12 Tips to Improve Your Blog & Content Marketings’s Conversion Rate

Help—People Are Coming To My Blog But They’re Not Buying!

Have you built traffic to your blog or content marketing but are discouraged because no one’s buying from you? While only a small percentage of your visitors will eventually purchase, the chances are that your content may not be aligned with the purchase process for your product offering.

Here are twelve questions to help you determine where there’s an issue that’s preventing your prospects from purchasing.

  1. Are you attracting the right audience? While your blog or other content marketing may be optimized to yield maximum traffic, it may not be effective for driving prospects into your purchase funnel. You must develop content that answers prospects’ questions about your offering before they’ll buy from you. If you’re not sure, create marketing personas to better understand your prospects.
  2. Is your blog or content optimized for the right keywords? When prospects look for your product offering, do they find your supporting content via search engines? If not, your blog and content aren’t attracting people interested in your product. Check your analytics to see what terms people use to find your content.
  3. How does your product rate relative to your near competitors? Especially in a social media world, your product has to be the best it can be since consumers will check other sites to determine its quality and usability relative to other options.
  4. Have you built brand awareness so visitors are pre-qualified? It’s possible that prospective buyers are first being introduced to your brand via your blog and need more time to get to know you before they’re ready to purchase. Does your buying process track the blog’s contribution to the buying cycle? If not, you may be undervaluing your blog or content’s contribution to sales.
  5. Do you offer promotions or incentives to drive sales? In today’s budget constrained environment, consumers have been trained to wait for the best price and/or free shipping and handling. What are you doing for your prospects?
  6. How is your product priced compared to competitors and substitute products? Since other purchase options are just a click away, the issue may be how your product ranks relative to other options. Customers use ratings and reviews and comparative research to help narrow their search.
  7. Does your content link directly to appropriate products? Do you make it easy for customers to purchase by linking to the appropriate product? This should be as specific and efficient as possible. Remember you’re fighting inertia.
  8. Do you have a call-to-action? Prospects may not perceive that you want them to do anything. It’s important to have a strong, targeted call-to-action that’s appropriate to your product and the message context.
  9. Is your purchase process efficient from your customers’ perspective?  You may need a fresh set of eyes to examine your process because your internal resources are used to the-around-the-back handshake and think the current process is effective. But in reality, there are way too many steps for consumers. Can you streamline the process?
  10. Do you maintain the scent through your purchase cycle? In other words, do you use similar wording, branding, etc. so that prospects know that they’re on the right track? If you’re not continuing the related copy and graphics, consumers may leave your purchase process without knowing it.
  11. Are you able to track your blog’s contribution to the purchase process? Since blogs and content marketing can influence prospects before your firm realizes that they are in market to buy, you may not be able to track the true influence of your content. Consider using tailored links and special promotional codes to better track your results.
  12. Have your competitors changed their marketing? In other words, have they introduced a new product, a better promotion or more advertising? I’ve seen this problem happen to clients where their marketing appears ineffective despite the fact that they haven’t changed their strategy. The issue was that their competitors increased their spend reducing their marketing’s effectiveness.

Start by determining where the problem is with your blog or content. If the issue isn’t obvious, try to understand your buyer and work through the process from their perspective. Is the issue with your audience, product, offer, website, conversion process or your competitors’ actions? Then incrementally modify the area(s) where you suspect problems and measure your results.

Do you have any other suggestions that you ‘d add to this list? If so, what are they?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen


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Photo credit: Roland via Flickr

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