Content Ideation

When creating a blog, it isn’t enough to create blog posts that are somewhat relevant to your product. The goal is to create content that is so useful, timely, and relevant that it draws in potential customers who already need your product. Content that converts is a way to describe a focused content strategy that allows you to brainstorm blog ideas that help your customers. At Intero Digital, we have developed techniques that help organizations identify types of content that draw in potential customers and how to revise one’s content strategy toward a more narrow focus on those who will ultimately convert into sales.

1. Understand your customer’s pain points

One of the most valuable lines of research for your content ideation team is understanding the idea of what your customers need, want, or find challenging. If they don’t have a software solution like the one you offer, what potential issues does this spark? If they have a different software solution that doesn’t offer the same features you do, what is slowing them down or gumming up the works? Understanding your customer’s dissatisfactions, either with a competitor’s product or because they don’t have a product at all, helps you to realize what they look for once they begin searching for a solution online.

2. Brainstorm content that addresses specific pain points

Rather than allowing your ideas to stem from your own product, direct them toward the pain points of your potential leads. Do they need hacks for saving time on a specific process? Do they want a solution that is more customizable to their needs? Let your team come up with a range of ideas, but make sure the core topics are focused on those pain points. If you only focus on your own product, more of the ideas will feel “sales-y” rather than how-to focused. This may seem like a roundabout approach, but the more you focus on offering solutions to the issues your customers face, the more ways you will find to relate the content back to your product.

3. Pick keywords based on these ideas

Beginning with thoughtful, useful ideas is an important step, since readers can now tell if a resource was just written for SEO and not to be read in reality. By brainstorming first, you can then go and find keywords that are connected, putting the horse before the cart. Let the keywords be driven by the useful content, rather than trying to stuff as many keywords as you can into content that doesn’t help very much.

4. Select keywords based on intent

Our final tip for writing content that converts is to identify specific keywords that target your customers’ pain points. Keywords are the bridge between what your customers need and what you can provide. By now, you should have a list of ideas for useful content and understand what your customers are looking for. The next step is finding keywords with search volume that satisfy their intent. Beginning with relevant keyword ideas is an important step, since readers can recognize if a resource was solely written for SEO. We suggest using a keyword research tool such as Google Ads Keyword Planner to complete this step. Then, let the keywords be driven by the content. Integrate your top keyword phrases throughout the content in ways that are both useful and easy to read, rather than stuffing in as many keywords as you can.

1. Incorrect Target Audience

Sometimes you can write great content that ends up reaching people without the decision-making power to make the purchase themself. The Solution: Note the kinds of leads generated from your posts, realign your brainstorming to your target buyer persona and keep him or her in mind as you ideate.

2. Not Generating Enough Traffic

Your posts may be stellar but aren’t getting read very much. The solution? Consider posting more frequently on social media, interlinking more posts, and incorporating more high-level keywords for increased organic search engine traffic.

3. Not Converting at a High Rate

Despite high traffic rates and reaching your target audience, some posts don’t seem to connect to sales. The solution: Pay close attention to the posts with the highest conversion rates and emulate their success. Have a usability tester try searching keywords related to your posts and see how easy or hard it is to click through to the product sales pages from your blog – you might have a broken link or a simple change that could make exploring sales easier.

• Consider creating autoresponder emails that ask your customers to describe what they are looking for and what their challenges are and ideate from those responses.
• Join online or social media communities where your customers spend their time so that you can hear/read authentic responses and understand what they really care about in a product.
• Make blog posts that more clearly track to the most popular keywords in your industry.
• Create FAQs that you answer based on your customer service team’s records – these may become very high-traffic, high-conversion pages!

Want help making content ideation that converts to sales? Contact us today!