Here’s a Call to Action For Ya!: Create Better Content

My Takeaways From This Year’s Call-To-Action Conference

In our industry, more than others, we are consistently challenged to break through the noise and engage individuals in a way that converts them to customers. This means creating better content.

The 5th Call-To-Action Conference, hosted by Unbounce in Vancouver, BC, was full of insightful and actionable ideas about the ever changing marketing landscape. From AI generated pages to a step-by-step walk-through of landing page audits, there were new things to learn and relearn throughout the conference.

Here are my top takeaways:

“Content is every experience we create. Not just blog posts.” – Oli Gardner (@oligardner)

We know that when someone mentions “Content Marketing”–the first thing that comes to mind are blog posts. Blogs are notoriously flawed in the sense that, they typically do not bring substantial awareness to a product. Blog posts may bring you tons of traffic, but do they convert those visitors into customers?

As marketers, we should examine two major aspects:

• the context (who is visiting our sites and what do they want?), and…
• the content (how can we use our content to gather more context on our website visitors?)

After closely examining these two factors, we can use our findings to create opportunities for conversions. No one is saying get rid of your blogs altogether–but if we can optimize our content then we’ll see the results we really want. Strategy is the name of the game, which is why, for example, here at Strathcom we spend as much time planning and researching as we do executing the content.

Andy Crestodina echoed a similar sentiment:

“Good content is amazing. Bad content is useless.” – Andy Crestodina (@crestodina)

Optimize Your Content for Voice Search

Not only do we need to optimize our content, but we absolutely must optimize it to perform well in voice search queries. We’re not being hyperbolic when we say it’s of monumental importance. Voice powered devices are in almost every household, whether via devices like Alexa, Google Home, HomePod, or in the hands of any individual who owns a smartphone–which is 77% of the U.S. population.

Creating conversational content, and optimizing it using Schema.org markup is one (very effective way) to optimize for voice search. Voice Search results are driven through structured data markup, and “Speakable” markup is coming to help us in optimizing our content.

This year’s Call-To-Action Conference was yet another reminder that in our line of work, we can’t rest on our heels. There are always new techniques, new ideas, and new ways to excite customers. Essentially, there’s always a call to action–and you’ve got to be prepared to answer it.