Blogging and content creation is time-consuming, even more so when you are writing quality, readable content.
You can pour countless dollars into strategies that will create traffic. You could have high traffic and click-through rates (CTRs), but the visitors are not taking action or converting. What gives?
First things first—as tempting as it is, don’t give up, even if you have not seen any ROI.
When you publish content to your site, your intention should be to convert your site visits, no matter what your business is. If that is not obvious when visiting your site, then you need to make some changes.
So, how do you get site visitors to stay long enough to get to know you and your product or service? How do you increase your conversion rate? We are here to help. Keep reading to see why your blogs aren’t converting and what you can do to boost your conversion rate.
Why is my Blog Not Converting?
Your website is optimized, branded, and traffic is rolling in. Yet, you are frustrated by the lack of ROI. When traffic isn’t the issue, it is time to tackle why your website is not connecting with your visitors.
Even B2B companies value creativity when it comes to content strategy and blogging for increased sales and growing brand recognition online.
As part of an inbound marketing strategy, blogs are a great tool for engaging visitors. Blogs should be part of larger content strategies, like strategies for organic traffic and brand awareness, and part of PPC campaigns and email marketing campaigns.
If you are blogging without an overall goal or working without a strategy, you’re wasting your marketing efforts. Your blog always needs to remain a priority. Without it, you may notice that your traffic drops. Instead of stopping your blog, you need to optimize your efforts.
Some common reasons why your blog is not converting may be because:
- It is not optimized for UX/UI
- It is failing critical SEO checks
- It has not been optimized for the most recent Google updates
- It lacks images, readability, bullet points, shorter paragraphs
- It doesn’t address your audiences pain points
- The content is full of jargon
- It forces visitors to do too much before they get something in return
- Links are broken
- CTAs are misleading
Some content marketers say that as long as you’re blogging, you’ll have traffic and the opportunity to close a sale. But, as you can see, there are so many things that could go wrong when blogging that can prevent a conversion. It’s essential to set aside time to reassess your marketing strategy and optimize it for better conversions.
Assessing Your Content Marketing Strategy
Your blog is the lens through which customers and sales get to your brand. A potential customer might navigate to your site through your blog and then sign up for your newsletter. With careful planning and authoritative content, you will be drawing visits from your target customers.
If you haven’t developed a solid marketing strategy that includes blogs, then this must be your first step.
One of the first things you should do when considering your marketing strategy is to make your business contact information visible. Your website and blog should connect visitors to your phone number, email, and social media information. Consider putting this information at the bottom of the page, side panel, or in a CTA.
Nail down the following before you continue:
- The goal of the content (you want them to sign up for a newsletter, for example)
- Your target audience(s)
- Your budget
- KPIs or measurables (i.e., sales, leads, site visits)
- The niche that you want to address
- Target audiences pain points and the ways your niche overlaps with these
- Other avenues where the blog will be promoted (i.e., social media, email marketing)
Once you have optimized this, you need to nurture the relationship. These customers will be the ones who review your products or services, use them, and bring more people to your business. They are valuable gems and need to be treated as such.
How do I Convert Blog Traffic to Sales?
If you have high traffic but low conversions, you need to figure out why you aren’t appealing to your traffic. Why are visitors turning away?
Consider that you won’t convert all of your traffic. If traffic is coming through strictly organically, then you might see conversion rates around 16%. Other campaigns like social media will convert 9.21% (average across all industries) of the traffic through Facebook ads.
If you’re hitting these marks, then you might be succeeding at converting high numbers of traffic visitors. If these numbers aren’t high enough, then you actually might want to boost site visits.
If you aren’t converting at these rates or something close, reconsider your value proposition. Your website is supposed to showcase the value that you bring to these new conversions. By selling your product or service, your brand is solving a potential problem. Reposition your product/service in terms of how it can solve the buyer’s problem rather than simply providing a description of what it is. Connect the dots for them.
For example, if you offer a massage service and you are a Registered Massage Therapist, you want to present your services as one that can create mind/body balance, relieve severe stress and chronic pains, and more. This is better than selling your service as “massage therapy.” Your visitors may already know that you provide massage therapy, but are you telling them why it’s important?
Always consider your traffic as what it actually is—potential customers. People visit your site because they found your brand or have a particular need that a search engine tells them your brand can meet.
Once visitors are on your site, ask yourself:
- Where would you like your customers to go?
- How are they getting there?
- Why aren’t they there when they first land on your page?
- What do you want these customers to do?
From here, optimize your sales funnel in a way that makes sense for your customers’ needs.
Better Content is Better for Sales
It can’t be stressed enough that quality content is crucial to converting your blogs.
One of the best ways to achieve quality content is optimizing your blog content to draw new subscribers and customers. While this can be a lot of extra work, you can start to assess your content so that it is
- Solving your audience’s pain points
- Optimized for SEO
- Easily searchable and high ranking
- Easy to read
One of the first steps is to develop a buyer persona. Personas address common traits in groups of visitors. These groups might all have similar attributes like having a degree, being in a certain job position, having experience with a past product/service that is similar but frustrating, having certain knowledge around your product/service, or even living in a certain geographical region or being in a particular age range.
Personas help to educate your marketing team and further strategy development and topic planning, allowing you to create blog post content that will be interesting to your buyer personas.
From there, you can provide actionable measures. For example, an intriguing headline will be attention-grabbing. Your introduction should tell the reader precisely what problem you are going to solve for them. When you have a good grasp of your buyer persona, you will tailor your posts to that demographic.
For example, if your products are subscription services for students, writing a blog about the benefits of subscription services during retirement will not convert.
To keep it simple, people search and read content for three central purposes:
- For entertainment
- Problem resolution
- To get information
To answer any one of these, you will need to have deep insight into your customer. So, that blog about retirement should actually be related to how subscription services will save students’ time and energy. Or how it will enhance student life. It could even be about how new graduates use subscription services. The aim of your blog posts should be that you have solved a problem for your readers, entertained them, or caused them to feel an urgent need to purchase your product or service. Therefore, a compelling blog title for a student-aimed subscription service should look like this: ‘Pressed for Time? How subscription services will give you more hours back in a day.’
Your suggestion that subscription boxes are time-saving has solved a problem. Coupled with well-written and entertaining content, your audience will connect with you and keep coming back for more.
Create a Sales Funnel
Are your call-to-action buttons working effectively? They should bring your visitors to a central landing page so that they are not wandering through your website aimlessly.
The path to convert a visitor to a customer is called a sales funnel. It guides your traffic from recognition to deliberation and, finally, commitment. Your sales funnel should be tailored to suit your product or service, your customers, and even your competitors.
The path begins with your customer recognizing your brand. This might occur on social media, through search engines, from an ad, or through a press release. These entry points will then lead your visitors to your website. At this point, you should also entice visitors to sign up for email notifications or a newsletter by offering small incentives. Tell them why this sign-up is worth it. For instance, insider tips, sale notifications, tutorials, Q&A sessions, or sneak peeks are some ways to incentivize an opt-in opportunity.
When these visitors take action, you have successfully moved them to the next step of the sales funnel: leads.
If you have a sales team, you will send the qualified leads to the team to begin the nurturing process, which converts these visitors to buyers. Being aware of how your sales funnel functions at the recognition, deliberation, and commitment to buying stages will help you to understand your target customers, and better nurture leads once you have them.
Some of the marketing tactics you can employ at this point are:
- White papers
- Slideshows
- Cost comparisons
- Influencer marketing
Once you start to use your sales funnel effectively, you can use analytics to further refine your targets.
Direct Your Blog Traffic
Now that your sales funnel is clear, the way you produce content will be an important part of how passive visitors convert to sales.
You should consider:
- The product or service you offer
- Your price point
- Where
- How
- How often your customers will typically purchase from you
You will also need to think about the average value of each customer transaction and compare this to the cost per action (CPA) or how much it costs to get one sale.
When you have all this, you are getting a better picture of your customer journey, the steps that they are taking to commit to a purchase from you and the value of your customer, and the cost of their journey.
Use this knowledge to sharpen your sales funnel—tackle their pain points at every step of their journey. A typical buyer journey, with actions at each stage, should look like this:
- Searches to solve a problem, be entertained, or get information
- Clicks on blog article via SERPs (visits site, click-through-rate, and organic traffic)
- Gives email address with ebook download or newsletter subscription (lead)
- Downloads content upgrade (marketing qualified lead; MQL)
- Purchase (conversion)
Since your end goal is converting sales, you can also run A/B tests to see where you may need to optimize your site for more conversions. Do this regularly.
Convert to Leads
To convert your visitors to leads, you need to take actionable steps to build a relationship with your readers.
Conversion to leads can occur through:
- Lead magnets
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Webinars
- Calls to action
- Remarketing
- Email drip campaigns
- Special promotions
- Content upgrades
Employing marketing strategies like these will be helpful to convert leads, and you will also reap the benefits of building a communication model. When you can keep your site visitors engaged, they will return to your site for further information. You will build brand trust as well as repeat customers.
Convert Your Visitors
When your blog already has traffic, half of the battle is already won. To convert your website traffic to sales, you will need to get to know your customer closely. Direct your traffic exactly where you want it to go using marketing tactics that entice your website visitors to move from passive viewers who spend seconds on your site to actively engage customers who rely on and trust your brand.
Don’t overcomplicate your blog. Use simple terms and avoid jargon that people outside the industry will have to search. Add content upgrades, and be creative with your call-to-action buttons. And don’t forget to regularly test your sales funnel.
Use these strategies, and in no time, you will start to see the sales you are looking for.
