5 Most Common Reasons Your Readers Aren’t Turning Into Buyers

The popularity of content marketing is hard to overestimate. Now it affects all kinds of sites, portals, web services, and applications. Receiving email newsletters, push notifications, material from blogs, long reads in publishers, and online events are all components of content marketing. Mastering the above direction is simply vital for owners of commercial websites specializing in sales. So, what should be done to make your blog turn your readers into real buyers? Pay attention to the basic mechanisms of content marketing.

Some business owners still don't have a clear understanding of what content marketing is. Some think it's the same as sales copywriting and hire yesterday's copywriters for the job. However, the content marketer and the copywriter have different tasks.

A copywriter is usually first of all focused on selling some product, but a content marketer has a different goal. He views a website or a company's account in a social network as a full-fledged media, so he is not trying to sell products, but to satisfy the readers' need for useful and interesting content. Confusing content marketing and copywriting is not the only mistake made in this direction, and now we will break down the rest.

Reason No. 1: Not Knowing Who Your Readers Are

Mistaking your target audience is the most common mistake in content marketing. For example, you write for business owners and directors, but middle managers and employees read you. In this case, you won't convey your message to the audience because they won't understand you, and the readers won't benefit from the content. Therefore they won't read you anymore, discuss and publish your articles on their social networks.

Without considering the characteristics, interests, and common problems of your readers, you can't do successful content marketing because you simply won't be heard. It is advisable to make an average portrait of your target audience, derive from it the image of a particular reader, and address all materials personally. Here are the criteria you should consider in a portrait of your target audience:

• Demographics: Gender, age, marital status, place of residence.
• Social status: ability to pay, position in society.
• Occupation: profession, average income.
• Hobbies: what hobbies he/she enjoys.
• Sources of information: what media reads, what sites he/she spends time on, what services he/she uses.
• Sphere of interest: what he likes and wants to read about.

How do you determine that you have chosen the wrong target audience?

There are several indicators to help you understand this:

• No comments. If people don't want to discuss your stuff, it means they're not interested and don't care about the topics. This is a sure sign that you're writing for the wrong people.
• No likes or reposts. Not all articles involve discussion, but if they also do not want to like and share in their social networks, the text is really interesting to readers.
• Negative. If the negative feedback exceeds the positive, then, again, you are read by the wrong people.

Reason No. 2: Believing That The Content Is More Important Than The Product

Content marketing is not a magic tool that will help you sell anything to anyone. It's a mistake to think so. It only helps if you have a competitive product, a well-established sales system, and professional customer support. If all of that is in place, content marketing can help you wrap your product up nicely and present it to your audience in a way that they won't be disappointed after they buy it.

If the product is of poor quality, breaks down quickly, does not meet the advertised characteristics, or is simply inferior to competitors, no content marketing will not save you from the negative, but rather it even contributes to it. Because it's one thing when a company sells a poor-quality product and doesn't hide it. It is another thing when it tells everywhere about the high quality of its products, but in fact, consumers find themselves deceived.

Therefore, you should begin content marketing only when you have thoroughly studied the product itself and are confident in its competitiveness.

Reason No. 3: Expecting Quick Sales

It is not uncommon for business owners to be disappointed in content marketing when it does not bring them instant results and give it up completely without having recognized the full benefit of this method of promotion. Indeed, a week or even a month after posting the first materials on the company's website or on social media, you should not expect to have thousands of readers every day.

Content marketing is not contextual advertising and promotions designed for instant results. Here, in order to reap the benefits, you have to make some effort and wait at least a few months. Users have to be convinced of your reliability, become interested in your articles, and become your regular readers; only then will some of them start converting into customers, and others will start distributing your content to their environment, thereby smoothly increasing your audience reach.

Content marketing will not work for you if your only goal is to get a large number of payments. This promotion method will rather help you to increase customer loyalty and thus indirectly influence sales. You may want to use methods other than content marketing to promote your site. For that, you can use the helpful tips at codeinspiration.pr.

Reason No. 4: Focusing on Quantity over Quality

In content marketing, the number of articles and other texts is not as important as their quality and regularity of publication. It's better to write 1 text twice a week than to publish 5 articles a day, then publish nothing for a week, and then post a dozen materials again at once.

Suppose you produce a large amount of content. In that case, there are significant risks that it reduces its quality. This already contradicts the very essence of content marketing, providing people with really useful and interesting content they will want to read.

If you publish a lot of texts, over time, users will start to perceive your publications simply as information noise, which is constantly in their feeds and which they may not even read. If you write less frequently, however, your publications will be awaited and studied with interest every time.

Nonetheless, long expert pieces that are long-form can elicit a positive reaction from readers. But to do so, a longread must be extremely interesting, structured, and useful to be read to the end. Writing such materials is difficult, time-consuming and expensive, so it is better to publish them once a month or even less frequently.

Reason No. 5: Not Evaluating Results

Content marketing is a tool to increase sales in the long run. But this does not change the fact that content marketing must have a specific and measurable result.

It would be a mistake to simply publish content and not analyze what results it brings to the business in numerical terms.

What criteria can be used to evaluate the results:

• The number of unique visitors to the site per week/month/quarter/year. UTM tags can help you understand who came specifically because of articles and other texts to evaluate how useful they are to the business.
• Time spent reading. Google or other search engine counters can help you estimate how much time users spend on a site reading texts.
• Number of leads. Conversion is also an important indicator of how convincingly you communicate to readers that your company is worth trusting.

It's cool if you create useful and interesting content, but it's a mistake not to extend it to a new audience that might like it. In content marketing, great reach is important, and different methods are used to get it:

• SEO optimization of texts for search engine algorithms will help you get a sufficient flow of traffic from new users who are interested in the topics you write about. To do this, it is important to insert the right keywords in your texts, work with headlines and write the kind of content that people are searching for on the Internet.
• Referral services. There are various services that connect authors and readers, finding an interested audience for the former. This is a good opportunity to reach new readers if you start a channel there or connect your website or blog to the service.
• Targeted advertising. You can set up advertising campaigns in social networks so that your content is shown to specific users you choose.

How to Turn Your Readers Into Buyers

We know how difficult it is for marketers to create fresh content to attract more views and leads. You can create new content and modify well optimized content already published on the site.

Using old content in new ways takes some practice. Once you've mastered the ego, your marketing team can build their strategy around existing publications.

Here are a few ways we've expanded a single piece of content and attracted more sales leads:

• Take quotes and statistics from the blog post and create data visualizations for social media: images, attention blocks, etc.
• Turn a blog post into an infographic.
• Share infographics on social media and in your newsletter.
• Divide infographics into several smaller graphics to share on social media.
• Turn lists into carousels on social media.
• Create email headlines from social media posts.
• Turn a blog post into a podcast or web series.
• Combine multiple blog posts on the same topic into a white paper or e-book.
• Use the e-book as the basis for a webinar.
• Split a long e-seminar into short YouTube videos.
• Create GIFs from videos to share on social media.
• These are content repurposing techniques we've used, but the possibilities are endless.

The process of engaging potential customers and encouraging them on their way to purchase is challenging. Perhaps a few more basic, non-traditional ways to engage potential customers in sales can help:

• Customized content.
• Promotional mailings.
• Hybrid events.
• Personalization.
• Referral and marketing.
• Redesigned content.
• New content channels.
• Closed content.

You can use all or some of these methods of generating leads. Don't forget to test target segments, calls to action, landing page design and social media signatures.

Finally, while getting as many leads as possible is great, make sure your automation software and sales team can handle it.