Effective Link Building Service: Strictly Business: A Six-Step Content Marketing Check-Up For B2B Marketers

**A Six-Step Content Marketing Check-Up For B2B Marketers**

**by Galen DeYoung**

Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B
marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a
substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans. But before you get
started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step
back to assess your efforts to date. Below are six steps to help you
do that. While the list is not exhaustive, my hope is that these steps
will help you improve the performance of existing assets and develop
strong future content marketing efforts.

Map site content to the buying cycle

Some people segment the buying cycle into three or four stages. B2B
Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee segments it into seven stages
<http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2010/01/get-the-guide-design-nurturing-programs-to-drive-sales.html>
. However you choose to define it, analyze your buying cycle and make
sure you have substantial, valuable content
<http://searchengineland.com/the-b2b-content-equation-26570>
that speaks to each stage. Prospects have questions at each stage in
the buying process. Each question represents an opportunity for
content. Think about what should be free and what should be gated
(Chris Koch
<http://www.christopherakoch.com/2009/07/how-old-school-data-capture-is-poisoning-marketing-and-what-to-do-about-it/>
and Michele Linn
<http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/171351/lose-control-three-reasons-not-to-require-registration-for-b2b-content>
had good posts on this recently).

Also remember people have different learning styles, and consider
having multiple media available for each style. Analyze the
effectiveness of your existing content vis-à-vis your buying cycle,
determine the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and develop a
plan to round out your content.

Reduce friction on gated content

Review registration pages for items that reduce conversion rate. Yes,
this includes how much information you're asking for, but it also
includes many other things.

Ask yourself, is the page design and intent clear, or do you have
many other things potentially distracting visitors from taking the
desired action or perhaps even obscuring the desired action? Have you
reduced the anxiety of registering? Are the benefits of doing so
clearly stated? Have you illustrated credibility, e.g., are there
recognized third-party endorsements on the page? Have you told
visitors what you're going to do with their information?

Todd Miechiels had a great post on reducing site visitors' anxiety
<http://searchengineland.com/want-more-b2b-conversions-reduce-your-visitor%E2%80%99s-anxiety-16320>
last year, and Ben Hanna gave some strong, practical examples of
ways to improve B2B conversion rates by reducing buyer risk
<http://blogs.business.com/b2b-online-marketing/2009/improve-b2b-conversion-rates-by-reducing-risk/>
.

Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from
them. Take a look at last year's numbers for the content on your
site. What was the most popular content? What were your most popular
landing pages? What were the sources of the visitors? Did those
sources change over time? What organic keywords drove traffic to that
content? What did these visitors do? What were the conversion rates?
Where did they go next? What made those pages successful? Equally
important to analyze is the content you thought would do well, but
didn't.

Compare and contrast the successes and the failures, and you'll
likely find strong clues to help you develop a best practices model.
But don't just use this information for prospective content. You can
likely redeem some of your previously less-than-successful content by
making improvements or repurposing and relaunching that content.

Capture the value of content

If your content is a web page, it's pretty easy to track the
results. But what if your content is a PDF or some other digital
asset? These assets can drive readers and viewers back into your
website. However, unless you've coded the links appropriately
<http://searchengineland.com/capturing-the-value-of-content-marketing-20349>
, these visits will show up as direct visits instead of being
attributed to your content marketing assets. Obviously, you should
ensure future content marketing assets have such links, but there's
no reason you shouldn't make these changes to existing content as
well.

Include sharing options with your content

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides can be
powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools. At the same time,
they're expensive to create. They're also hard to get into the
hands of the right people. You may get one of these assets into the
hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the
prospect's company who will influence the purchase decision.
Embedding social sharing options
<http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/09/do_your_pdfs_have_embedded_sha.html>
is a great way to help push the reach of great content, and
modifying existing content marketing assets to include social sharing
options is fairly painless.

Optimized content for search

Finally, optimize your content for search. While social media can
play a big role in the visibility of good content marketing assets,
SEO will help ensure online visibility over the long term. Make sure
your content marketing assets and their related landing pages are
optimized and aligned with the keyword strategy for the piece. This
includes optimizing copy
<http://searchengineland.com/ten-copywriting-tips-for-b2b-seo-14807>
as well as other on- and off-page factors. While it does take a bit
more work, you can optimize PDFs
<http://www.proteusb2b.com/b2b-marketing-blog/index.php/optimizing-pdfs/>
for search as well.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.

Galen DeYoung <http://searchengineland.com/author/galen-deyoung/>
is Managing Director of Proteus SEO <http://www.seo.proteusb2b.com/>
, which specializes exclusively in B2B search engine optimization,
and Proteus B2B, which specializes in repositioning
business-to-business companies and their brands. You can reach Galen
at gdeyoung@proteusb2b.com and follow him on Twitter.
<http://twitter.com/galendy>

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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Strictly Business: A Six-Step Content Marketing Check-Up For B2B Marketers

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