What is Conversion Content, and Why Should You Be Creating It?

BY Carly J. Cais

November 9, 2022

Millions of internet users interact with websites daily to get information on various items, topics, services, or products and then leave these websites. But what if you could get them to take action and not just leave? What if you could get them to take the next desired step in their journey – one step closer to becoming a customer?

In addition, businesses struggle with training new hires on their Sales team and ensuring they have all the materials they need to have great prospect and customer conversations. This is where Conversion Content comes in as well. It aims to take new hires from where they are, to a fully enabled state so that they can contribute to the business at the same level as tenured reps. It converts new people to the next level.

This is the premise of Conversion Content, and this piece will explain what it is and how to create it.

What Is Conversion Content?

In general terms, Conversion Content is content that moves the reader to take action and is measured by the desired outcome. For leads, Conversion Content encourages action-taking and moving to the next stage in the Buyer’s Journey.

For Leads

Conversion Content gets the reader to take action on something. This could be:

• Clicking the CTA to “Learn More”
• Filling out a form
• Reading the next article in a series
• Reading a case study on the Case Studies page
• Watching a customer testimonial video
• Downloading a piece of content
• Subscribing to the newsletter
• Signing up for a demo
• Booking a meeting on a Sales calendar
• Writing a question in a chatbot

…and more. By getting the reader to interact with your website this way, this creates valuable interactions that can be interpreted as intent. Enough signals, you have a warm lead on your hands, and the Marketing and Sales teams can take appropriate action to engage them proactively.

This allows you as a team to better serve them in their journey and in interactions with your brand.

For an Internal Sales Team

Conversion Content is Sales Enablement content that converts them from new hires into seasoned pros quickly and helps them level up their skills. For internal teams, Conversion Content converts them from where they are, into an improved state whereby they are fully enabled and supported to do their jobs at the level of seasoned pros. This benefits your company or business since you can build your sales team into competent professionals quickly who perform better in a shorter amount of time.

Conversion Content:

• Reduces ramp time for reps
• Creates competency quickly
• Trains sales reps to your company’s process
• Fully supports hires with expert documentation and guidance
• Advances them from junior to senior reps

In both cases, Conversion Content is measurable by the desired outcome. This means that the success of Conversion Content is measured by how it induces a positive change in behavior. Consider the following examples:

Example 1

Leads are arriving at your website but the Bounce Rate from the homepage is above 75% and the Time on Page is <52 seconds. It’s clear that people aren’t finding what they are looking for once they hit your homepage. After analyzing the top 5 sources of what is bringing traffic to your homepage (the visitors’ pre-frame), you ensure that the same keywords and phrases are clearly visible on the top ⅓ of the homepage, and that those are designed as links to click for visitors who want to learn more. With a few small tweaks to the homepage of the website, Bounce Rate decreases by 25% and the traffic Path shows they hit higher-value pages of the website at a rate 4X what it was before.

Example 2

Your onboarding time from hire to first Opportunity created is greater than 5 months. It’s clear that there is an issue even though lead flow is good. After gathering feedback from the reps you hear consistently that prospects have difficulty understanding the value the product brings to businesses. You create a one-pager for prospects for different ICPs, citing use cases and improvement metrics the product brings. In addition, you create some sales scripts as conversation starters, objection handling, and selling frameworks. After rolling out this new content, rep ramp time decreases to 3.5 months.

In both examples above, Conversion Content helped move someone from where they were to where they needed to be for a better, more engaged experience.

How Is Conversion Content Different From Regular “Content?”

While generic content serves the purpose of driving visitors to a website, Conversion Content encourages visitors to interact on the site and take the next step in the Buyer’s  Journey.

What is a Buyer’s Journey?

A Buyer’s Journey is the path a person takes towards purchasing the product or service. HubSpot famously defines it as a person going through the stages of Awareness -> Consideration -> Decision. These are high-level generalized buckets; within each there will be sub-stages that make sense for your business and should be built into your CRM to track.

Generic content is Top of Funnel (ToFu), which fuels awareness and answers basic questions, driving traffic via backlinks and placements. It is typically a high-level overview and definitional, required for SEO. An example might be this blog post itself – defining the concept of “Conversion Content.” Content like this is responsible for answering basic questions in search results and improving rankings for the website based on backlinks. It may or may not drive traffic directly to the website. If it does succeed in driving traffic, it is essential to harness that traffic to get visitors to do something on your website and not just leave.

In contrast, Conversion Content sits more Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) or Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu), where the goal is to encourage action on the viewer’s part. Conversion Content gets people to do what is wanted on your website, taking them on the next step of their journey. It bridges the gap between what SEO Agencies provide and getting that traffic to convert once it hits your site.

Why Create Conversion Content?

Conversion Content is necessary for the Buyer’s Journey to move someone into the next stage of learning about your company and solution – and hence, act.

Conversion Content allows you to tie the vanity metrics (traffic, visits, views, SERP placements) to the things that matter for the business’s health (form fills, downloads, Qualified Leads, meetings, sales).

Vanity metrics are somewhat important to track, but smart Marketers know that not tying them to ultimate value for the business can fuel assumptions that the business doesn’t have a problem because content views or traffic looks good. Every business needs to focus on conversions as their number one goal – if the conversion rate is good, then increasing traffic/vanity metrics only can improve the business downstream.

To accomplish this, every Growth Marketer should seek conversions first – and optimize every digital touchpoint into Conversion Content in order to do this for the audience.

How Should You Create Conversion Content?

There are several ways to create Conversion Content. One way that we leverage with our Clients is via a Buyer’s Journey Content Audit.

The Buyer’s Journey Content Audit

1. Ensure Buyer’s Journey is fully documented

Is your Buyer’s Journey documented into the accurate sub-stages for your business? Do people go through a defined stage with consistent exit criteria that is not yet captured? Audit the current Buyer’s Journey and ensure it still applies to all ICPs, Sales motions, and your internal selling method.

2. Ensure Buyer’s questions and context are documented

Include the questions a Buyer needs to be answered at each stage of the journey AND where they are at that Stage. Are they Googling online? Are they viewing your website? Are they talking to other customers? Are they reading G2 reviews? It is important to know both the questions they need answered AND where they are encountering your brand because context and perception matter. The questions they may have while reading reviews on G2 may be different from the questions they have when Googling a painpoint they need solved.

3. Map existing content to Buyer’s Journey stages

Ensure that your existing content maps to each stage in the Buyer’s Journey. For instance, if Sales finds that Case Studies are very useful in early-stage Lead conversations, then Case Studies would be placed in the applicable Lead stage. If interactive product demos tend to be viewed most during the Qualification/SQL stage, they would map there. Look for patterns and large generalizations, and try to map the content to where it is most valuable for the Buyer – not where it could be used or might be used, but where it has historically been used to greatest effect.

4. Identify gaps where Buyer questions are not answered or content does not exist

Once you have content mapped out, now it’s time to consider a series of questions:

• What Buyer questions are not being answered?
• Is content being leveraged at the right time – ie, would it be more effective deployed earlier or later in the Buyer’s Journey?
• Can you see gaps?
• Do Buyers come up with specific questions at specific times during the process?
• Are their questions proactively answered by the content you have put out there?
• Is it a matter of Buyers not having access to that content at that time?
• Or is it really that this content just doesn’t exist – and should be created?

We usually identify issues as “Content Does Not Exist” “Content Exists But Unavailable” and “Content Exists But Wrong Stage” buckets.

5. Create content for these gaps and leverage them where the Buyer is at that stage

Once you identify gaps in the Buyer’s Journey and mapped content, proceed to replace these gaps with Conversion Content. It will also solve the problem of why Marketing assets aren’t influencing the potential buyer’s actions in a desirable way.

Upgrade Your Content to Conversion Content

Conversion Content ensures that the content you create for the business achieves goals. It is about planning, leveraging buyer psychology, and anticipating their next action to achieve desired results.

It is about converting someone from their current state into their next, improved state. Whether website visitors, social media followers, newsletter readers, or new hires, converting someone from where they are to where they need to be is the ultimate goal of Conversion Content.