7 Tips for Creating Irresistible Content Marketing Offers

Creating new, gated content offers is what inevitably will help you drive leads from your inbound marketing efforts. It is important for you to understand not just what offer you need, but how to make it so enticing that visitors can’t help but want to click the CTA and download it. 

Below are tips for creating irresistible content marketing offers:

1. Focus on Personas

Who are you targeting in this offer? What problems do they have? Why is this offer good for that particular persona? If you don’t have a persona in mind when you start creating your offer, it’s going to be less successful. Think of who your persona is first and then create the piece around their communication style and pain points.

2. Solve an Actual Pain Point

The best way to get a potential lead to download an offer is to give them confidence that your offer will answer their burning questions or solve a problem for them. If it isn’t helpful to your persona, then it’s not worth offering.  An example of an offer that isn’t helpful would be a downloadable company newsletter that showcases an employee-of-the-month. While cool for your team member, it doesn’t move the lead along.

3. Create an amazing title

“You can have a great offer with a bad title and no one will download it. But if you have an amazing title, suddenly everyone wants it,” said Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot. People still judge a book by its cover. If the title of your offer is unappealing, chances are no one is going to download it. You need to make sure your title is as enticing as the content inside the offer itself.

4. Stop Using Corporate Jargon

No one likes it. Everyone can see through it. Corporate jargon is unappealing to you and me and everyone else, so stop using it. Words that you should stay away from are:

• Next generation

• Cutting edge

• Best of breed

• Ground breaking

• Mission critical

• Scalable

You get the idea. Stay away from these words and relate to your persona instead.

5. Use the Best Performing Offer Formats

Being creative is fun, but when you need leads, start with what works first. The best performing offer formats (these offer the highest visit-to-lead conversion percentages) in order are:

• Ebooks or Guides

• Presentations

• Research and Reports

• White papers

• Kits

• Live Webinars

• On-Demand Webinars

• Demos, Consultations, Decision stage offers

By looking at the above list, you can conclude that filling out your content matrix with many eBooks or guides, and other awareness stage offers will be extremely beneficial.

6. Stay Up-to-Date & Current

The best way to lose trust is to have an ebook or guide dated back to 2001. Shut that down. Revamp the offer and make it as current as possible. You want to be talking about what your personas are talking about today, not yesterday, not last year. This is also a good time to update the title if it needs to be more enticing and re-promote the content through email to some of your newer leads.

7. Learn from your Mistakes

Analyzing your efforts is important. How do you know what was successful unless you’re looking at the numbers? At SmartBug Media, we use HubSpot’s inbound marketing software to learn the details of each offer we produce. The reporting system is easily to use and pinpoints the peaks and pitfalls of every campaign. From there, we adjust what we’re doing and apply it to the next offer.

If you create offers with the above seven tips in mind, you will be on your way to generating more leads for your company online. What tips do you have? Please share with us in the comments!