October 13, 2022
How Your Business Can Turn Organic Traffic Into Effective Leads
Content marketing is an essential marketing tool for any business and can bring a huge audience to your website. So how do you take advantage of this increased brand awareness and traffic? This article will explain how you can take that organic traffic and use effective, proven strategies to convert them into effective leads and paying customers.
Getting a ton of new traffic to your website through content is just one of the first goals of content marketing. Once you have that captive, engaged audience how exactly do you turn them from people just browsing the internet into actual paying customers?
It is important to know first of all that not every visitor will be a potential customer, and that is okay too. Those visitors will benefit from your content in many other ways, from simply sharing or commenting on your content to increasing brand awareness and trust or keeping your brand in mind when they have another question or are ready to become customers. But for those viewers that are ready, there are tried and tested strategies to help you convert organic traffic into actual leads, and this article will help you go through them.
These tips will help you make use of your increased audience, convert them into leads, sell more products and make more money from your content marketing efforts.
Use content to become a useful resource
This is the first and last rule of content marketing. Provide value to your audience. Be a useful resource to them. Help them solve a problem or answer a question for them. Once you get this right you will attract more and more readers to your website, you will make them want to stay and want to come back. That is the fundamental basis for all of these other tips to work.
By producing relevant, useful content, making your site worth staying for and using liberal links and CTAs (Calls To Action), you will be turning your audience into qualified leads in no time.
Use relevant links
Consumers do not like a hard sell, they don’t want products or services shoved into their faces the moment they land on your content pages, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them a gentle nudge in that direction
The primary purpose of any blog post or resource page is to entertain, inform, educate and help your audience, and that should always be its main function. If it fulfils these aims well and solves a problem or answers a question for your audience, then it will make your website a valuable resource for them and they will remember that and keep coming back. That is perfect, that is exactly what you want. A large audience of general readers who keep finding your pages through search engines, and a smaller group who know your brand, like it, trust it and keep coming back.
So now you have that audience, how do you turn them into leads? Well imagine you are an eCommerce business that sells clothes, and have created a style guide for the perfect summer trends. That post goes viral and is seen by a huge audience all wanting inspiration for what to wear for a variety of summer occasions. Wouldn’t you want to feature some of your products in that guide? Perhaps a link or two to the sales page where they can buy that specific product they have just looked at? Maybe you sell tools and visitors have landed on your blog after Googling how to fix a particular DIY issue. Why not give them all the advice they need to do just that and then direct them to a product that will solve their problem?
It doesn’t have to be overt or in your face, in fact the opposite is true, but relevant links will help convert those visitors into leads and paying customers, and will help with your internal linking strategy for SEO too!
Use live chat widgets
A live chat solution is an increasingly common tool in eCommerce and is a very simple and effective tool to help gather basic customer information, turn visitors into leads and also provide a useful resource for customers at the same time. Simple scripts can be written that prompt visitors to share information and direct them to various parts of your website, even product pages. This increases user experience, engagement, length of time on your website and have a positive impact on your lead conversion rate.
Tailor your content to your customer behaviour.
One of the big mistakes most businesses make when it comes to content marketing is putting the content out that they want, instead of what their customers actually need. By monitoring your analytics correctly you will be able to see what types of posts or articles are popular, gain insight into your customer behaviour, how long they spend on site and where they click through to, and then you can tailor your content accordingly.
Have a call to action for your email subscription
Email marketing is an extremely effective way to use content to attract, retain and convert customers, and building a subscriber list should be a priority for any business wanting to implement content marketing. Having a call to action in high traffic areas or articles, such as the bottom of every blog post for example, will mean that it is much more likely that you will capture those random viewers who found your website through search and want to keep reading more. If you add an offer to that subscription you raise your chances of converting that reader into a lead even more.
Utilise social media in the correct way
Social media is a fantastic tool in content marketing, it really is! The problem is so many businesses don’t utilise it to its full potential. At its core, social media from a marketing perspective is about reaching and engaging with customers on the platforms they spend time on and that is great, in and of itself that is exactly what you want to be doing. The real issue is you are engaging with them on outside platforms which you have no control over, when you really want to be capturing that audience and turning them into leads on your own platform. Your website. So utilise social media by all means but see each separate channel as a net that you can then channel potential customers through to your own site.
Use downloadable content
If you want to pull organic traffic through the sales funnel and turn them into qualified leads more quickly, there is no better way than to make them need the essential information you have to offer. By creating content that is useful and helpful to them, and then guiding them to a much larger, more useful PDF, white paper, research paper or handy tips to solve their problem that has been gated and requires an email to access, you now have a qualified lead that can be used in your next email marketing campaign.
Keep content fresh
As alluded to above, not all viewers will be paying customers straight away, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean however that they won’t be in the future, so what you want to do is bring them back again and again. That means constantly providing new value through new content and updating old content with new information or new media such as video. The more times they come back, the more useful they find your content, they more CTAs you have in your content, the more likely they are to eventually become qualified leads.
Use social proof
Social proof are those signals that consumers look for on your site to tell them that you are a reliable, trustworthy brand and that your products or services are worth buying. You can create killer content, utilise all these methods to push people down the sales funnel and convert them into leads, but it can often take just that little extra nudge to turn them into paying customers, and quite often social proof is it.
Quite often this comes in the form of product reviews, star ratings from Trustpilot, testimonials or something similar, but by seeing these social elements, consumers will be more willing to take that next step.
Optimise your UX (User Experience)
When visitors land on your site they want an easy, fun experience, and it is your job to give them that. Make sure that your site is designed well, isn’t too cluttered and offers an easy, low click route through to your sales page or product page no matter where it is they land.
Converting your audience into qualified leads and ultimately paying customers is just one of the many benefits of an expertly designed content strategy. If you want to discuss how a content strategy can benefit your brand or eCommerce website, come and chat to our experienced content management team and see how we can help you.