Fresh, Valuable Content That Converts in 5 Weeks

How do you create content that converts without burning out or breaking the bank? Creating fresh, valuable content on a consistent basis requires extensive planning, effort, strategy, and knowledge of your target market. Today, we’ll focus on creating content that converts with a weekly calendar that reduces stress and harnesses the limited resources available to most small businesses. This 5-week calendar balances education, social proof, and entertainment to create engagement and leads to conversion. Here’s an overview of our calendar.

Content marketing

Managing content marketing is the most crucial element of digital marketing in any era, but it is especially challenging with the changes wrought by AI. In case you hid under a rock for the last year, content is the new SEO, and creating valuable content on a consistent basis is how you earn viewers’ attention today, much the way early TV relied on programs to get viewers to watch commercials. Now that TV advertising is dead, or at least in its death throes, content marketing is the name of the game.

Back in the spring, I wrote a comprehensive post detailing the steps involved in content marketing to generate content that converts. If you didn’t get a chance to read that one, you can catch up here before reading on. I’m also repeating the image used to detail salient tactics necessary for success in content marketing.

I briefly discussed the importance of a content marketing calendar as a means to ensure you consistently create valuable content across multiple platforms, including social media, your website, email marketing, and any other digital strategies you use. I offered the calendar used by Content Marketing Institute, which is good, but today I’m going to expand on ySince you need fresh content at least:

• Once a week for your website (blog)
• Once or twice a day on most social media platforms with the following exceptions:
  • X (formerly Twitter) requires posting multiple times per day
  • YouTube performs well with publishing once a week, especially if you always publish a new video on the same day.
• Email marketing requires new broadcasts every week or more frequently, depending on how your subscribers respond.

Creating content that converts

If you want content that converts, you must use best practices and take care in crafting every piece of content to ensure you make conversion enticing and easy. There are different types of content, including owned, earned, and paid. Today, we’ll focus primarily on owned content, which is posted on platforms you control, such as your website, social media, and email messages. Paid media deals with advertising, while earned media is brand mentions, reviews, recommendations, and other content about your brand posted by others. We’ll touch on this briefly.

Content that converts takes into consideration your target market; that subset of consumers who possess:

1. a need for your product
2. a desire to buy your product
3. the authority to make a purchase
4. the money necessary to buy your product

Your posts must help that target market move through the decision-making process by providing the right content at the right time. Content that converts helps ease your prospective buyers along the customer journey, which looks like this:

Types of content

We find various types of content useful in content that converts. In fact, varying the types of content you produce often represents the best strategy. Among the types of content you should produce are:

• blog posts; consistently valuable content is the biggest factor in SEO
• social media posts on platforms frequented by your target market
• email newsletters to segmented subscribers
• white papers and other evergreen content often used as a lead magnet to gain subscribers
• videos including explainer videos and short videos for TikTok or Instagram reels
• unique images, such as infographics, to attract backlinks and make your content more interesting
• guest posts on other blogs as a way to reach new markets and gain authority
• SMS messages or other messaging app content

That’s a lot of content you need on a weekly basis. Creating a content calendar helps keep you on track to produce all the content you need and automation tools, like Buffer, reduce the effort required to keep the content flowing onto your chosen platforms.

Writing content that converts

Nail your calls to action (CTAs) 

A CTA asks for the sale and every good salesperson knows you never leave a sales call without asking for the order. You need to choose the right CTA for your market and the type of conversion you seek. CTA’s can come off as very ‘saleys’ if they aren’t done right, so it’s worthwhile spending some additional time perfecting yours.

Remember, a good CTA encourages the reader to take the next step along the sales process, whether that’s signing up for more information or taking the plunge and buying a product. Utilize this by including positive affirmations in your CTAs like the ones you will see below.

Instead of: Click here to buy now! 

Use: Yes, I want to get (product benefit), today! 

In the latter example, the customer is the one with the agency to access the powerful benefit you can offer, rather than simply doing what they are told to.

Be sure to mix your CTAs up and keep them fresh as well, as they won’t retain the same impact if they are identical throughout all of your content. Many tools out there allow you to create A/B tests to optimize the conversion of your CTA.

Buttons perform better than links in achieving conversion, but remember to space your buttons far enough apart so you avoid accidental clicks, especially on a mobile device. Experiment with the color and font used in your CTA to ensure it stands out without yelling at visitors.

Focus on your followers 

Content is only successful if it is consumed and shared. Fortunately, you can maximize the chances of this happening by putting the focus on your followers and their needs rather than your products. Indeed, by researching and asking what your followers would like to see, you are much more likely to create content they will consume.

Similarly, by putting in the time and effort to interact with your community on social media, you can help build a more positive relationship that means they are more amenable to consuming the content you put out.

Lastly, don’t forget that your community is an excellent source of effective content. This is because user-generated content (UGC) serves a range of purposes, including engaging the people making the content, as well as showing the usefulness and other benefits of your products and services to those consuming it. UGC also humanizes your brand, as customers always find it easier to relate to a real person over a faceless corporation and they believe what another user says over what the company says.

Calendar for content that converts

This calendar proposes topics for content that converts based on planning for a publication schedule of five days a week. Timing and the most effective days to publish content will vary based on your target market, so the best thing to do when you start out is to test to determine the optimal schedule. Marketing automation software like Buffer uses AI to suggest an optimal schedule based on how your community reacts to your existing posts and learns as you continue posting.

The key to creating content that converts is to stop talking about your brand and focus on things important to customers and prospects.

While this schedule might seem daunting, it’s very manageable with only an hour or so a day. The first trick is to use a marketing automation tool. You can use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite for free, with a limit of three social media platforms. A small business should limit itself to just these three. This eliminates the need to constantly interrupt your day to post directly to the social network.

The second tip is to craft a week or even a month’s worth of posts at once, set them up to publish on your optimal schedule, then revisit periodically to track metrics and adapt content to changes in the environment. For instance, after the attacks in NY on 911, sharing upbeat content just didn’t seem right. A company should accommodate such events.

The third tip is to reuse content whenever possible to avoid overburdening your content team. For instance, a YouTube video can form the basis for a blog post, then be shared on your social media platforms in an appropriate format. Or, cut up a long-form video to post smaller bits on TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Remember that digital content isn’t read like a book from cover to cover. It’s OK to reshare older content, ask your community to comment on something posted sometime in the past, or to tweak content posted some time ago. It’s also acceptable to share similar content across multiple social media platforms, adjusting the format to optimize for each platform.

The following is based on publishing Monday through Friday. Adjust your schedule as recommended above. Similarly, armed with this calendar, you can collect ideas, resources (such as images and links) to use in crafting future content pieces, and assign tasks to members of your content marketing team. You can even use the calendar as a check to ensure content matches the brand voice, doesn’t conflict with brand norms, and avoids unfortunately inappropriate posts (like the one below) by requiring a sign-off before being loaded into your marketing automation tool.

• Monday might focus on building your authority through posting educational content such as actionable tips, tutorials, or industry insights.
• Tuesday should help build your brand and your community by humanizing your content. Consider posting behind-the-scenes content, introducing key employees, or calling out prospective buyers. IBM, for instance, might call out targeted firms with recognition of their accomplishments, such as contributions to community events showing corporate social responsibility.
• Wednesday is set aside for building social proof by sharing case studies, reposting user-generated content, or reviews. You might also highlight your own accomplishments, such as signing new clients.
• Set aside Thursday for building community engagement. Consider posting questions, hosting contests, creating polls, or encouraging conversations.
• Friday is for making direct offers. Once a week is sufficient for posting a call to action, offering a discount, discussing products, or other content that helps drive conversion.
• Weekends are dedicated to interacting with your community, responding to comments, and answering questions (although this should be part of everyday activities).

A 30-day content calendar to content that converts

This content calendar may sound challenging, but don’t damage your budding reputation (or a more established one) by turning this critical task over to AI. It’s perfectly alright to use AI to suggest topics or even craft drafts, but overreliance on AI results in dehumanizing your brand. This might reduce conversions rather than support more.

• Week one might involve laying a strong foundation and dispelling myths or misconceptions that might interfere with a decision to purchase your brand products.
• Week two, you can focus on establishing the value of your brand and highlighting your processes to show the care you take in creating products, taking care of your people, and ensuring value to customers.
• Week three can include posts related to frameworks and transformations. For instance, a step-by-step checklist showing how you complete a process. You can also share what a day in the life of a team member looks like or how you fixed a customer problem to ensure satisfaction.
• Week four is dedicated to overcoming objections. Consumers can always come up with objections to your brand and every real salesperson knows that selling truly starts when a prospective buyer states an objection. This is your chance to dispel misconceptions, correct misinformation, and restate the value of your brand in solving the prospect’s problem.
• Week five might involve a wrap-up of the month, such as summarizing all four weeks’ worth of posts.

Conclusion

Using this advice, you’ll soon find that creating content that converts is less onerous and more effective in achieving conversion. Of course, you need to use appropriate metrics that include tracking how each piece of content converts, to ensure you optimize your content marketing efforts. Good luc

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