What Should You Keep in Mind When Creating a Conversion-Focused Piece of Content?
When you talk about “content” most people think about thought leadership, video or social media content.
When marketers create content for a company, the objective is usually to educate, raise awareness, or inspire the reader.
Few marketers create content with one priority: acquire customers.
That’s because content is rarely seen as a lead generation or customer acquisition play – it’s usually specifically for educating and building trust.
Which is why when a marketer reads a piece of Bottom of the Funnel content designed to convert readers into customers, it can be strange to read.
Long form content that is designed to rank on Google and convert searchers into customers is a unique type of content. It requires having a mix of sales, product and educational writing skills. It requires understanding SEO and sales. It requires having deep knowledge of a product.
In this article, we want to explain to those who are new to content marketing and BOFU content, what goes into a piece of BOFU content that has the objective of bringing in customers – and how it’s so different to magazine, thought leadership and newsletter content.
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What BOFU content is NOT
If you’re new to BOFU content and how we define it, we recommend reading this article: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
When marketers start investing in content marketing, most will start their content strategy with Top of the Funnel content. In the financial services world, content like “What is payments?” “Invoice financing 101” or “Embedded finance trends”.
This type of content is not inherently bad content, but the problem is that it’s often targeting beginners and people who are just learning about the topic and haven’t expressed interest in buying. It’s a great way to educate people and potentially build trust, but it’ll be years before the readers become customers.
That’s why when we start creating content for a client, we first start by targeting people who are already ready to buy. Why not first create content for those who know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution? That’s Bottom of the Funnel. That type of content looks more like “Stripe vs Adyen” and “Top direct debit solutions”. Someone doing research on these topics is clearly more advanced in their buying journey and are actively looking for a solution.
By not targeting these prospects, you are essentially leaving low hanging fruit in the form of customers on the table. So why not start with people who are already close to buying, and then move up the funnel and do Middle and Top of the Funnel content?
Starting with BOFU content allows you to start getting results sooner, which in turn allows you to better build a business case to invest more in content marketing, so you can then do more long term marketing plays like middle and top of the funnel.
BOFU content like “Stripe vs Adyen” is unique, though. As we’ll see in this article, it’s a mix of product, sales and educational copywriting, and there is one objective: help the reader take action.
Because of this, this is what BOFU content is not:
Magazine content. It’s not designed to entertain or be funny. We’re targeting people who are looking for a solution to their problem, so we’re not trying to “catch their attention” and make it entertaining. They are looking for information. We have that information. We give it to them, and explain how our product can help them. It’s that simple.
Technical documentation. We’re not targeting developers, we’re usually targeting business or commercial people looking for financial services solutions. We do want to go into the weeds, but not too much.
For beginners. People who are actively looking for a provider usually have some level of knowledge: they are comparing platforms, they are talking to providers, they know a little bit about what they’re looking for. This is how BOFU content is different from TOFU content which is more about raising awareness and educating beginners. Because of that, we need to be able to write at the level of the reader.
A pure sales pitch. Yes, BOFU content does require talking about your product features and benefits and how they match the reader’s pain points. But that doesn’t mean you want the first sentence of your article to be “At [Company], we’re the best at XYZ”. The BOFU article is a delicate balance of educating the reader, building trust, and then explaining the value propositions of your product. We’ll go into more detail on this later on in the article.
So what does BOFU content look like? And what do you need to keep in mind when creating this type of content?
Over the past few years of creating BOFU content for companies like Jeeves, Modulr, Zai, Persona and generating hundreds of thousands worth of customers, here’s what we’ve found is important:
1. Your piece of content should have one priority objective
Whenever you create a piece of content, you need to have a clear idea of what the objective is: is it educate? To raise awareness? Or to convert the reader into a customer?
Usually when we ask our client this question, they’ll say “It’s all of the above”.
Although it’s ok to have multiple goals, we believe that you should pick one as the priority. Your BOFU content will also help you raise awareness, but which is the priority right now? If it’s customer acquisition, then you can talk about your product quite early on. But if it’s not, then you might want to leave it till last. By having one goal as the priority, it’s easier to decide on the structure of the article and answer questions like:
How many images should we include in this article?
What else should we link to in this article?
Should we add a newsletter opt-in?
This is also why you can’t look at your competitor’s content and say “this is bad content”. You can’t ever fully judge a piece of content without having the full picture.
Yes, maybe their article is dull and lacks images, but if that piece of content is bringing in customers for them, then you can’t say the content is bad.
Let’s take, for example, this is a piece of content we created for Zai: BPAY API: How Zai’s API can help you settle payments faster
We’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the sexiest. There are no mind-blowing statistics, fun videos or funny images. The introduction doesn’t start with a fascinating story about how money was invented.
But that’s because the article does what it says on the tin: it helps the searcher find information about using an API to complete BPAY payments.
This piece of content also brought in over $100k+ of yearly opportunities for Zai.
So did it work? In our eyes, yes.
Someone looking up BPAY API is just looking for information to help them make a decision, and we’ve given it to them. It’s that simple.
That’s also why it’s important to have the key objective in mind. If your main objective is customer acquisition, then you know your content should be to the point and only include information that’s relevant.
2. Your BOFU piece should give a great first impression about your company
A big part of the BOFU strategy is “DAMming” demand: targeting people who are looking for X, interrupting their search, educating them and explaining how Y (your solution) is better.
We’ve written an entire article that goes into this in more detail: How to Create a New Fintech Category with Content by DAMming Demand
Whether you’re writing a comparison article such as “Xero vs FreeAgent vs Your Product”, or targeting a specific use case such as “accounts payable solution”, it’s important to remember that the person doing the research isn’t aware your product exists.
That’s a big part of the BOFU content strategy: you are raising awareness for your product amongst people who have indicated they are ready to buy via their search. With other marketing channels such as LinkedIn ads, newsletters and events, you’re only ever targeting prospects who fit your demographic criteria, but you don’t actually know if they’re ready to buy.
Organic search and Google Ads are the only channels that allows you to target people based on demand stage (even when they don’t know your product exists). And that’s why content marketing can be so powerful as a customer acquisition channel.
Here are some typical BOFU keyphrases. In each one, the person doing the research doesn’t know about your company:
Top direct debit solutions
Best credit cards for small businesses
Top invoice finance solutions
Stripe alternatives
Amex no fees
When you’re targeting people who don’t know about your company, you have to be careful about how you write your content. You can’t start out the article by immediately selling your product.
Every time you write the content, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the reader: what are they looking for? What do they care about?
In the article itself, you need to be able to build trust. You can’t start an article titled “Top invoice finance solutions” with the first section being: “At [Company name], our invoice financing solution is the best at Y for companies that do XYZ”.
The main priority when you first start a BOFU piece of content is to answer the searcher’s question. Either they read one sentence about your product and click away, or they get an answer to their question, which encourages them to keep reading – and eventually learn a lot more about your product.
First impressions matter a lot, especially when it’s from someone who could be ready to buy. So remember that they might not know about your company, and that you want to start off by:
Genuinely answering their question to build trust
Not immediately promoting your product
3. Your piece of content should be written for someone who’s in “research mode”
The type of BOFU content we create is designed to rank on Google, and the person who is going to read this will be actively searching online.
In other words, they won’t find this article by going to your website, heading to your blog, and then reading. It’s also unlikely they’ll find it when scrolling on LinkedIn (unless you promote it there).
The person you are targeting has typed up in Google some variation of a specific keyphrase, and they are looking for information and are in research mode (or potentially, a colleague has sent it to them – but the colleague was still the one doing research).
Picking a direct debit provider is different to picking a birthday card. Meaning: the searcher is going to do a lot more research and they’re looking to make an informed decision. They are not reading this for fun (and few people read payments or finance content for fun).
The best way to put yourself in the mentality of someone doing this searching is think back to the last time you were looking for a recipe to make dinner.
You were likely in research mode. You just want to find the information you’re looking for, and move on. You’re easily frustrated with websites/articles that are full of fluff, don’t get to the point and aren’t giving you the information you need.
When you click through on a page, you’ll likely scan the article, and look for keywords that indicate that this website will give you the recipe you’re looking for. And then you’ll take action. Either bookmark to read it later, or start cooking.
This is the kind of person you are targeting. It’s very different to someone scrolling LinkedIn, looking for a dopamine hit. It’s very different to someone who knows nothing about “direct debits” and is trying to understand financial services.
This is why it’s important that your BOFU content is to the point, has the right information and isn’t covered in random stock images that don’t add to the content of the piece. You also want to add CTAs in all the right places (nav bar, within the article, etc) to make it easy for them to take action.
Because of the mindset of the reader, you also need to be mindful of the information you put in your content. We’ll illustrate this with content from another payment client of ours, Modulr. In this article, we’re targeting someone doing research on “account to account payments”. It’s such a specific keyphrase, it’s clear that someone looking this up is trying to learn more about account to account payments.
As you’ll see, the content focuses on explaining the pain points the reader might be facing, how to select the best account to account payment solution and then how to use Modulr to implement it.
With such a targeted article, we’re not going to go on a tangent and start talking about the future of payments. We’re going to talk about the key topic. And also, because it’s a piece of content that is designed to convert, we do need to talk about the Modulr product.
As mentioned above, we don’t want to talk about the product immediately (it’s ok to include it in the title). But it’s very hard for a prospect to make a decision on which payment provider to go with if you avoid talking about your product as much as possible. We go into more detail about this here: How to Write About Your Product In Your Content [And Increase Conversions]
To summarise:
Keep in mind that the person you are targeting is in research mode. Keep your article succinct and to the point.
Include a section about your product, as they’ll need this to help make a decision.
Make it easy to take action: add CTAs in your navigation bar, at the bottom of the article, and anywhere in the article where it makes sense.
4. Your content requires a mix of product, sales and educational copywriting
This is one of the key aspects of creating BOFU content: it’s requires a very unique combination of writing skills.
It’s not thought leadership, and you’re doing more than just stating facts and defining what “SEPA” means. It’s also not a landing or sales page, so you’re not just going to talk about your product non-stop. It’s also not a product one-sheet for a prospect that you just started talking to, so you need to give additional context.
With a BOFU piece of content, you need to first build trust with the reader, answer their question and educate them. Then, once you’ve reasonably answered their question and educated them, then you can explain why it makes sense to work with your product. But you can’t just talk about your product, you also need to be able to explain how your product’s features and benefits help them solve their problems.
So there you have it: it’s product, sales and educational copywriting.
It’s a unique set of skills, which is why we have such a thorough hiring process for our writers. It often takes 3+ months to train writers on our team, and we’re very careful with who we work with. In order to write this type of content, the person doing the writing needs to:
Take the time to understand the product inside out.
Know how to write in a way that sells a product.
Understand the target customers and their pain points.
It’s a very delicate balance. It’s also why people who don’t know about BOFU will read a BOFU piece of content out of context and it’ll come across as strange to read. If you’re not doing research about “payment API”, then reading this BOFU article will seem strange. You won’t resonate with the pain points. You’ll think the content is dry and clunky. You’ll ask why we don’t talk about the product sooner.
And that’s why, BOFU content out of context is strange to read, because you won’t resonate with it. The content is not designed to entertain: it’s designed to give information to someone who is desperate to learn more.
If you’re looking to create BOFU content, you need someone who has that skillset. We have a list of resources for writers who want to get better at this.
5. You’re writing for an online audience
Finally, it’s very important to remember you are writing for a screen.
Writing for someone who is going to read on a phone or computer is very different to writing for someone who will read it on a piece of paper or a book.
There are a few unique things about reading content online:
People rarely read a full article, they scan. That’s why it’s ok to have long articles with clear Table of Contents so people can navigate. This means you’re able to cater to a wider range of people (and for those for whom it’s not relevant, they’ll skip it).
People need to find it comfortable to read. If you’ve got constant pop-ups, a tiny font and really wide paragraphs, it’s uncomfortable to read and people will click away.
You can repeat yourself. Again, people don’t read from start to finish. It’s ok to be repetitive in some sections because the person reading will not have read the section above.
It has to be easy to read. A bit like the article you’re reading now: it’s almost like a casual, formal style. Even if you’re targeting accountants and very academic people. People who are researching on Google are in a different frame of mind, they want easy to read stuff. You want your style to be professional, not stuffy but easy to read.
This article explains the different ways that people read articles: People Don’t Read Online—They Scan. This Is How to Write for Them
The most important is to get all the right information on the page, and then trust the reader will know where to find the information they are looking for. As long as you include a table of contents, the reader will know how to navigate it.
The other thing that’s important is the tone of voice. It cannot be corporate, stuffy or academic. Ideally, it’s professional and casual, flows well and is easy to understand. Especially for something which can get as complex as payments, you need to be able to explain things thoroughly and carefully
To make the reading experience as good as possible, we recommend:
Minimum 18px font
Dark/black font colour
Narrow paragraphs
Although we’re not fans of stock images, we do love graphics that help explain a concept better. Especially for more complex topics like payments, the right graphic adds to the text and help explain something better are huge. Here are example of the type of graphics we would use:
Creating BOFU content: simple in theory, complex in practice
The premise behind BOFU is so simple and logical: target people who are already looking for your product. Because it’s so simple, people dismiss it or think they have to create this elaborate content strategy in order to create content that acquires customers.
But the hard part is execution. The hard part is writing in a way that builds trust but also talks about your product. The hard part is constantly putting yourself in the position of the reader and thinking from their perspective, and not yours. The hard part is training and editing writers to write that way.
But once you get the execution working, content marketing can be your most profitable customer acquisition channel for your company.