As an e-commerce store owner or a company promoting a service, a blog on your website is a great marketing tool, and a way to sell products and services to the people who need them.
However there’s a fine line when creating content between being useful, educational, informative or pushing sales too much. So here are a few of our top tips on how to sell within your content marketing campaigns without being too pushy and putting potential customers off.
- Be informative first
Write your content to be factual and informative, letting the reader create their own conclusions. If you objectively discuss the benefits of a product or service and even honestly appraise any potential weaknesses or downsides you will earn the reader’s trust and give them the information they need to make a decision. Google will also reward you because search engines prefer high quality and useful content over spammy sales pitches.
- Make your design intuitive, not annoying
It’s easy to spot the websites and blogs that have been set up with a sales first approach. You know the ones. Pop up, after pop up, click here, sign up to this, add your email now. While these kinds of contact capture forms are useful and even necessary, how they are implemented is important.
The user experience on these kinds of web pages are frankly awful and it drives people away and stops them wanting to come back. Instead focus on the user experience. Clean layouts with well organized content, and fast loading pages is key here.
- Stay classy
Following on from our previous point, keep your CTAs classy and minimal. One way to do this is to have a CTA ever present via a button in your navigation with a sticky header design so it’s always there on top of the content but does not interfere with the user while they are reading an article.
It scrolls with the user and is there when they want it. Another way to ensure you are using CTAs well is to make them relevant. If you can create a CTA in a side bar adjacent to the content for a product or service that directly relates to the topic you are discussing it seems more natural.
- Give the reader something else to do
If you’ve done a good job with your content you will have captured the reader’s attention, and provided informative and useful material they have enjoyed reading. Now you have their attention you want to keep it, so give them something else to do on your website after they’re done reading the post. This could be directing them to other related blog posts, or using a call to action at the end of the post to share the article, leave comments, or to view a product or offer.
If you would like help with your brand messaging, advertising, and digital marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina to Seattle, Washington, and everywhere in between, get in touch with Visual Caffeine to learn how we can help you.