B2B Content Marketing

Strategies for Successful B2B Content Marketing

When you choose Overdrive as your B2B agency for content marketing, we’ll help to infuse your program with proven strategies and tactics that increase consumption, build brand affinity, and drive more conversions. Here are some of the most important tactics for generating and marketing great content.

• Document your strategy. This may seem obvious, but a recent survey found that while 62% of the B2B organizations that are successful at content marketing have a documented strategy, only 37% of all B2B content marketing specialists take the time to develop one. A content marketing strategy helps to focus priorities, identify metrics, demonstrate ROI, and keep your team focused on the tasks most important to B2B content marketing
• Tell stories. Even though your content is business-oriented, the decision-makers who are purchasing products are teams of people, and people love stories. Telling great stories in your content humanizes your brand, engages users more effectively, and connects with users at an emotional level, which is critical to conversion.
• Say it with video. Video has been proven to increase engagement on webpages and conversion on landing pages, and it’s estimated that by 2022, 80% of the content consumed by buyers on the Internet will be video.
• Automate processes. B2B content marketing has a lot of complexity and moving parts, and automation tools are essential to managing it all effectively and cost-efficiently. The right tool should help integrate your content into social media, enable increasingly granular messaging for specific accounts, personalize site content in emails, and provide the data analytics you need to measure performance.
• Make it evergreen. Evergreen content has a longer shelf life than highly topical or trendy content. Evergreen content centers on fundamental or foundational ideas and will tend to rank higher on Google search engine results pages.
• Make it portable. Content that can be easily shared, tweeted, emailed as a PDF, or printed on paper will gain more traction and views.
• Think lightweight. Content that is easily produced and easily consumed will deliver higher ROI. While long form content like white papers, webinars and eBooks are still an essential part of B2B content marketing, you’ll get more traction from blogs, minute videos, infographics, checklists, short how-to guides, and other short form content.

Key Metrics for B2B Content Marketing

As a leading interactive agency, Overdrive builds analytics and measurement into the B2B content marketing process from the start. Our detailed reporting structures provide instant visibility into critical metrics such as:

• Consumption
  • Page views – to gauge the top performing content
  • Unique visitors – to determine the total size of your audience
  • Average time on page – to identify how deeply users are engaging with your content
  • Number of downloads – to identify which content resonates with audiences most effectively
• Retention
  • Bounce rate – to better understand which pages/content are driving viewers away
  • New vs. returning users – to see how effectively your content is bringing people back to your site
  • Unsubscribe rate – to determine how well your content satisfies users’ needs
• Engagement
  • Comments – to see how seriously users engage with your content and what kind of responses they have to it
  • Pages per session – to see how long users engage with your content
  • Click through rate (CTR) – to see how well your content encourages action
  • Social media engagement – how many likes, comments and favorites your content generates on different platforms
• Sharing
  • Social media shares – to see what kind of content resonates most effectively
  • Email forwards – to help measure the performance of content distributed through email
• Leads
  • Gated content downloads – to help identify Marketing Qualified Leads
  • New newsletter subscribers – to help identify Marketing Qualified Leads

Increase Traction by Adding Authority to B2B Content Marketing

Recently, major search engines like Google have created plans to combat disinformation by refining their algorithms to prioritize authoritative content in search rankings.

Google’s new Content Rating Guidelines, for example, will rank pages based on a number of criteria related to authoritativeness, including:

• Who is responsible for a site and its content.
• The reputation of the site or the creator of the main content.
• Information on sources of reputation.
• The level of Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness (E-A-T).
• Clarity and satisfaction of website information.
• Overall page quality ranking.

While many of Google’s methods for evaluating content are based on algorithms, the process of gauging authoritativeness is manual – real human beings will be reading and evaluating your content.

With these guidelines in mind, you can improve search engine rankings by including subject matter experts (SMEs) with large digital footprints in your content, building trust through association over time. (If you have SMEs that need a bit of an authority boost in Google’s eyes, you can improve their status through PR activities and by forming connections with other well-known authorities.)

Overdrive can help you to understand how to leverage trusted SMEs to create new content or improve the effectiveness of existing content, developing pieces that resonate with your consumers while aligning with new SEO best practices for authority.