then translates into repeat business. In fact, working hard on determining how to fill this bucket properly ensures you’ll get the maximum Lifetime Value (LTV) from your customers. In a nutshell, LTV represents the amount of money generated by a customer over their lifetime. The screenshot from smile.io shows an easy way to calculate this for your business. You start with the first calculation: Then build on it, for the final figure: But, to get high LTV, you need to boost loyalty. To boost loyalty, you must become a resource that your customer trusts. You can increase loyalty through a number of tactics, including: Outstanding customer service (and content that promotes … Read more

10 Website Copywriting Secrets to Get More Sales

June 19, 2024July 17, 2018 by Adam Oakley

Website copywriting matters. Correction. Your website copy REALLY matters. ‘Why?’ I hear you ask. It matters because your business website is the only digital asset you truly own and have control over, making it the single most important online platform you have. Think about that one for a second. While social media is a key part of an effective content marketing strategy, it involves using another organization’s platform, which means you’ll always be playing by their rules. In contrast, your website is 100% yours to bend to your will, and a killer site will attract traffic, convert prospects, and keep your customers coming back. That being said, not all websites are created equal. There is a real correlation between the success of a business and the effectiveness of its website, particularly the traffic it generates. In one study by Hubspot, the majority of companies exceeding their revenue goals had more than 10,000 visitors per month to their website. In comparison, 80% of companies not reaching their revenue goals had less than 10,000 visitors. And you can bet your bottom dollar those visitors weren’t going to the websites by accident. They happened to be there because of great website content. [bctt tweet=”@JuliaEMcCoy shares her top 10 website #copywriting secrets to gain more traffic and, of course, sales! ” username=”ExpWriters”] Why & How Website Content Is The Great Differentiator We know from experience that website copy, and high-quality content at that, can be what sets a brand apart from its competitors. Don’t take our word for it, though. More than 70% of marketers rate relevant content as their most effective way of obtaining website traffic, with content marketing generating three times as many leads as outbound marketing, and costing 62% less. [bctt tweet=”More than 70% of marketers rate relevant content as their most effective path to site traffic, with content marketing bringing in 3x as many leads as outbound marketing & costing 62% less. @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”] What’s more, small business websites that have blogs experience 126% more lead growth than businesses without, and B2B companies with a blog generate 67% more leads per month than companies that don’t have one. Not Just Any Old Content Will Do Like any other product or service, quality matters when it comes to website content. A recent UK study revealed that 59% of people wouldn’t use a company that had glaring grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website. In addition to this, a whopping 82% of people said they’d be put off by a website that featured content poorly translated into English. The scary thing is that poor website copywriting, instead of generating sales, can actually cost your business. That’s right. Poor quality content can actually turn away customers and create additional costs for your business. Writing expert and author Josh Bernoff says poor writing costs U.S. businesses $400 billion every year. From thedailybeast.com/bad-writing-costs-businesses-billions He names websites and marketing materials as the worst offenders, pointing the finger at lack of clarity, overuse of jargon and poor structure. Bernoff attributes the massive cost to the time that is wasted correcting and attempting to interpret poor writing. This figure doesn’t take into account other expected costs to business in terms of lost leads, sales, and reputation. [bctt tweet=”Did you know? Poor writing costs U.S. businesses $400 billion dollars every year. Read more: ” username=”ExpWriters”] Using poorly written content on your site can also have a significant effect on how Google ranks your site and your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). People Don’t Read Your Content So, here’s the thing. You may go to the trouble of crafting what you think is beautifully written content, but people aren’t going to ‘read’ it no matter how good it is. Numerous studies confirm what we already know. We don’t typically read much of the content we see. We scan or skim it. I do it. You do it. And so do your website visitors. Our average attention span is just 8.25 seconds – that’s one second less than a goldfish! We read at most only 28% of the words on an average web page – 20% is believed to be closer to the truth. So every single one of your words has to count. Reduce your content to the smallest number of relevant, and necessary, words possible without sounding stilted. 10 Website Copywriting Secrets to Win More Sales & ROI from Your Online Presence Want more in-depth tips? Check out my 365-page book on Practical Content Strategy & Marketing. You’ll learn the entire strategy for great web content. Bonus: Module/Section 5 is completely devoted to creation techniques – called Practical Content Creation! Creating effective website copy is an art. This is why many businesses turn to professional copywriting services or someone who specializes in online copywriting. Whether you hire website copywriters or decide to go at it alone, it helps to know the factors and qualities of great website content. Here are our top web copywriting tips. 1. Know Who You’re Writing For With more than 200 million pieces of online content created every minute, it can be difficult to stand out. One of the best strategies to cut through the competition and reach your audience is to create a target persona. Once you have your target persona clear in your mind, writing your content becomes much easier. Your target persona will guide what language and tone are most likely to resonate with your audience and inspire them to take action. 2. Create Eye-Catching & Skimmable Content Since we’ve already established that our attention spans are worse than a goldfish, you should make your website copy skimmable, as well as eye-catching. Start with an awesome headline. The headline is your hook and helps a reader decide whether they should click and read on. Make your headline clickable with power words. Use lots of white space around your copy. Incorporate subheadings and bullet points to break up space and create obvious landing spaces for the reader’s eyes. Break up text with images. Photos and videos not … Read more