Content marketing is powerful.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the two facts below…
- “Businesses that blog generate 126% more leads, get 97% more inbound links, and have 97% more indexed pages (Ignitespot)”.
- “99% of visitors won’t buy on the first visit (Seewhy)”.
As a tool to sell and generate more business, content marketing has soared in popularity.
Businesses are finally aware of the tremendous value behind engaging content that attracts a large audience.
But content comes in two types.
Content that merely entertains…and content that sells. And we all liking selling don’t we?
So here are 3 wickedly effective ways to create content that magnetises your audience and spikes your sales.
Let’s go.
- Teach with an Engaging Personal Story
Using stories to teach and sell is a classic way to generate sales. You can use stories for sales pages, TV ads, landing pages, and yes…content marketing.
The most popular way to sell through stories is to tell a personal story. You grab the reader by the hand and share how you suffered the same gut-wrenching pains and problems, and how you achieved the same results they’re desperately searching for.
Let’s say you’re selling a traffic boosting software to online businesses…
You’d tell them a story about the pains and problems you endured to improve traffic. How business started plummeting due to a lack of traffic. How all the strategies you tried didn’t seem to pay off, no matter how hard you worked. How everyone sneered and laughed at your low traffic site, even though you bled hours into it.
Then you’d transition into how you created a software that helped you boost traffic, and how other business owners just like you, can use it too.
An awesome example of using a personal story to educate and sell is Danny Inny’s “Freddy Kruger of Blogging” story.
Danny tells the story of how he became known as the Freddy Krueger of Blogging to his audience. He describes his painfully low traffic days, where he’d receive “30 visitors on a really good day” and how he quickly flipped the tables and became a big name in the blogging and marketing world.
When crafting your story:
- Have a problem, struggle and solution
- Keep it simple, and use vivid powerful language
- Have an impactful ending with a strong takeaway point
If you find yourself stuck, ask yourself “how does this relate to and help my reader?”. It’ll steer you in the right direction.
- Energize Your Content With Personality
Humans are social animals.
We relate to things that seem human and personable, and dislike the idea of engaging with robotic, ivory tower businesses that don’t understand us.
It’s the same with your content.
Stiff, robotic content makes it hard for people to relate to your message. And more importantly, it makes it harder to relate to you as a person.
Your content should build a solid relationship and rapport with your audience, and it can’t do that when you sound like a pompous, boring professor who is deeply in love with the sound of his own voice.
So how do you go about injecting personality into your content?
- Trash the sophisticated babble. Keep your writing fresh. Grab fluffy bloated language, rip it to shreds, and toss it into an incinerator. Toss out sentence bloaters. Words like very, really, almost, probably, most likely etc. And don’t replace simple words with complex ones to look smarter.
- Reveal small digestible chunks of yourself to your reader. Personality is good, but don’t go overboard. People are searching for solutions to problems, not browsing through personal diaries. So the 450 word mini essay on how you spent last evening sipping cocktails won’t be helpful.
The best way to reveal yourself and strengthen your bond with your audience (without overwhelming them with personality), is to tie personal stories or experiences with content that you’re writing. Jon Morrow’s post on how he “moved to paradise and got paid to change the world” is a great example.
3.Use power words and verbs to create vivid posts. Don’t rely on adjectives and limp words to add clear descriptions. Instead, use powerful verbs and words that explode inside the reader’s brain and jolt him into paying attention.
- Use Compelling Case Studies
Case studies are awesome.
They power up the selling power of your content by educating your audience with real life lessons, and promote your business with subtle strength. They also show how you’ve helped people like your audience overcome their problems.
The benefits of case studies are numerous…
- They educate your audience with real life lessons that solidify your advice and claims
- They serve as powerful promotional tools for your business because they show how you’ve helped others.
- They act as great testimonials and prove you know what you’re doing
- They motivate your audience and show what’s possible
- They naturally tend to get more traffic and views
Case studies are used by all types of business. Take for example one of the most popular a/b split testing softwares on the web, VWO (visual website optimizer). VWO is a company that get’s content marketing. Their blog,is crammed with interesting conversion case studies and tests that were conducted using VWO
Now imagine if VWO didn’t use case studies in their content marketing. Let’s say they relied on normal blog posts that just provide tips. They’d probably convert fewer prospects wouldn’t they?
Here are a couple more examples of case studies that do a terrific job of educating and selling:
- http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32543/How-Savvy-Inbound-Marketers-Get-Results-From-Guest-Blogging.aspx
- http://neilpatel.com/case-study-techcrunch/
- http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/content-marketing-leads-4-step-strategy
So how do you come up with case studies that crush it?
- Write about someone who your customer can relate to
- Make it easy to read and understand
- Include solid facts, figures and data
- Focus on a specific strategy
For more tips on crafting compelling case studies check out this post here.
Creating content that sells isn’t rocket science. It just takes a little know how, and now you’re equipped with enough tips to power up the amount of sales that your content generates.
There you are 3 powerful steps to creating content that shoots up sales. How do you go about ramping up sales through your content?
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 3 Steps To Create Tasty Content That Sells
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