4 Ways to Improve Your Conversion Rate - business.com

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When you hear marketers talking about conversion rate optimization (CRO), they often cite content as one of the best ways to get more engagement and sales. There's no question that your blog posts, emails and social media feed play a vital role in how people interact with your business. 

You may be wondering, "How can I actively improve my CRO with content marketing?"

There are plenty of things you can improve your onsite conversions. The most common ways include tweaking existing blog posts, adding new kinds of content and diversifying where content is shared. We are going to talk about some of the things you can do to get more subscribers, sales, and site interactions by fine-tuning your content marketing strategy. 

Blogs are essentially the heart of all top-performing websites. Business owners and marketing teams use their blog to bridge the gap between consumers and products. Without compelling, entertaining, or educational content, there's no reason for someone to stick around on your site unless they go there specifically to buy a product. 

At this point, you probably have various posts on your company blog. Some of your articles are likely to perform better than others. These articles are compounding posts, and they can help you drastically boost CRO. 

Compounding posts, simply put, are blog posts that continue to generate consistent, new traffic, long after they were published. Believe it or not, this content is responsible for 38% of all website traffic on sites with compounding posts. 

Because these articles see so much traffic, they are also great for getting more conversions. Look at your website analytics to find your compounding posts, and prepare them for this extra traffic. 

You can add an email opt-in form, promote a special on one of your products, or even optimize performance issues, like loading times and mobile responsiveness. These small tweaks ensure that visitors that land on your best posts have an excellent experience and more opportunities to interact with your brand. 

When you think about content marketing, not many people think about user-generated content. The truth is, things like reviews, testimonials, and a comments section on your blog can do wonders for your conversion rate optimization. 

Reviews are a great way to build social proof. When a user lands on your website, there's a good chance that they are not ready to buy. User content, like reviews, can be the deciding factor between someone who completes their order or moves on to a competitor. We know this because online product reviews about specific items resulted in a conversion increase of 270%.

You can get feedback from users by asking for reviews through email and encouraging users to complete an onsite satisfaction form. Not only can you add positive feedback to your sales page, or on-page of a specific product, but you can learn and grow from constructive feedback. 

Adding a comments section to your blog posts can encourage users to leave their thoughts, which can spark discussions within the comments. This tactic is great for keeping users engaged with your site. 

If you need more evidence that adding user-generated content is the way to go, consider this: Businesses that include user-generated content see a 161% increase to their conversion rates. 

Lead magnets are unique pieces of content that businesses offer to consumers in exchange for their email address, or "likes" on social media. These are excellent tools for showing users that you're an expert in your industry by delivering thoughtful, valuable content. 

Typically, lead magnets are infographics, e-books, whitepapers, or case studies, all of which should help your users accomplish a specific task. For instance, you could create an infographic that shows the best times to post on social media. The purpose of this infographic is to help people get better at social media marketing.

When you're creating the perfect lead magnet, it's vital that you think about the problems your users are facing and how you plan to solve them. Try to understand your leads' pain points and come up with actionable solutions to their problems. 

The goal is to build trust with your audience and encourage them to open your emails and read your content because you provide value to their lives. After a consumer gets your magnet, they should feel compelled to read what you have to say in messages.

If you've done your job, this will help you get more email and onsite conversions. 

Another great way to improve your CRO with your content is to test your sales pages. Sales pages are where a consumer will have to decide to buy your product or subscribe to your email list. 

If you don't see the results you want, you can split test your page by making changes to various elements of the design and content. You could try to write a long-form version of your page where you go over more details to see if this information leads to more conversions. 

Alternatively, you can make tiny changes, too, like using "I want my free e-book" instead of "sign me up," on your call to action. These subtle changes can yield significant results. In fact, if you're testing and targeting your users, you can improve your conversion rate by 300%. 

It's worth noting that testing your sales page will take time. Don't make a knee-jerk reaction to your analytics after a day or even a week. To see if your changes have a positive impact on your conversions, you need to allow your changes to run for several weeks or even months. Shutting down your test early could skew the final results of your test. 

Finally, you should diversify where you post your content. Your CRO strategy should have you posting content on your website, partner sites, social media, and email. If you're not using all of these platforms to share your content in various forms, you're missing out on a major marketing opportunity. 

You can increase your traffic sources by going beyond only publishing your post to your blog. Business owners often connect with other brands in their industry and cross-promote by writing guest posts for one another. This is an excellent strategy that can help both companies see more conversions.

But the possibilities don't end there. You could create an attractive image showing off some of your points and share it on Instagram. Why not upload a YouTube video where you talk about blog topics at length? Share your posts on sites like Facebook and Twitter. 

These different platforms can help bring diverse traffic to your website, which creates more conversion opportunities. You'll also learn more about your target audience by finding parallels between your analytics across multiple platforms. If you see that there's one topic on your blog, social media, and email that sees more engagement, you know that you should create more content around this topic in the future. 

Combine all of the tips we've presented today and implement them across your content marketing platforms. You may not see drastic changes overnight, but if you're persistent, you can master CRO and generate tons of leads by improving your content's quality and effectiveness.