Last week, Carlos del Rio of Agillian gave an interesting whiteboard session on content, conversions, and a 3-part framework for understanding their connection. In his presentation, he outlines the three most important things for all conversions rates.
1. A clear action
a. Tell a person what you want them to do
2. A clear purpose
a. Tell them what it is about
3. A clear value
a. Communicate what value they’re going to get out of the interaction
These three key ideas are what drives the layouts and design behind every landing page. We can use this framework for analyzing content. For example, here are a series of questions one should ask oneself when creating a blog post.
- Is it clear what the purpose of this blog is?
- Is it clear what the topic is?
- Is it clear that there is a value for this person to share it with their friends?
Essentially, if you are involved in content marketing, you are going after links and the correlating juice. It’s important to understand what the strategy behind your campaign is.
- Is it about helping users understand what they can do with your company?
- Helping them understand who your company is?
- Or is it helping them understand what the value is
Carlos gives a great example of genius content marketing from everyone’s favorite feline-friendly website, LOLcats:
“So, if you take the example of, like, LOLcats, we've all seen these. The difference between the millions of LOLcats that nobody cares about and the LOLcats that end up being in your Facebook stream every 15 minutes are that the ones that get shared answer the clear action, which is share me; what is the purpose, this is a LOLcat; and what is the value, this is the funniest LOLcat that I've seen all day. This is the LOLcat that crosses over with my community.”
Understanding these key concepts will allow your content strategies to do more than just add pages to your sitemap, they will add high value pages that people will want to share with friends, and thereby create quality links for your website. For these and other content marketing strategies, please contact our Digital Strategy team at Verndale.