Copywriters and content marketers have distinct roles to play in online marketing. Copywriters take care of all promotional materials. This includes drafting content for ads, flyers and most importantly the sales pages of your website. An ideal sales page takes the visitor through all the unique selling points of the product along with testimonials and the many other elements that drive conversion.
Content marketers on the other hand focus on other forms of content that drive traffic. This includes blog content, guest posts and survey reports that create interest and bring people to your website.
There are a few problems with a sales page though. For one, sales pages are most effective with an audience that is already warmed up to your product or service. In other words, if your visitor is coming across your page for the very first time, it is highly unlikely for them to convert. There are workarounds to this (capturing email leads and nurturing them, for instance) but that is beyond the scope of this article. But perhaps the biggest challenge with sales pages from an SEO perspective is earning high quality backlinks. Third party blogs and websites seldom publish content that contain such commercial links.
Content marketing fulfills this gap. Comprehensive guides, stat databases and research articles are handy link magnets that third party blogs and websites naturally link to while writing on a topic. If you have ever written a blog article, you would recall the number of times you searched Google for specific statistics, ‘how to’s and Op-Eds that back up your claims. If you had comprehensive articles ranking for these long-tail keywords, then you could be earning a lot of backlinks to your website. Not only this, such guides and reports also play a critical role in warming up leads. This is particularlyn true when leads are driven to the sales page from a content asset, as it makes these visitors a lot more likely to convert.
The Pair-Up Strategy
Sales pages and content resources should complement each other in your marketing objectives - content resources draw eyeballs and warm up the leads while sales pages convert them. For maximizing conversions, businesses must deploy a ‘pair-up’ strategy. Put simply, create specific sales pages for each of your target visitors and drive traffic to these sales pages from uniquely crafted content resources. The idea is that re-warmed leads who search for your money keywords or brand name on Google are taken to your sales pages for conversion while the rest of your audience are first allowed to warm up through your content resources from where they are taken to your sales pages for conversion.
Real World Example
A great example of the pair-up strategy in action is Shopify. You would know Shopify as an eCommerce platform that is used by entrepreneurs from a number of industries to sell their wares online. Regardless of the industry, there are two kinds of people in the audience that Shopify targets - sellers who are absolutely aware of eCommerce tools and are looking for a solution that will fit their industry, and the others who are interested but are not aware of such tools. The former kind is pre-warmed to Shopify’s solutions while the latter is cold.
To cater to the first kind, Shopify has unique sales pages for every industry they target. For example, here is a link to their sales page targeting artists. While this is an ideal page to link to from ads and promos, it does not help with earning links to the company’s website. This sales page for artists is paired up with a content resource targeting artists. This second link is to a guide that is a link magnet and ranks on top of Google search when artists search for ways to sell their art online. This content resource warms up the visitors to their eCommerce platform and these visitors are channelled to the sales page where conversions happen.
The ‘pair-up’ technique is an all-encompassing marketing strategy that brings together SEO, inorganic user acquisition and content marketing together to increase product conversions. Have you come across other examples of the pair-up strategy? Share them in the comments.
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* Adapted lead image: 
Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com
