The biggest fear of every content marketer is to ask the next question:
Can content marketing drive sales?
The answer is yes. You can drive sales with content. But it requires more than just publishing a blog post or social media update. To turn content marketing into a sales driver, you need to have a strategy in place that covers the entire buyer’s journey.
And the problem is that we, marketers, don’t know how to point out that piece of content to a direct sale.
In fact, I don’t even think we should point out a single piece of content to drive a sale. It’s the entire journey I want you to present now so we can understand how to create content that drives sales.
It’s a framework I used, and it helped to make the sale, build the brand and get the leads.
Here’s the purpose-driven content framework to understand it:
- We create content to get noticed
- We get noticed to earn mentions
- We earn mentions to build a brand
- We build a brand to bring the leads
- We bring the leads to make the sales
Let me explain this framework so you can understand it and use it on your own.
First step – Build content to get noticed.
We are living in an era where attention is the current currency.
Brands, creators, and marketers are waking up in the morning to get their community’s attention, maintain it, and convert that attention into a new customer or client.
It’s an attention game we are all playing. I want your attention. The press wants your attention. The competition wants your attention. And heck, even your cat wants your attention.
So how to get attention in this world?
Creating consistently purpose-driven content that solves a problem for a specific audience, helps them do their work and life better, or entertains them.
Every article we publish, every tweet we write, and every video we record, we do it because we want people to notice us and consume it.
We write articles on our company blog because we want prospects and future clients to read them, see them, to notice them.
But in an overcrowded world where everybody is doing the same thing, we should do something different. Have a different perspective and approach that will help us get those eyeballs we want.
For example, we created Creatopy, a case study where we talked about vertical video ads. But it was from a different perspective. We invested $1000 in every platform where you can do a vertical video ad promotion and analyze it from the results perspective: which platform is good for vertical video ads and what kind of results anyone can get from it.
This kind of article was interesting for the industry because it was the answer anyone was searching for.
We didn’t just write an article about TikTok ads, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reel, and Pinterest Pin ideas. We moved forward and made something that nobody has done before us about this topic: we tested them out to see which was the best for one goal: web traffic.
So we created that kind of content to get noticed in the marketing industry.
Do you want to get noticed in your industry?
Do the work nobody wants to do.
Do the work nobody is willing to do.
And how do we know if people are noticing us? That’s the second step.
Step 2 – Get noticed to earn mentions.
How do you know when you are not ignored? People just talk about you. Even if you do great stuff or even bad ones.
That’s why the next step in the Purpose-driven content framework is to get mentions.
If people notice your work, they will talk about you.
Take, for example, Amanda Natividad. She coined the term “Zero-Click Content” with an article on Sparktoro’s blog – and now almost everybody is talking about the “Zero-Click” concept.
Amanda’s work was noticed, and she (and Sparktoro) gets tons of mentions about this framework.
She talks about this term whenever she attends a podcast, webinar, or online conference. And repeating it, people are reminded it and will talk about mentioning her.
Why? Because it’s relevant, memorable, and marketable, she has done the work nobody was willing to do.
It’s not rocket science, and she didn’t invent this strategy. This is something anyone can do it.
She just came with a name to a thing that anyone in the marketing industry is doing. So she started talking about it, presenting the benefits and every time she had the chance to present it, she show it why it’s effective.
Now when you talk about “Zero-Click Content” framework, you will also mention Amanda Natividad from Sparktoro.
It doesn’t mean that if you build it, they will come. It means that people started noticing a thing that they wondered too.
And when you get into this stage, you realize that you need to continue to build on this momentum because it can stop at any moment.
The only way to continue to get mentions is to be helpful and interested in this topic.
Do you want people to mention your brand?
Be the one in your industry that is doing the things nobody is willing to do.
Go that extra mile. Find the solution for that simple problem. Coin a name for a common behavior in your industry.
There is no such thing as too much communication.
Talk about it in your tweets, newsletter, podcast, webinar, landing page or wherever you can to remind it to your audience over and over again.
Step 3 – Earn mentions to build a brand.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos.
And that’s very interesting even in the digital ecosystem. I bet that there were agencies and marketing teams who said, “Hey, did you read this case study from Creatopy about vertical video ads?”
And we gave people a reason to talk about us. Even if we are an ad automation platform, we still do these content projects to help the industry and answer all their questions about online advertising from every perspective.
But our case study helped us put another brick to building our brand.
Don’t get me wrong. The case study didn’t build Creatopy’s brand. This case study only helped with one tiny brick. It was the right brick at the right time.
But this case study helped us be in the newsfeed of the industry day by day and week by week by redistributing the content.
For example, I secured a place to speak at one of the biggest conferences in the advertising industry: Ad World Conference, and be on the same page with my marketing heroes like Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin, Amanda Natividad, and many more. The topic I will discuss will be exactly this case study and how marketers can use different vertical video ads to convert potential clients into customers.
And the brand is building brick by brick with every one of these small steps. But the next phase of the framework is to understand that this piece of content can drive your leads.
Building a brand is not a one-stop activity. It’s a continued activity. You can’t just stay in your brand life. Either you go up and you build it, or you go down, and you destroy it.
That’s the power of a brand and the responsibility of growing a brand.
Step 4 – Build a brand to bring the leads.
A lead can be a new subscriber, a new follower, and even a new prospect who signed up for that trial. But if they didn’t trust the brand, if they didn’t see that piece of content and connected with the brand in a simple educational way, they wouldn’t sign up for the trial or hit that subscribe button.
But we got the attention. We got mentions, and now people are talking about Creatopy.
And we also designed a short funnel to get more leads, subscribers, and prospects through that piece of content. We used a dedicated landing page; people can download the case study in a .pdf format.
And I need to be honest. In my opinion, it wasn’t a perfect landing page, but it simply gave what people wanted: the .pdf format of the case study.
You don’t need to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in your landing page to get the leads.
Take, for example, Justin Welsh. His social media and lead generator strategy is very simple. Publishing daily on Twitter and Linkedin, one weekly webinar, and 3 lead magnet landing pages: video course, newsletter, and sponsorship. The secret behind his one-person business with $3M in revenue? One audience, consistency, and make sure you remind people that you can help them in these ways whenever they are ready to buy it.
I love how Larry Kim articulated the sub-niche audience in a webinar I had with him “The bottom of the funnel is the new top of the funnel”.
That’s exactly what we did at Creatopy with this piece of content.
We identified and grew a new audience that wouldn’t find us before if we didn’t move forward and implemented this case study.
Our audience was not social media marketing people. Our audience was the social media marketing people doing performances on these platforms, and they were asking questions about the real deal with vertical ads.
And after the lead trusted the content and gives their name, email, and phone number, it’s time to go to what we expect: the sales.
Step 5 – We bring the leads to make the sale
It’s not just about the sales; it’s about how you make them.
We are in a sales funnel, so people are going to move from an article and a video to a test or trial or maybe add us to the cart and buy the platform.
After making this case study, we received new subscribers, new leads, and new customers.
We had the scope of this piece of content.
It’s not a one-day framework that will make the sales – but it’s worth it.
The sales are not the end of the game.
It’s a never-ending cycle that we need to implement and keep doing to grow the brand, build a tribe around the brand, and ultimately make sales.
And you can build upon this framework every time when you are about to create a new piece of content.
Step 1: Create purpose-driven content
Step: Get noticed
Step 3: Earn mentions
Step 4: Build the brand
Step 5: Bring the leads
Step 6: Make the sale.
You don’t need to find that new perfect idea or plan to get there.
Start with this framework, and it will become easier to see the connection between these 6 phases that will help you create and publish good and high-converting content.
l want to hear from you about this content strategy. Let me know your thoughts.
Leave a Reply