Content is the primary driver for capturing prospects and converting them into leads. However, in order to pique their interest and draw them to your website, it is important that you provide a variety of information. Until you capture the lead, you probably don’t know what stage your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. Therefore, you need to continually reach out with educational and informative information to attract their attention and to maintain it until they are ready for more. Prospects will need to see the benefit over and over before they’ll become interested and engaged. And at some point they are going to move into the decision-making stage and will want to learn more about your product offerings.
Are you ready?
Take a look at these 5 sources of content to persuade your prospects to buy:
- Customer testimonials
- Product comparisons
- Employee advocates
- Expert reviews
- Live demo or free trial
Customer testimonials provide the best example of the true customer experience with your product and company. Nearly 9 in 10 consumers have read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business, and 39% do so on a regular basis. Customer testimonials are great way to demonstrate the value of your product from a customer’s perspective. Highlight the customer’s pain points and how you were able to solve their problem. Include quotes of their experience throughout the process.
A product comparison chart gives you the opportunity to visually show how your offering ranks against the competition based on features or benchmarks. Highlight your product strengths focusing on solutions that tie to your prospects primary pain points.
Employee advocates provide a unique perspective within a company. Content from employees are more personal and oftentimes more relatable. This type of content can serve a similar role to that of customer testimonials in terms of providing information that is credible. Have employees from your customer service department describe a situation where they helped solve a customer’s problem. Demonstrate your ability to easily connect with customers and communicate immediacy to solving a problem in a timely manner. Let them know how important they are to you.
Include expert reviews that highlight’s your product in their review guides. This information helps prospects see how you rank in relation to other offerings within your industry. Inclusion in an expert review could be the tipping point of consideration for a prospect that may be concerned with products that are not mainstream.
A live demo or free trial allows a prospect to try your product to see how your product really works – a great way to convince those who might be a little skeptical to convert into a customer. In a benchmarking study involving 63 web-based companies and startups, an overwhelming majority of 93% offered a free trial period at least 14-30 days to their customers. Let them see for themselves how invaluable your product is to solving their problem.
Quality content is informative, useful. It instills trust. Having the type of content your prospective customer needs when they are ready to make a decision is imperative. Convince your prospects with credibility, usability and customer proof. It will be enough to persuade them to buy.
1 Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/88-consumers-trust-online-reviews-much-personal-recommendations-195803
2 Get Social
(http://blog.getsocial.io/3-reasons-why-companies-should-offer-free-trials/)