The High-Conversion Content That Dominates at Every Buyer’s Stage

What makes a Prospect become a Customer? It all depends on whether your high-conversion content strategy delivers the right value at the pivotal moment.

Key Takeaways

• Just because your content is good doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s optimized to convert.
• Leads and Prospects want to see free value-packed content that helps them validate and diagnose their problem.
• Prospects are looking for content to jumpstart a conversation about their options.
• Customers want content that empowers them to extract the most value from your solution.
• Promoters want to build their relationship with you through exclusive content that’s just for your inner circle.

Have you ever spent months planning and executing the perfect email campaign, only to find that your lead magnet was a dud, and it all goes nowhere? 

You’re in the company of millions of other inbound marketers who have found themselves scratching their heads at their ROI after doing everything right.

In a perfect world, your effort would be enough to generate results. But we’re in the fast-moving world of the flywheel and the buyer’s journey.

A quick recap of the flywheel and buyer’s journey

The flywheel and the buyer’s journey are two similar, but different concepts that make up the foundation of inbound marketing. 

The buyer’s journey 

When a buyer embarks on a voyage to understand their problem, consider how to solve it, and ultimately decide on a solution that’s their unique buyer's journey.

The buyer's journey consists of these steps:

• Awareness: The buyer knows there’s a problem and wants to understand and validate it.
• Consideration: Now that the buyer has named the problem, they’re thinking about the best way to solve it.
• Decision: The buyer has a clear picture of their options, and they’re ready to compare and choose the right solution (hint: yours!)

The flywheel

The flywheel is a model for fueling relationships through exceptional experiences. HubSpot created the flywheel to fuel their biggest goal – building lifelong partnerships by delivering constant, personalized value.

Unlike the buyer's journey, the flywheel is cyclical and self-propelled. It’s based on the real-world flywheel, an engineering invention that uses constant motion to harness and store kinetic energy.

The flywheel consists of three steps:

• Attract
• Engage
• Delight

The flywheel is a model for fueling relationships through exceptional experiences. 

Delight is the kinetic energy that propels the cycle forward. You generate delight by creating over-the-top wonderful experiences for your engaged customers. 

That helps them rank up to promoters—your secret ending to bottomless strangers, each one a potential prospect and customer when you take the time to engage them. Keep delighting your promoters and they’ll reward you by telling everyone exactly how they feel about you! 

Read more: Get promoters talking by delivering delight in the form of interactive, rewarding, valuable, and exclusive content!

What makes content convert?

For the purposes of adding momentum to the flywheel, converting can mean:

• A buyer on their journey becomes a customer 
• A buyer moves to the next stage in the flywheel, moving from stranger to prospect, prospect to customer, or customer to promoter

The momentum that triggers the flywheel to spin and the buyer to move along their journey comes from content that tells an out-of-this-world story, sure. But it’s not enough to simply throw resources at your content and hope that killer quality will overcome other shortcomings.

To maintain that forward motion of the flywheel or the buyer's journey, your high-conversion content must be both:

• Well-timed by reaching the buyer right when they’re looking for it
• Buyer-focused by connecting with the buyer in the way they want you to 

When you’re crafting your next content campaign, make it completely buyer-centric. Don’t send your entire list a promo code for a product when two-thirds of them haven’t even reached the point of buying yet.

Instead, run down this checklist for every piece of high-conversion content before it’s time to publish: 

• Does this content deliver the value the Buyer wants to see?
• Does it speak directly to the Buyer, making them feel heard? 
• Does it create a sense of urgency, making the Buyer feel they should act now? 
• Does it reduce friction for the Buyer by addressing their worries? 
• Does it tell a story that reflects the Buyer’s own?

You should be able to check off every one of these items confidently. If you can’t, then it’s back to reformulating your content until it hits the mark. 

Most importantly, are you delivering the content in the right package?

That means the package your buyer is most likely to open – the high-conversion content that’s right for their stop along the flywheel or buyer's journey.

Attract early-stage buyers with value-packed content

Early on, buyers know that they have a problem, but they aren’t 100% sure that they understand it from every angle.

To get the jump on whatever’s giving them a headache, buyers at the beginning of the journey go into full research mode. They’re looking for specific, diagnostic (free) content that reflects what they’re experiencing and validates what they’re thinking. 

Buyers in the awareness stage (or strangers and prospects on the flywheel) want to hear your take on their niche question in the form of: 

• Blogs
• Infographics
• Videos
• Whitepapers
• eBooks

Engage mid-stage buyers with content that starts a conversation 

Buyers reaching the consideration stage of the journey – late-stage prospects and new customers on the flywheel – are confident they know all about their problem now. They’re ready to start a conversation about their options by engaging with content that:

• Discusses available solutions for prospects who haven’t yet converted 
• Explores related solutions for customers who are looking for more

Typically, these mid-stage buyers are interested in consuming: 

• Comparison articles showing how multiple possible solutions stack up against one another
• How-to content that describes implementing a solution or solving a problem in enough detail to replicate it
• Case studies illustrating how other clients in their industry have approached solving the same problem

Delight late-stage buyers with relationship-focused content 

Late-stage buyers include those in the decision stage of the journey, plus customers and promoters on the flywheel.

This is perhaps your most valuable demographic of buyers for a couple of reasons: 

• You’ve already put maximum resources into engaging, converting, and building each late-stage relationship
• Enough delight elevates a customer to promoter status, fueling forward motion of the flywheel 

Nurturing these buyers and giving them the delight they crave requires going above and beyond by building the relationship. 

Show them you care about their experience by smoothing out friction and identifying places where your customers and promoters may find the experience stalls. They want to see content that proves you’re always listening and looking for ways to help them succeed.

Plus, late-stage buyers love feeling like they’re part of your exclusive club, so they’re fans of limited content that rewards them for staying in your close-knit brand family. Customers and promoters want to know their relationship with you pays in perks that no one else can get.

Make any of these high-conversion content types exclusive, and your late-stage buyers will eat it up: 

• Resource centers and other self-led educational content
• Webinars and Masterclasses with live Q&A and expert-level guests
• Podcasts where they can hear industry expertise and problem-solving in action
• Loyalty campaigns, such as thank you emails with exclusive deals or tips included 

Tell a story that attracts, engages, and delights 

When you’re planning a high-conversion content campaign, you must tailor the types of content to meet the buyer where they are now.

A buyer who’s in the decision stage will scroll right past an email with a subject line stating Inside: Diagnosing why your ROI tanked (and what to do about it). They know what to do about it. You spent 66% of the buyer's journey explaining it to them already.

It’s fine to reuse content across multiple channels or campaigns if it’s relevant – turning an existing blog post into a video, or making an email campaign around a white paper you already have.

But it’s all too common for uninformed marketers to blast content with the same intent across every buyer’s stage regardless of the buyer’s need or readiness. That feels invasive to the buyer, who wants to remain in control through the entire Journey.

After you’ve tailored the content strategy to your unique strangers, prospects, customers, and promoters, there’s one more critical item to check off your list: 

Does it tell a captivating story that keeps them on the hook from start to finish? More importantly, is that story theirs? 

We see that sweat on your forehead, and we hear you. Not everyone is a natural Brothers Grimm and all of a sudden you’re expected to be.

Whether you feel up to the challenge or not, the reality is that storytelling in marketing is a skill that takes time and work to perfect. You can put your nose to the grindstone and come out a true tale-weaver in the end, a year and a (literal) million words later. But is that the best use of your time? 

Outsourcing your high-conversion content strategy means that you’re entrusting this monumental task to the inbound marketing experts who live and breathe storytelling: ContentBacon. 

The time savings you get from outsourcing are huge, but that’s not all. The ContentBacon team will handcraft the perfect narrative for every touchpoint along the buyer's journey and ensure it reaches the buyer exactly when they’re ready for it. 

Quality and impeccable timing aside, you get the peace of mind that the industry’s best storytellers and marketing experts have their hands on every moving part from start to finish. 

Contact us today to put your FREE discovery call on the books. Let’s have a no-pressure conversation about content conversion!