Content is king. Today that is more true than ever before. Why? Because there is such a glut of information that you need to make yours stand out from the competition. You also need to make your content and your information more compelling than the rest so that you can capture, and keep, the attention of clients and prospects.
Every piece of content you share – from blog posts to social media status updates to enewsletters to the landing pages you make for offers you’re presenting – needs to be the best piece of content you’ve written. If your content is leading to conversion, then you have mastered the “secret” to compelling content. If you’re still struggling to go from content to conversion, you might need to either up your offer to be more compelling or review your content to see if it’s just not hitting the mark.
What can you do to make your content more compelling? Here are our thoughts:
- Be action oriented and upbeat. Just as you need to have a call to action in your blog posts and your enewsletters, you need to have a compelling call to action on your landing pages. If you haven’t captured your prospects’ attention in the first THREE seconds – chances are you have lost them. With this as your metric, you cannot have any words on your landing page that aren’t crucial. Use action-oriented phrases such as: Buy NOW, Take ACTION today, Don’t MISS out, Offer ends SOON, etc. You also want the copy to let the reader know that what you’re offering is something he or she can do themselves. For example, “LEARN how to…” “Drive traffic to your site from…” “Grow your enewsletter list by…”
- Make it clear what value your prospects will reap by sticking with you to read your landing page content and by making a purchase from you. A bulleted list is an ideal and eye-catching way to make it clear what your prospects will receive. “Redeem this coupon for a…” “Following our laser-focused coaching call you will…” Remember the sales adage of sharing features and benefits? This is true with your landing pages as well. In addition to telling the features of your product or service you need to point out the benefits as well; don’t leave it up to chance that the prospect will fill in the blank in his or her own mind. “With this system you will save time…” Okay, that’s a great feature, but what is my benefit? “Allowing YOU to focus on working on YOUR business instead of IN your business…” Make it personal with YOU and YOUR, etc.
- Be clear, not creative. Since you have less than the blink of an eye to capture a prospect’s attention you need to get right to the point. Don’t make them wade through acronyms or fluffy prose. They need to know “what’s in it for them” as quickly as possible. Insert facts if they’re relevant. For example, “Did you know that most website visitors don’t stay on the page for more than five seconds?” then lead into, “If you want your readers to stay with you, this FREE report will give you the top 5 tips to help you keep your readers with you!” Don’t go into deep dives on metrics or analytics, share a pain point then show how your system will address it.
- A great landing page has vibrant colors, bold and various sized fonts, images, call outs and calls to action sprinkled throughout. Don’t make them wade to the bottom of the page to “buy now.” In between blocks of text add a “If you don’t want to waste another minute, you can buy now!” box so they can click through. Break up text with white space and short paragraphs and bullet points. Don’t have paragraphs that are longer than five sentences. Make sure your sentences are short and snappy.
- As with any content you put forth you should proof for grammar, punctuation and consistency. For example, did you capitalize Internet the same every time, did you use a hyphen in e-newsletter in one place and then write enewsletter, sans hyphen, in another?
If you have an offer aka a call to action in your enewsletters you should consider building a new landing page for each offer. Why? It makes it easier to track results and see if your offers are gaining traction. Not sure how to construct a compelling landing page? We can certainly help!