Ways to Warm Up Buying Temperature
The key takeaway here is learning how to “warm-up” traffic by optimizing content for each stage of traffic:
- The best approach to the “cold traffic stage” is to provide truly exceptional content. Since this is also the “pre-trust” stage, you’ll have to deliver immediate value to the prospect to keep them interested. Provide content so valuable that people would pay to get access to it. This is the giving stage: think tutorials, explanations, 101-level information about their pain points. Don’t ask for too much information on form fields.
- Retarget with more value at the “warm traffic” stage. At this point, provide even more content as you warm up your audience. Address more nuanced pain points that go beyond the “101” stage: assume they’ve already seen and read the basics.
- With the “hot traffic stage,” your lead has shown interest, and they’re ready for sales copy or a solid sales pitch. By the time traffic is considered hot, it’s time to deliver content that motivates them to pull the proverbial trigger and buy.
For Greater Conversions - Give Before You Take
Take a moment to ask yourself: do you enjoy being sold to? Chances are the answer to that is a firm no. It feels impersonal and high-pressure; it puts you on the defensive and makes you uncomfortable or irritated. Your prospects feel the same way! With that in mind, take it easy in your messaging and focus your content marketing on being helpful, not making sales. When you give them something truly valuable first, you’re empowering your audience to know, like, and trust you, rather than being suspicious of your intentions and short-tempered at high-pressure sales tactics.
Increase Conversions Delivering the Right Content
The average prospect engages with multiple pieces of content before buying. They might start by signing up for your podcast, follow it up by downloading a case study, reviewing customer testimonials, and finally, being ready to buy. When you deliver the appropriate content and provide value at each stage within the sales cycle, you’ll be leaving your buyers a breadcrumb trail of sorts. This will nurture the lead and improve their long-term relationship with your brand.
This concept is demonstrated clearly in the “Content Marketing Funnel” concept. The content marketing funnel is a step-by-step process that converts prospects into leads and leads into customers.
There are three key stages of a content funnel:
- Awareness - People become aware of your brand through the following content types: social media posts, ads, blog posts, landing pages, videos, and podcasts.
- Evaluation - At this stage, the prospect takes a closer look at your service or product, evaluating it against competing solutions. The ideal content types for this stage are books, case studies, white papers, webinars, courses, reports, guides, and assessments.
- Buy - During the closing stage of your content funnel, you can provide content to help close the sale, such as social proof, customer stories, or competitive comparisons.
Customer Behavior and Analyzing Your Web Traffic
Analyzing web traffic gives you insight into customer behavior, the most popular content, and your total web conversions. Understanding the behavior of both current and prospective customers allows you to focus on higher converting content, letting you mimic the structure and/or subject(s) for better future results.
Increase Conversion Rates with KPIs
Analytics tools break down critical content Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. These include:
- How many visitors are reading your content?
- How much time visitors spend reading your content?
- Bounce rate - how many visitors “bounce” or leave the page quickly, or without engaging with it.
- Collective time spent reading your content.
With this insight available to you, you’ll be better able to plan fully informed content strategies and speed up conversion increases. Depending on what sort of insights the data offers, you can improve your chances to bump conversion up by, for example, adding additional call to action buttons, subscribe and download links, and more.
Improving conversion rates is a never-ending quest, and understanding audience buying temperature is a critical element of succeeding at it. When the goal is increasing conversion rates, your biggest allies will be great data, careful examination of your traffic temperature, and a willingness to adjust your marketing strategy to find your sweet spot.