If you own a small business, trying to boost sales of your products using content marketing, you know it can be hard to get traction. You spend a lot of time (and money) struggling to generate leads with the content you create, but aren’t seeing the results you’re hoping for. Fortunately, there’s a simple formula to increase leads using content.

Consumers Want Content

According to a Hubspot survey, consumers on average will read between 3 and 5 pieces of content before they’ll speak with a sales representative. Said differently, offering valuable, relevant and informative content is critical to the buying process. Unfortunately, most marketers, including those who allocate substantial resources to content marketing, don’t know if their content marketing efforts lead to increased sales, and many don’t even have a formal plan for their content marketing campaigns.



In that same survey, B2B marketers report allocating almost 30% of their total marketing budget to content marketing, but more than half say they don’t know what content marketing success would look like. Only 30% felt their content marketing efforts were effective, and only 32% have a documented content marketing strategy.

Translation: Most Marketers Don’t Understand Why They Push Content

This isn’t to say that marketers are flying completely blind—certainly most are careful to link their content to specific marketing objectives, and many create buyer personas and target content to different market segments. What most don’t do is tie their content to specific stages of the buyer journey, from prospect to lead to qualified lead and, finally, to buying customer.

What Is Conversion Content And Why Do You Need It?

The goal of conversion content is to convert a window shopper into a buying customer—in other words, a visitor to your website into a qualified lead, actively considering buying your products or services. Certainly, not all conversion content appears on your website—some will appear in social media posts, for example, that link back to your site.



But once someone is on your site—whether what got them there is organic search results or sponsored adds or social media posts—you need to create a conversion path that moves site visitors from prospects to qualified leads. The first step on the path is a content offer, one sufficiently engaging that site visitors will click on a call to action to get it. That takes them to a customized landing page where you ask them to complete a form in exchange for the content. You then allow them to download the content.

How Conversion Content Is Crafted

Earlier you read that there’s a simple formula to generate qualified leads with your content. Here’s that formula, in 4 critical steps:

Create Your Content Offer : The content you choose must be appealing to the market segment you’re trying to convert—for example, if your goal is to sell accounting software to small business owners, you might choose a blog about new tax deductions for small businesses. Your content could be a white paper, case study, video, or eBook. In some cases, that content will already exist. At other times, you’ll need to brainstorm new content ideas. The bottom line is that however your content is created, it must be sufficiently engaging to make prospective customers want it.

: The content you choose must be appealing to the market segment you’re trying to convert—for example, if your goal is to sell accounting software to small business owners, you might choose a blog about new tax deductions for small businesses. Your content could be a white paper, case study, video, or eBook. In some cases, that content will already exist. At other times, you’ll need to brainstorm new content ideas. The bottom line is that however your content is created, it must be sufficiently engaging to make prospective customers want it.

Create an Action-Oriented Call to Action : The words you use in your call to action should be action-oriented and attention-grabbing, include keywords which match what’s in your content, and appealing enough that site visitors will want to click on it. For example, the seller of accounting software might have a call to action like, Read Our Blog to Get the 5 Small Business Tax Deductions You Don’t Even Know About.

: The words you use in your call to action should be action-oriented and attention-grabbing, include keywords which match what’s in your content, and appealing enough that site visitors will want to click on it. For example, the seller of accounting software might have a call to action like, Read Our Blog to Get the 5 Small Business Tax Deductions You Don’t Even Know About.

Create a Customized Landing Page : The sole purpose of the landing page is to collect visitors’ contact information by persuading them to fill out a form. The landing page should be customized to a specific market segment (or buyer persona) as well as to where prospects are in the buying cycle.

: The sole purpose of the landing page is to collect visitors’ contact information by persuading them to fill out a form. The landing page should be customized to a specific market segment (or buyer persona) as well as to where prospects are in the buying cycle.

Create the Form Which Gates Your Content: If you’re new to creating forms, you can get help from online forms tools resources. Using these tools, select your form. Choose fields for your form—in general, limit the number of fields to a maximum of 4 or 5 (prospects are reluctant to fill out excessively long forms), including first name, last name and email address.

Conclusion: It’s a Win-Win

In creating conversion content and an effective conversion path, you’ve demonstrated the reason inbound marketing is so effective—you’ve pulled customers to you by giving them something they want and need—and everyone’s a winner. Visitors to your website get information that helps them in their businesses, and you get the contact information you need to continue the conversation and move the buying process one step further. In the process, you establish trust and authority.

You need to ensure that your website is helping you achieve all of your business goals, from generating qualified leads to nurturing those leads to closing sales. To learn more about the ways we can improve your sales process and make your website work for you, contact us today.