21 Proven Strategies to Drive Audience Action

You don’t just create content for the sake of the audience.

You’re a marketer. You create content to ultimately drive profitable customer action. (It’s right in the definition, after all.)

How do you create content that converts? We turned to the experts for their best tip. Interestingly, they had different ideas of what to put at the top of your list (and one person’s best tip is to create content that doesn’t convert).  

Read on for the 21 top takes related to audiences, content, and business.

Revolve around the audience

By definition, successful content marketing attracts and retains a clearly defined audience. That’s why these experts’ best advice centers around the consumers of your content.

Deliver solutions

Know your audience and their problems. Create content that solves these problems. — Royna Sharifi, senior marketing campaign manager, Amazon Web Services

Solve the unsolvable

Give your audience solutions to challenges they can’t otherwise solve. Your solution doesn’t need to solve 100% of their challenge. Solve maybe 85% of it and make your call to action an invitation to complete the remaining 15%. — Dennis Shiao, founder, Attention Retention

Make them care

Make it all about the person it’s written to help. If your content does not answer “what’s in it for me,” then people won’t care. If you write a case study all about your brand, written in your brand voice, featuring your brand messaging, it won’t be persuasive. But when you publish a case study with direct quotes from the happy customer whose experience you’re sharing, that will actually connect with your buyer. — Erika Heald, founder and chief content officer, Erika Heald Marketing Consulting

Contemplate avoidance

Before you write your first word, think about why someone would not want to do what you’re about to ask them to. As marketers, we often dwell on all the reasons why someone should click, call, or buy. And that’s fine. Helpful, even. But the real question is, why might they not?

That’s what allows us to craft content that converts and addresses those buying barriers at the moment before they take root and spread like conversion-killing kudzu. Once you’ve identified the one or two most likely barriers to success, then you look for the best behavioral science tactics to overcome them.

Behavioral science offers marketers ways to prompt decision-making shortcuts — automatic responses to certain situations. Is your big buying barrier price? Test anchoring or magnitude encoding effect to overcome it. Is it low brand awareness? Consider social proof or the authority principle. Remember, people’s decisions are often influenced by these hardwired behaviors. So, add the appropriate triggers to your content and watch your conversions soar. — Nancy Harhut, chief creative officer, HBT Marketing

Give the answers they seek

To improve conversion rates, you must create content that answers your customers’ questions. Find out what they’re searching for with customer research (i.e., talk to your customers) and give them direct answers on pages formatted for clarity.

Keep your sentences short and simple. Include calls to action (CTAs) that align with their expectations. In other words, give them the next step that they want. Try not to force them down a path that feels uncomfortable to them or premature. Meet them where they are. — Dale Bertrand, president, Fire&Spark

Be deliberate

No more random acts of content! While a person’s individual content journey is never linear, I’m amazed how many content teams today still create content without thinking about their overall audience’s journey. How does your audience find the content? What do you want them to do next? What other assets might be related to the one you just published? How do they connect? It seems so simple, yet it’s often the thing people forget to do that can make the biggest impact. — Amy Higgins, director, content strategy, Cloudflare

Scrutinize your content

Content is the star, but it requires you and the team to make it shine. Follow these tips to make your content sparkle with conversions.

Stick to the definition

Create content that is compelling, useful, and relevant to your users. This is the best way to connect to them, answer their questions, stay on your site, and then have them convert on your site. — Zack Kadish, senior SEO strategy director, Conductor

Do these two words

Talk human. — Tony Byrne, founder, Real Story Group

Don’t go all AI

Practical content written by a human (not AI) is one type that many audiences seem to appreciate. You definitely want to avoid sounding like everyone else when you create content. That’s why a human touch is more important than ever. It helps you stand out in a sea of sameness. — Michelle Garrett, consultant and writer, Garrett Public Relations

Tell a story

Everyone seems to be very excited about producing short-form videos. The truth is those short-form videos are raising awareness, but they’re not the best for conversion. When you build a video strategy, you need to consider all phases of your funnel or flywheel and produce videos for each one. I still can’t think of any video that helps convert more than a good testimonial that tells a customer/client’s story. — Tony Gnau, chief storytelling officer, T60 Productions and T60 Health

Helpful tops fun

From the start, winning the online content race is a matter of posting things that are fun, interesting, or useful. Fun is fleeting. Comedy is much harder than it looks. Interesting is better, but with so much out there, it’s a continuous struggle for the latest and greatest, and you end up being a news organization. Useful wins the day. Answer a question, solve a problem, or give somebody an application that does something for them. — Jim Sterne, president, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara

Design it for function

You need a great image and headline to pull in, clear calls to action within the content, and a simple UX to help readers that might want to dig deeper before taking that next step. — Jenn VandeZande, editor-in-chief, SAP CX + Industries

Follow this path

All content that converts in the modern era needs to embrace what I refer to as the conscious growth pathways, tapping into the 4 Es — experiential, educational, entertaining, and empowering.

Most consumers, businesses, and audiences don’t care about how it looks or sounds anymore as much as they care about how it makes them feel. We live in a world now where a video with a CEO in a graphic T-shirt in his car now converts seven times more than a high-production 4K video with graphics and perfect lighting and sound on the same distribution channel.

Content needs to embrace the 4 Es and be relatable, authentic, and less about selling or forcing action and more about presenting value that guides the consumer to choose action on their own. If one can harness that regardless of content type and medium it will eventually do well. — Troy Sandidge, founder, Strategy Hackers

Stop hawking

Don’t sell your product. I know that sounds counterproductive, but one of the key parts of content marketing is making sure your audience doesn’t feel like they’re being sold something. They’ll see through that right away. Give them content that connects them to you, as well as your company and its values. The more connected they feel to you, the more trusted you become, and the more likely you are to convert. — Beth Elderkin, content marketing manager, Informa Connect

Create without conversion goal

My biggest tip is to also create content that doesn’t convert. You can give without strings attached all the time. The resulting action for you is the learning you can gain from the data of that content. Are people reading it? How long is it sitting on the right path of the customer journey? Can I make it exclusive for my own committed first-party data? — Michael Bonfils, global managing director, Digital International Group

Spark cohesive experiences

Make your content a joy to experience, not just a joy to read. We know from the recent Google leak that how long someone spends on your web page and what they do while visiting matters. On-page engagement directly influences your ranking, so content that converts impacts more than your bottom line.

Ensure your content is visually attractive. Does it breathe? Now, make sure the ask relates to the intent of the content topic. We’ve all had the equivalent experience of reading an article about the Top 10 Kid-Free Things to Do in Gatlinburg and then being asked to schedule a teeth cleaning at a Gatlinburg dentist. Uh, mismatch. No action from these pearly whites. So, work on your curb appeal, then match your ask with your info. — Haley Collins, director of operations, GPO

Think business

You’ve thought about the audience and the content, now it’s time to ramp up the profitable action game — what you want the audience to do after consuming the content. Use these insights to identify your business priorities.

Be straightforward

When crafting your calls to action, carefully consider the desired action you want your audience to take and make it easy for them to engage with or follow through. — Pam Didner, vice president of marketing, Relentless Pursuit, LLC

Know what’s next

Before creating any piece of content, get clear on the purpose and explicitly articulate what you hope consumers will do next. Often, you know this on some deep level, but without bringing it to the top of mind during production, it’s easy to lose sight of the action you’re trying to create. When you remind yourself of your purpose at the start of content creation, you can ensure that you’re keeping that purpose at the center of what you’re creating. — Melanie Deziel, co-founder, CreatorKitchen.com

Think on and off

Make the call to action the next natural step — even if that step is offline. Call, click, contact CTAs are effective, but inviting the visitor to engage person to person, such as attending an event, offers an experience and not just a transaction. It shows that you support the user’s entire journey well before they are ready to commit. — Mariah Obiedzinski Tang, assistant vice president of content marketing, Stamats

Start with end in mind

Content converts because it’s relevant and valuable. Before you create anything, have a solid understanding of your strategic goals, know your specific audience, and figure out what problems of theirs you can solve or what questions you can answer. Then, think about the content format and channel that is best suited to deliver that content. And, of course, be sure to track and measure so you know if it worked. — Brian Piper, director of content strategy and assessment, University of Rochester

Go for their motivation

Several different types of customer actions could be desired as part of your content marketing strategy. Whether you want your audience to click a link, share information about your brand, or contact your company, think about their behavior patterns. What inspires them to act?

Your audience cannot take action if they don’t have something they will react to. Your message, visuals, format, and distribution channels must cause an emotional reaction for your audience to act. Emotion causes a reaction, which causes action. In addition to enticing visuals and messaging, you must include a clear and compelling call to action to guide your audience toward the desired behavior. — Andi Robinson, content strategist, Hijinx Marketing

Turn content into the ultimate profitable action

With this expert advice, you’re even more ready to live the definition of content marketing and convert your audiences so they do good for business. Whether it’s a tweak to your content or a major change in your strategy, always keep your eye on the profitable actions.