B2B marketers, here’s what to do right NOW to maximise ROI from your content
Get ready – I’m going to share some of Velo’s proven tips for successfully maximising ROI from your B2B content efforts. Tips you can implement RIGHT NOW that can achieve immediate quick wins.
A blog or content hub is a staple component of any B2B website, providing a place for companies like yours to share their expertise, news, views, and valuable insights.
However, maintaining, publishing, and producing such resources warrants considerable time and effort. It’s key that this time and effort provides return on investment, both now and in the future.
Demonstrating the value of content marketing to internal stakeholders can be a struggle for B2B marketers, so I’ve put together a quick guide to getting more from your B2B content.
The below tips and tricks will make your content efforts work harder, achieve greater cut-through, be more memorable, enhance brand credibility, and even contribute to pipeline building.
Maximising engagement of poor-performing content
Have some of your posts or articles failed to land the punch you had hoped? Are you observing high bounce rates and low engagement rates for some of your blog posts and knowledge articles? Those negative results can be reversed – here are some things you can do:
Action 1: Break long-form content up into a series
Something I’ve observed from working with B2B tech and industrial companies in particular, is a tendency to produce ultra-long articles. I’m talking 5,000 words, some even in the region of 10,000 words, covering large topic areas or complex technical subject matters.
Content of that length is difficult to consume for any reader – it means a commitment of circa 20 minutes to read it through even once. As a result, bounce rates of 70-90% are common.
Breaking up long pieces into a series of shorter 500- to 2,000-word articles can attract higher engagement and present a series of opportunities for fresh content – benefitting SEO and feeding your social media content calendar with extra content to share.
It also eliminates the “Oh no, I’m not reading all of that” impression readers get when they land on your existing 10,000-word beast. You can then signpost to the “next” article in the series at the end of each post – more on “signposting” later in this article.
Action 2: Adding rich media
This action is particularly relevant to increasing engagement for content that is either too short (less than 500 words) or too long (5,000 words plus).
Give readers a reason to stick around longer by breaking up and enhancing your blog posts and articles with rich media. Include videos, infographics, and videos which support or complement the points being made in your post – this can be owned or third-party content of relevance.
This will also appeal to more visual learners who prefer to scan the content and watch the videos or view the infographic featured instead.
If you do include third-party media – reference the source and let them know you have featured their creative…….with a harmless suggestion that they might even consider sharing your article 😊
Action 3: Updating for relevancy
Few pieces of content are ever truly “evergreen” anymore in any B2B market 🙁 If content is going “stale”, and not quite enjoying the traction it once did, give it a refresh – perhaps a facelift even – to ensure it still offers relevant value.
This could be as simple as updating examples and rich media or references to certain practices or legislations to replacing visual examples or re-envisioning the overall content “hook” to give it a fresh appeal in today’s market.
Getting even more from your best-performing content
Getting more from your B2B content goes beyond breathing new life into poor-performing articles and posts – your best-performing pieces can work harder too!
But wait, first thing’s first
A quick dive into Google Analytics can enable you to uncover which of your published posts have appealed most to your target audiences – but there are some key things you’ll need to account for:
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- Don’t just focus on the most visited articles. A post may have 10,000 visits but if it has a bounce rate of 92% and average time on page 10 seconds – that’s NOT your best-performing content.
- Combine “soft” engagement metrics i.e. visits, impressions with “hard engagement” metrics like time on page, pages viewed, and actions taken i.e. form submits.
- Consider even diving a little deeper using the free version of tools like ShareCount to analyse the level of shares certain articles received, to get a true view of your top 10-20 posts and articles.
Now, press “go”
With your list of top articles now to hand, you’re ready to make some moves to make that gold-star content pay further dividends, using the following three actions:
Action 1: Repurposing into different media formats
We continuously recommend to our clients that they develop content that appeals to the various different audiences and stakeholders their brand engages with. However, this doesn’t just relate to content topic areas, but the formats in which that content is delivered.
Different people respond better to different content formats. So, for your list of high-performing articles and blog posts, consider how you can repurpose these into additional media formats to maximise their reach and engagement. This could include:
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- An infographic
- An illustration
- A short two-minute video
- A LinkedIn pulse post
- A third-party guest post
- A podcast
- A webinar
- A whitepaper
- A Slideshare (yes, they are still a “thing”!)
- A series of pull-out “tips” for social media
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There’s lots of potential for fuelling the fire of your existing best-performing posts!
Action 2: Using as assets for demand generation and sales enablement
Following on the previous action above, your best performing content pieces could be easily transformed into gated content for demand generation or key enablement assets for your sales team.
Consider this:
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- Could any of your best-performing posts be potentially grouped together as an eGuide/eBook with an overarching topic? Then made available for download on your website?
- Could they be turned into case studies referencing real customer examples? And again, could they be made available for download?
- Could they be created as PDFs or two-page print pieces for sales efforts? As a brochure insert, a meeting leave-behind, or some event materials?
- Could they add value to a sales presentation?
- Could they form the basis of a research report perhaps?
- Could they play a role in your email nurturing programmes?
- Could they be weaved into digital advertising or ABM campaigns?
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I find questions the best fuel for thought so I’ll just stop right here with this point!
Action 3: Signposting on your website and other areas online
Our final recommended action seems the most obvious of all – but remains forever an opportunity that is crucially missed by many B2B companies. Once you are clear on what your “big-hitter” content articles are, promote them!
That means:
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- Signposting to them on your website – on relevant product pages, on other related published articles, even on your homepage.
- Linking to them in your email comms, perhaps even your email signatures.
- Monitoring and identifying sharing opportunities in industry groups and forums.
- Encouraging partners and distributors to share them.
If content has proven to be a big hit, let it take the main stage. I guarantee if you audit just how well you have done the above for your best-performing content, you’re bound to find some holes – but these holes present opportunities.
Signing off
Taking my own advice, I’m going to sign off for now before this piece gets too long for anyone to want to read – but who knows, perhaps this post may turn out to be the first in a series!
If you have any questions or want some further advice on bettering your B2B content, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or just send us a message via the contact form on our website.
Quick shout out to David McGuire at Radix Communications. I had been meaning to join David McGuire’s B2B Content Tuesday Q&As and this week I finally committed myself. The topic of this week’s live Q&A was “Writing successful B2B blogs” and it inspired me to put together this piece – so thanks for the inspiration, David!
