jt-content-marketing-showI recently gave a talk to around 1000 content marketers at this years Content Marketing Show on putting the content into conversion. Through this and a series of blog posts I will cover the topics and techniques covered within the presentation.

As content creators, post penguin and panda, we have had things pretty easy. Companies virtually over night abandoned questionable link building techniques and put pretty much all their effort into content creation. As a result we were creating freshness and adding value to websites (basically do what Google has been asking us to do for years).

And on the whole this technique has been very successful and been responsible for generating some great content.

But there is a problem…

Typically what happens is, a piece of great content is created, this same content is then published and then promoted through the usual channels… but how is that success measured?

For most people, key metric is how many Facebook likes, tweets, retweets the content receives.

I don’t know about you, but personally I have never paid my mortgage or any other bill Facebook like, a retweet or any kind of social share, so why should expect our clients/companies to be happy with these as indicators of success as predominantly these are just Vanity metrics.

At Graphitas, we have generated campaigns which have generated thousands of social shares, yet generated no revenue whatsoever… on the other hand we have created content which have had very moderate social uptake yet generated thousands of pounds in revenue.

Who would you rather be?

The person achieving great social shares, or the person achieving great revenue?

Personally I would take the revenue every time.

Time for a change?

As content creators need to start thinking differently, we need to commoditise our content and look beyond the social shares and judge our content success on conversions.

10 tips to make your content convert

Over a series of posts I will be sharing 10 tips that you can apply to your content to make it convert.

Tip 1 – Define your objectives

Tip 2 – Understand your audience

Tip 3 – Use the language of your customers

Tip 4 – Concentrate on headlines

Tip 5 – Anchor products into content

Tip 6 – Calls to action and triggers

Tip 7 – Visual impact

Tip 8 – Add value

Tip 9 – Never stop testing

Tip 10 – Play to win

 

Justin Taylor

Justin's path into design and marketing has been anything but conventional. A random selection of career decisions saw him designing rave flyers, t-shirts and (although refusing to divulge his stage name) he allegedly did a summer stint in Gt Yarmouth as a magician before finally settling on a career in marketing.