Grow Sales and Loyalty with Persuasive Content Experiences
There’s little doubt you’ve seen your website and social media performance stats, and now you don’t want to think about that anymore.
If you’ve done Google/Facebook PPC campaigns with poor results, then it likely wasn’t very persuasive. Visitors don’t seem moved to click through or become a customer. That’s not good. You need a fix.
The Fix: make persuasion the primary outcome—where everything else in your digital marketing campaigns exists to support it. Ask what is the persuasive power of each page, word, sentence, heading, image and idea your prospect is being fed. Persuasive content aligns your content and brand to the visitor’s desire (raising interest and lowering friction).
There are two reasons for visitor disinterest:
- they don’t want what you sell, or
- they don’t like how you’re selling it to them.
Likely, as we explore in this post, it’s not aligned with your real, human prospect’s actual needs and preferences. So the question becomes what is persuasion and how do you make your content persuasive?
Most travel websites fail because they try to persuade everyone at once. The moment a site mixes first-time dreamers, comparison shoppers, and ready-to-buy impulse customers on the same page, persuasion collapses. Which is why content personalization can persuade better and increase conversion rates.
Your key content needs to resonate with the dreams and real challenges your customer is experiencing right now. You’ll need to study and visualize your customers/prospects intent, and you must empathize with the pains and beliefs. Their path is full of friction and demoralizing thoughts, which you might dispel with a new, easy, smoothing-over persuasion process.
Let’s Focus on Persuasiveness — The Power to Persuade
Persuasion is the missing piece in digital marketing. Mastering it can bring better results. Pushy, slick presumptuous copy, or Generative AI structure aren’t going to solve that. The solution is a simple matter of understanding what your real, human customer is experiencing right now and what they need. It’s caring, helpfulness, and empathy. It’s showing them you’re zoned in on who they are, what their real needs are, and you can reliably fulfill their wishes.
Persuasive content aligns with the audiences situation bringing out benefits and doubts before they come to mind. If you content points precede or anticipate what they’re thinking, that’s powerful alignment.
For instance, for a Realtor, if your target is a young couple who want to buy a home, you need to empathize with their situation – the things that really grind their home ownership dream to a halt and what might free them up. If we can present content that anticipates their mental blocks, wishes and beliefs, they’ll believe the Realtor is on the same wavelength.
Persuasion = alignment between provider and customer.
The Persuasion Flow
Just to get you into this fast, because your time is precious, let’s take a look at the persuasion experience flow in one simple line:
Seen > Calmed > Understood > Matched > Affirmed > Oriented > Invited
These are the key emotional checkpoints that you must pass.
- Seen refers to them being recognized as relevant, valuable and someone to be served. Through your content, they feel you like them.
- Calmed refers to them expecting an easy reading and visual experience without a feeling of stress. A sense of ease is growing.
- Understood shows that you know the topic and can deliver the path to fulfillment. Confidence is building.
- Matched means your product and brand are relevant to them and fit them like a glove. They stop the mental gymnastics because you’ve proven your “one and only” significance as a provider for their specific need. Their new clarity and focus makes all friction disappear. Certainty is building
- Affirmed refers to a strong feeling of alignment to their self-image/identity. The choice to buy from you seems consistent with who they are, and why they need your product/service. Choice is building.
- Direction is about their comfort/confidence that they can see a path forward. It means they’re satisfied so far and their mind begins to move ahead to the future – perhaps seeing themselves enjoying their purchase, and feeling relief about resolving their need. Action is being clarified.
- Momentum is about them feeling the full forward motion of their buying intent, actively experiencing the joy, good vibes, higher self-esteem, and focus on the rewards. This leads into purchasing without much push from you. No aggressive call to action is required, because they’re eagerly looking for the buy button. In their mind, they are your new customer. Commitment is being cemented.
At the end of this process above, the friction, doubt, lack of confidence, uncertainty and unwillingness have dissolved. We’ll be able to describe what each of your content assets and messages completes your promise of satisfaction. You’ll understand the psychological values of each and how it needs to fit into their amazing content experience.
Whether it’s selling travel adventures, buying/selling houses, or capturing a new SaaS software subscriber, the visitor will only be persuaded if your content experience is aligned with their situation.
They’re Overwhelmed and their Content Experience Doesn’t Flow
Low converting marketing can be due to many things, but primarily due to a lack of cohesive flow in the persuasion process. Flow in copywriting has always been important. Prospects don’t want to buy on a site that doesn’t make them feel good — without gaps, upsets and friction. You can give them the content experience they want — moving them through relevant material and away from irrelevant material.
Visitors actually want to be persuaded, in their own style while resolving the specific issues they have. They’re online and at your website for a reason. But until now, your content experience didn’t match up with them, simplify, nor cleared out all the friction that stops them from buying.
Revise, Recreate and Republish, now to Persuade
You might recreate your current content (if it’s worth it) to create the flow. Likely though, it needs serious rewriting and strategizing, according to your new in-depth profile of your most ideal prospect. It can be tested too, before you commit in a big way!
Most web users and social media surfers are overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of content available. And let’s not even mention all the Generative AI slop! While that information has value, it tends to be overwhelming, conflicting, non-credible, and stress inducing. When it creates “cognitive overload” or exhaustion, content needs to be simplified, streamlined and become more aligned to what the visitor is experiencing at that moment.
Creating a Clear, Precise Profile of Your Best Prospects
This is the biggest weakness in small business marketing — no real, explicit, in-depth understanding of your most convertible customer prospect. It’s a void you need to solve.
The first step to gain this sharp view of them, is to create clear profiles of the customer you want right now. Target the ones you want most now. Then your content, social, SEO and PPC campaigns can target and reach them and you can test your content strategy.
If we understand your customer more deeply, about their situation, needs, challenges, doubts, fears, and expectations in this moment, we could develop content pieces that reduce overwhelm, friction, and insecurities that keep them from moving forward to purchase.
Reach them, ask questions, pry into their world, show them you’re on a mission to solve their frustration.
This simple process can help get them talking and unstuck. For instance, many couples can buy a house, but they have issues with mortgage payments, job location, day care, down payments, and getting their dream price. Home sellers are stuck too, with their locked-in mortgages, lack of affordable inventory to move to, and not being able to get their dream price.
Your content strategy has to resolve these stubborn issues without promises. It’s better for them to feel the solution rather than you offering explicit statements. Focus on the soothing feelings that drive their intent.
This isn’t about not Sounding Persuasive, but rather, Being Persuasive
If your content experience is exactly aligned with how they feel and provides continuous flow of persuasion, it’s like they’re on a smooth train ride that will stop at their exact preferred destination.
It is about answering questions, doubts, fears, uncertainty, showing sympatico, and building confidence. As all the debris is cleared away, they begin to feel more of the full joy of their desire, creating a stronger impulse to buy. You’re just releasing what’s there.
Example: There are plenty of reasons why a boomer couple shouldn’t book that Maldives vacation they’ve got dancing in their heads. Always some excuse that keeps them from doing what they want from cost to travel distance, to politics or feelings of unworthiness. But when your content shows you’re sincerely aligned with their best wishes, they start following your persuasion path, mowing down all those weeds that pollute their wonderful view. Knowing that vision and what the Maldives Islands mean to them, you can weave an online travel planning adventure that’s sure to make them book the trip.
Persuasion actually comes out of the positive emotions they begin feeling – where it becomes one emotion (converged emotions) that makes them feel buying is the right decision. Their buy decision becomes as simple as the one single positive emotion they’re feeling. The more laser focused that emotion is, the less debris is in the way, and the more likely they will be to book that trip, subscribe or buy that house.
Mapping out Paths to Fulfillment
Your content strategy would map all their key touchpoints/issues they need to resolve. We use words, concepts, results, and a narrative into each content piece or image. With each, we solve some of their frustration and build hope. And we’ll build in key pathways to purchase, with no gaps that would stop them in their tracks. Visitors do have intent when they arrive on your website. The goal then is to create a content experience that aligns with their purpose and situation – so that friction, conflicts and gaps don’t appear.
This successful content experience is felt like heaven, with good vibes along a path that opens up high self-esteem allowing them to act on their impulse. We help them follow the feel-good path they prefer. The more friction we clear out of the way for them, the more emancipated they feel. It’s like having the sun come out on a cloudy, rainy day. This personal emotional effect makes impact! It’s the thing that creates the sale – not features and benefits.
Don’t deliver features and benefits. Deliver good vibes that lift self-esteem, hope and confidence so their momentum takes them right through the contact to purchase process.
Let’s Get Out of Our Own Way, and Let them Persuade Themselves
In this sense, we work on getting out of our own way. In creating your content strategy, we build that paths that will feel natural and comfortable for them to follow – with text, headlines, images, info and even video that warms their heart and mind.
As you’ve seen here, we build our immersive, nurturing, persuasion process first, optimizing each step and content piece so it’s perfectly aligned to our most important prospects.
When complete, they will see themselves vividly within your content as the hero of their lives. They’ll feel their purchase intent grow, to where their resistance fades, resulting in a purchase.
Your empowered, persuasive content strategy is doable. Without persuasion, nothing else matters.
See more on real estate marketing, travel marketing and SaaS marketing.
