Yes – content marketing can help increase sales if your content is “sales-oriented”.
What do I mean by that?
You can write many content about your business: products, their benefits, your approach, your team, the awards, testimonials, how-to do a certain thing related to your offerings, anything you see your competitor publishes, and so on.
But, if you’re particular that you do everything you write should precisely – or near-precisely – lead to sales, you need to orient your content to be “sales-centric”.
Ever heard of the marketing funnel? You put your audience to the top of the funnel, and step by step you lead them towards the bottom of the funnel, where sales happen.
You also see marketing folks talk about the customer/buyer journey, which represents a similar thinking.
Like I said, sales happen at the bottom – where your prospect is aware of your product, its benefits, the transformations it can produce, the reasonability of the price compared to the value it creates, and so on.
What if you prioritise content targeting only to the people at the bottom of the funnel?
Certainly, there is a segment of your target audience who needs your solution as soon as yesterday!
Sure, they wouldn’t go through YOUR funnel, but why the heck should that matter – if you can skilfully persuade that your solution is better than whatever else they are considering?
Mind you, these are people who have NOT YET decided which solution to buy. They are in the last legs of their decision-making, but they are still open to considering the alternative options – even though they have narrowed down a couple of options.
That’s where you, with your deep product knowledge, understanding of (other) customers, and killer copywriting skills can tip the decision in your favour.
How Do you do that?
You target keywords that someone
- in their last leg of research would use
- who can just name the category of your solution
Want examples?
Here you go:
Let’s say you’re selling email marketing solutions.
You’d go after keywords like:
- free email marketing software (category keyword)
- email marketing software for ecommerce (category keyword)
- mailerlite alternatives (alternatives keyword; last leg of their research)
- mailerlite vs mailchimp (comparison keyword; last leg of their research)
- mailchimp vs zoho campaigns (comparison keyword; last leg of their research)