Marketers want their content to do more than just educate people: to persuade, catch their attention and turn them into leads. All efforts are in fact converging toward the ultimate purpose of action-focused content: to covert leads into customers.

 

Content marketing aims at producing great content, but this is just one step on the way. The process does not stop with this content being read by a prospect. Great content does something for the target audience and convinces readers to take some kind of action. Hence, content becomes a business vehicle that takes your company to destination (i.e. branding, sales, leads, etc.), by generating cash.

Action-focused content with variable outcome!

Newsletters are the most common example of action-focused content that could generate positive results or fail completely. How is this possible? Why do so many newsletters end up in the spam or trash folders?

  1. First of all, we all resent spammy messages that annoy us with pitches and waste our time. These never work for real content marketing purposes.
  1. Valuable information is what makes the difference between a successful and an annoying newsletter.  The content you send via email should clearly show recipients that you are not a spam-bot. The newsletter should be a value exchange: you give something worthy of your client’s valuable time.
  1. Good newsletters are those that get read because they deliver specific information which prospects may want to share with others (online or by word of mouth).

Content development is more than a means to get traffic

Many marketers make the mistake of considering traffic generation a goal to be achieved via content development. What would be your gain if you attract a huge number of web searchers to your pages, yet they fail to perform any kind of action on the website? The main objective is to get results from relevant web visitors, not simply increase traffic.

Content marketing strategies that work!

Value-based content in the form of articles supported by pictures and video can be accompanied by a free offer. A message like “Order NOW and Get FREE Shipping” cleverly displayed in a central-focus area does wonders for your sales. But it needs to be wrapped up in valuable content in order to generate a high ROI. Why? Here are the best reasons possible:

  • The Internet has grown around content, and content is organized around keywords.
  • Web searchers type in key phrases to perform queries and get what they want. If those keywords are present in your content, you have what they need.
  • Advertising messages that break the reader’s flow or ruin the web searching experience are a NO-NO, as they diminish the impact of action-focused content.

The most successful businesses and marketers are those who manage to provide excellent content without displaying an overt sales purpose. Their solution is mingled in content, but it does not strike the reader with pushy persuasion.

To put it in a nutshell, relevant content makes a difference for achieving a high ROI. The prospect or customer needs to perceive that you are working to offer them a benefit, not just trying to make money. Such a customer-oriented approach is a powerful enough way of improving sales, leads and ultimately, profit.