How to Develop B2B Content Pillars or Themes

A B2B buyer who is looking for a product similar to what you’re selling needs to do research. They can’t rely just on your marketing promotions for accurate information, and you can be sure that, regardless of how strong your message is, it’s not going to be the last message they see or hear. B2B marketers have to be certain before they make deals because there’s more than just their own interests on the line.

All of this means that, when you do grab the attention of a B2B prospect, you need to make sure you’re providing value in exchange for it. Ideally, you can design content pillars or themes that funnel the prospect into a streamlined buyer journey.

To do this effectively, you’re going to need a firm understanding of what a content pillar is and how to use it. Then, we can walk you through some simple ways you can start developing content pillars of your own.

What is a B2B Content Pillar or Theme?

Think of what a pillar does in construction: It’s a connection to the ground that holds up the structure itself. Without the pillars, a structure wouldn’t have anything to stand on, so to speak.

Content pillars function similarly.

When creating content pillars, your focus should be on creating a piece of content that dives deep into the details of whatever you’re covering. This piece of content should be an authoritative, one-stop shop of information on your subject.

As your website evolves and you add more and more content, you may add additional pillars and themes along the way. As you build your content portfolio with smaller pieces that add additional details or resources to the main pillar, you should focus on interlinking all of these content pieces.

This way, you can create a network of pillars and sub-pillars that customers can journey through while in the consideration stage of the sales funnel.

Content Hubs Make Great B2B Content Pillars

Holding a customer’s attention and using it to educate them on the value you can provide is the key idea behind a content pillar.

A perfect example of this is a content hub where all of your most important marketing content is collected and displayed to potential customers.

From a content hub, customers should have access to omnichannel content they can access anywhere and anytime they please. A great content hub is a critical step toward a great buyer journey since it represents an opportunity for a customer to delve into the rabbit hole of content you’ve been developing.

Why Do Content Pillars Matter?

Content pillars have a lot of benefits for customers and your business. Here are a few:

Content Pillars Improve SEO

One of the main factors that drive your search engine rankings is authority and expertise.

Essentially, the more your page is linked to by other sources, the more authoritative Google sees it as. If everyone is using your content pillar to educate people on a certain topic, you’ll quickly climb high in the rankings.

Driving traffic to your website in this way represents a perfect opportunity to generate leads and start customers on their buyer journey.

Expansive Content Pillars Hold Buyer Attention

If your content pillar is detailed and expansive enough, it should represent a great learning experience for your customers. This isn’t just valuable but ideally entertaining and engaging as well.

If you can infuse your content pillars with relevant and contextual calls to action throughout, you’ll be able to convert the extra traffic and attention into more leads and conversions.

For tips on how to create better B2B marketing content, check out our free eBook, Efficient Growth at Scale.

Accurate Content Themes Will Help You Connect with the Right Buyers

You want to make sure that your content is reaching the right B2B buyers. That means those buyers who are not only interested in what you’re selling but ready to buy it soon.

By developing comprehensive content pillars, you can quickly inform potential buyers of your message and why it’s something their business needs.

The flip side of this is ensuring that you’re not wasting the time of buyers who aren’t interested in buying. If you did generate false leads this way, you’d also spend more time and resources educating them, only for them to eventually learn that you’re not a good fit.

Content pillars can save time for both you and the customer. This means that even the customers who don’t end up buying your products will be grateful that your detailed and specific content pillars saved them the trouble of extra research. It’s this kind of goodwill that builds relationships and may even earn you a customer in the future.

How to Come Up with Content B2B Pillars for Your Company

Here are some simple principles you can follow to create excellent content pillars:

Start with a Plan

To plan your content pillars, do each of the following:

  • Determine your pillar topic. You’ll want a clear statement of your initial topic. Remember that this is going to be your main content theme, meaning it should be on a topic your company covers extensively and knows a great deal about. It should be long enough to explain most major details to the buyer and engaging enough that they’ll want to keep consuming it.
  • Determine sub-pillars. Alongside your main content pillar should be several smaller sub-pillars that directly relate. This allows you to interlink these articles which will improve your authority and drive extra traffic via SEO.
  • Audit your existing content. If you have content on your website already, check if any of it can be used for the main content pillar or any of the sub-pillars. This will keep your content organized and contextual.

Decide Between Evergreen or Timely Pillars

An evergreen pillar will be on a subject that’s always relevant. This could be a piece of history that will remain unchanged or a fundamental principle of your business that drives your product development. These pillars are great for companies with established products that are operating in a marketplace that isn’t likely to see any technological upheaval or revolutions.

On the other hand, you may be running a business that operates on the cutting edge of technology. Say you’ve recently developed a new technology that will need explaining to potential customers. A well-designed content pillar can help you communicate your new invention to a wide audience.

Focus on Interlinking

Regardless of your content pillar topics, you must interlink all of your sub-pillars and pillars together.

This will take some planning. You must have a solid idea of which sub-pillars will relate to one another. This will make it easy to develop a buyer journey using your content pillars and sub-pillars that will allow a smooth transition between all content.

Hushly Can Help Improve Your Pillar Content

Hushly knows content marketing.

Not only do we use it extensively for our own marketing (you’re in it now!), but we also specialize in developing easy-to-use technological solutions that can help you build content pillars of your own.

For example, our dynamic content hubs can collect all of your most relevant content and display it to those buyers who are most ready to buy. We do this with a combination of targeting and personalization you won’t find with other tools online.

Let’s get started on creating your content pillars today. Request a demo of Hushly to find out more.

Marketing Pillars of Efficient Growth at Scale

To create an efficient growth model you need to develop a repeatable, scalable motion. And know your ‘Why’. Why should your buyers care about your company? Why did you create this product and what problems does it solve? Understanding your ‘Why’ will be the catalyst to your entire go-to-market strategy. 

Luckily, marketers have started to see a shift in growth at all costs to efficient growth based on data-driven, scalable marketing. There are big trends in the market supporting this shift — most of which focus on how to drive predictable pipeline and revenue generation with the adoption of technology, data, and prioritization of the buyer’s experience.

Source: GTM Partners

The key to driving efficient growth is to orchestrate well-timed and personalized experiences that meet the needs of the prospective buyer – where they are in their journey – reduce friction and build relationships. There are two key marketing pillars required to drive efficient growth: content and experience. Read on to see exactly why without investment in these two areas it will be tough to develop a repeatable, scalable motion.

Pillar 1: Content 

66% of marketers
are devoting more budget and resources to content
this year than the last – according to HubSpot.

Content is more imperative than ever. And you need to have it for every stage of the buyer journey. But, your content can’t just be content for the sake of content. You need to establish the right message for the right people at each stage of the buyer’s journey that maps back to your “Why”. 

Gartner does a great job illustrating how complex the B2B buyer’s journey is and why you need to ensure you have the right content to answer questions across every channel and stage. In fact, the research found that customers who perceived the information they received from suppliers to be helpful were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.

source: Gartner

There are three core components to developing a content strategy that drives efficient growth. 

Step 1: Identify topics and keywords

Understand what your audience cares about by looking at the data. What are they searching for at each stage that’s relevant to your “Why”. It’s really important to dig into keywords you are tracking and prioritizing. Your keywords will be used for several things like, capturing intent data, SEO strategy, and ultimately developing your content pillars. Remember the old adage “Crap-in, crap out”? Well it definitely holds true here, so take the time to get your keywords right!

  • What words, phrases etc. Start by thinking about what you’d seach for if you were one of your persona’s
  • Interview customers and talk to other people your company
  • Once you get a long list, do some research to see what you’re missing.

Step 2: Establish content pillars

Leveraging intent data provides great insight into what your target accounts are interested in, especially in relation to your product and solution offerings. If you don’t have an intent data provider, no problem! Go back to your keyword list and make some assumptions based on what you know. You could also try a free tool or Google Search Console to see what keywords users used to get to your website.

source: Hushly

Once you know your top keywords and topics you need to tie them back to your product and value prop and establish “Content Pillars” or themes.

source: Hushly

In this example, you can see that the organization offers B2B growth marketing solutions, and that their target accounts are showing intent for keywords such as ‘B2B Growth’ and ‘Marketing Growth.’ Do this exercise for your business and develop pillars that can support both your inbound and ABM strategies.

Step 3: Create a content matrix

Now that you have your content pillars you will need to map out the different types of content you need for each stage in the buyer’s journey, personas, and channels.

source: Hushly

Pro Tip: Most content can be turned into multiple formats with varying degrees
of depth according to the persona and stage in the buyers journey.

Hopefully, you have existing content ou can leverage, but now is a good time to inventory what you have and find the gaps you have. A lot of businesses tend to have more top of funnel content but not enough for the mid and bottom of funnel. 

The best thing about having a content matrix is when you are planning marketing campaigns you can easily pull it up to see what you have to leverage and where you need to make more investments. 

Pillar 2: Experience 

“To put it bluntly, if a buyer doesn’t like the way you
interact with them, they will go somewhere else.”
– Sangram Vajre, Founder at GTM Partners

Every step in your buyer’s journey is an opportunity to delight your prospects and make doing business with you a pleasure. That’s why it’s so important to examine each step and think about how you can better enable your buyers. Where are the points of friction and how can you alleviate them? Make every interaction

purposeful and as frictionless as possible!

The best way to understand what experiences you need is to map the content you have to the touchpoints and channels you plan to deliver it on. This should allow you to easily identify what experience you need to build.

source: Hushly

Then from there, you should look to the following areas to improve the experience.

  1. Use intent data.
    In order to understand what your audience is looking for and what buying stage they are in you need to know what they are doing behind the scenes. 
  2. Inspect what you expect.
    All of your paid and earned channels should be driving your audience to your website. Evaluate what your audience is seeing when they get there.
  3. Create dynamic landing pages.
    Using the content matrix and taxonomy you developed plus advanced technology like Hushly, you can dynamically serve up a content experience that is highly relevant to your audience.
  4. Ungate content & utilize smart forms.
    These days, most of your content should be UNgated! Be sure to consider the type of content you are publishing before putting it behind a form. If you do have to use a form don’t ask for information you don’t need. 
  5. Be sticky!
    After you’ve done all the hard work of getting someone to your landing page keep them there! Perscribe content to read next and answer questions on the spot with live chat. Make sure people are finding what they are looking for and more when they are there.

We know it can be intimidating to put together an experience that is both repeatable and scalable. The good news is, there is technology and data to support us in making it happen. As we think about the buying experience, we like to design always-on programs that are in sync with your buyers needs. 

It is our job as marketers and sales teams to meet potential buyers where they are in their journey with helpful, relevant information. Leverage content and reduce friction to make it easy for buyers to discover what they need to make an informed buying decision.

source: Hushly ABM Experience

By leveraging tools like Demandbase, RollWorks, 6Sense Zoominfo or Bombora for intent data and buyer experience and conversion platforms like Hushly you can dynamically personalize your website, ABM pages, and campaign destinations in real-time. You can personalize things like:

  • Showing target account logos
  • Copy and graphics
  • Videos 
  • Swap out content by persona, account, industry, etc.
  • Providing the right account reps contact info
  • Messaging by stage of the journey

Investing in the experience does require the right resources and technology. But once you have it in place, you really can build a single page and scale it to thousands of your target accounts. This is really where you start to see efficiencies in your marketing efforts. 

Pulling it all together

Using the right technology coupled with a strong content strategy allows you to create a relevant, and scalable content

experience that will both educate and move prospects along in the buyer’s journey faster and more efficiently.

Without a content strategy and the right technology, the chances of a disconnected and inconsistent experience are high. However, when creating a content strategy, the tendency of many businesses is to create a lot of content and put it all out there (behind a gate) for prospects to consume after they give you their contact information.  And then send a BDR, or Sales Executive after them to try and get a meeting. This experience creates low conversion rates, missed revenue targets, and poor brand perception.

Increasingly, we are learning that prospects are looking to simply figure out how to do things better, and get results. They buy products with the result in mind. They do research to uncover what their options are and how they work. They are pulled in many directions so when it’s hard to find what they are looking for they will bounce and go somewhere else.

Marketing teams that create meaningful, personalized content experiences, in a repeatable, scalable way – will win the hearts, minds, and wallets of the customer. It’s time to create a better buying experience in the name of efficient growth!

How to Boost Your B2B Content Engagement

Content engagement is a key indicator of the quality of your content marketing strategy. Keeping track of it is a challenge in and of itself, but what about boosting it?

It may not always be obvious what drives social media users to engage with content, how to track it, or why to bother with content engagement at all. However, as we’ll discuss, content engagement is one of the keys to keeping track of your sales and marketing performance.

Today’s guide explores the challenges of B2B content engagement, what you should be looking to accomplish by boosting content engagement, and some proven methods you can use today to boost your engagement metrics.

The Challenge of Quality B2B Content Engagement

Identifying your target audience and where to find them is a challenge, but creating great content is the most difficult part of marketing.

Knowing great content when you see it can be tricky since it’s not always obvious. Therefore, choosing the right metrics to help you identify successful content is crucial. It helps everyone involved in the marketing cycle agree on what great content really is.

Once you know what you’re looking for in terms of quality B2B content, you can decide what kind of engagement you need more of and how to generate it.

How to Measure Content Engagement

If you’re still not sure what to look for when deciding on what quality your B2B content engagement really is, start with these few key metrics:

1. Conversion Rate

An increase in conversions is a sure sign that something is working well. Naturally, your sales team will want all the credit for this, but considering how your marketing operation contributed to that increase will yield fruitful information.

To this end, we recommend tracking conversions and getting as much information about what drew them to your product as you can. Knowing what you did right will help you do it again.

2. Pageviews

Customers who are redirected to your website are often ripe for conversions. You should keep track of how many users are visiting your website, where they are coming from, and how long they stay. These will provide critical insights into where to improve your next engagement strategy and how.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who go to your website and leave after only looking at a single page. Users to stick around for longer are probably shopping, leading to more conversions.

If your webpage is experiencing a high bounce rate, this means customers who come across it aren’t interested in staying. This may signal that you need to shift your content engagement strategy.

4. Use Hushly

Hushly can keep track of conversion rates, engagement, and web traffic automatically, allowing you to know which of your content is performing best.

By letting Hushly take over and manage your B2B content engagement strategy, you’ll know you’ll always have the best data-driven approach for your business.

6 Proven Ways to Boost B2B Content Engagement

Here are six examples you can use to start boosting your social media content engagement.

1. Use Automated Content Generation and Tracking Tools

Automation and AI are capable of some truly incredible feats regarding generating and managing your content. Here are a few ways to imagine using automation to make your life as a content marketer easier.

  • Generating Content: Many SaaS companies offer software that can generate language. These models can be used for content ideas, outlines, or even write entire articles for you (with mixed results). In the future, automated content may be the most common kind of marketing. For now, we recommend relying on it for ideas and outlines, but with the finishing touch of a real person.
  • Monitoring Metrics: Things like pageviews, clicks, bounce rate, and conversions must be accurately tracked and reported regularly. Knowing how well your strategy performs is vital to molding it into its ideal version.

2. Cultivate an Organic Following

Social media users want a human touch when interacting with or thinking about your company. This is why 93% of marketers know that people trust content created by other users more than content created by brands.

For this reason alone, it’s vital that you target the right audience. Your following must seem authentic, or it will lose the desired effect. The best way to achieve this is to be authentic by encouraging and sharing user-generated content.

3. Target the Right Platforms

To share content properly, you need to be on the right platforms. Just like the content you create should be targeted toward the audience you want to attract, the social media platform you post on will affect the customers you’ll be reaching.

Identify the platform(s) with the most users that are likely to become customers of yours: these are your top priorities. Other platforms may be used, but knowing the best platforms to advertise your services on will help you craft and prioritize future content.

4. Questions and Polls

Engagement is a two-way street.

Many customers are willing to engage with you as long as you create something they can grab onto. Questions, polls, and other interactivities on your social media accounts are a great way to boost engagement cheaply and get customers thinking about your product throughout their days.

5. Add Visual Interest Whenever Possible

This might be specific to your advertising platform, but people generally love visuals. An excellent graphic design or video can grab a customer’s attention and hold onto it longer than other forms of content, such as long-form blogs.

Since images are so easy to consume, they complement other forms of content like blog posts. Always consider whether the visual aspect is being taken care of when crafting any content strategy.

6. Create Video Content

Videos may be more challenging to create, but their high ROI makes them a no-brainer for any strong and wide-ranging content marketing strategy. 93% of participants in this study agreed that video marketing is better at converting than other types of content.

Videos are an excellent way to accomplish many critical marketing tasks all at once: great visuals, storytelling, and a call to action. Just like with other forms of content, you can and should optimize videos for SEO results.

Flexibility is a Strength

You could create the perfect content strategy today, but that doesn’t mean it will still be perfect six months from now.

Part of your content marketing strategy should be reviewing and regularly making changes to it. This ensures that your strategy will never fall behind the shifting demands of consumers or market pressures.

Ready to learn how Hushly can take on the job of boosting your B2B content engagement? Contact our team today!

How to Measure B2B Content Marketing Success (It’s Complicated)

Content marketing is vital for every business today.

While many businesses already understood the value of high-quality content, many are just dipping their toes in the water after COVID-19.

Research shows that 45% of B2B marketers are using digital marketing channels – like content – for the first time this year.

Content marketing is loaded with benefits:

  • It’s long-term and sustainable.
  • Content helps nurture leads.
  • It demonstrates your authority.
  • Content boosts brand recognition and trust.
  • It solves your lead and customer pain points.

However, the key is to create high-quality, relevant, and useful content, but how can you tell if your content is “working?”

You must understand how to measure content marketing success – and that’s more complicated than it seems.

Which Metric is the Most Important with Regards to Content Marketing?

None of them! There’s no single metric that will tell you whether your content is successful or doing its job. Page views might seem reliable, but how many times have you viewed a blog post you found boring or useless? Probably more than you can remember.

Instead, figure out which metrics really matter and how to draw insight from all of them together.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics get you excited and confident, but they don’t translate into action. They’re essentially meaningless and easy to manipulate.

You can’t draw conclusions from vanity metrics alone because they’ll always steer you down the wrong path.

Some examples of vanity metrics include:

  • Page views
  • Free trial users
  • Social media likes, views, or reactions
  • Email subscribers
  • Page followers
  • Acquired leads
  • Event registrations

Independently, these metrics look great on paper, but you must compare them to actionable metrics too to measure content success.

Metrics That Matter

Actionable metrics matter. These metrics show growth and success from your content because it inspired people to take action or at least consume more content.

  • Bounce rates
  • Shares
  • Conversion rates
  • Monthly active visitors or users
  • Email activity like clicks or conversions
  • Event participation
  • Lead quality
  • Customer churn rate
  • Lifetime value

Understanding Different Types of Content Marketing Metrics

Different metrics tell you distinct things about your audience’s behavior and opinions of your content.

Some metrics tell us more than others.

Basic Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Success

Start with basic metrics to grasp where your traffic is coming from and how people behave on your website or social pages.

Most of these are vanity metrics when used alone, but they work in tandem with other metrics to build a broader picture.

  • Post/page impressions
  • Page views
  • New users vs. returning visitors
  • Unique page visitors
  • Page sessions
  • Website traffic
  • Traffic source

Engagement Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Success

These metrics tell you a bit more about the behavior of your website and page visitors. Engagement metrics tell you people loved your content experience enough to stick around and consume more of it, sign up for your lists, or share your content with others.

  • Page views per session
  • Time spent on site
  • Bounce rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Conversions
  • Share ratios

Positioning Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Success

Positioning metrics tell you if your content is showing up in the right places.

For example, let’s say your website traffic has skyrocketed, but no one’s converting. You’d want to check your keywords, SEO, and content quality to make sure you’re publishing content relevant to your specific audience segments.

Some important positioning metrics include:

  • Search rankings
  • Backlinks
  • Brand mentions
  • Follower growth
  • Keyword relevance

How to Measure Content Marketing Success with Key Metrics

Even vanity metrics alone won’t paint a full picture of your content marketing success. Here’s why a strategy is so important: A content marketing strategy has goals, a plan to reach them, and methods for tracking your success.

Create a List of Goals

You can’t figure out how to measure content marketing success if you don’t know what success looks like.

Your content can, and should, have more than one goal.

Content targeting people within each stage would have distinct goals. For example, content targeting leads in the funnel’s early stage should have goals like brand awareness and lead magnet downloads.

Some of your content goals might include:

  • Brand recognition and authority
  • Lead nurturing
  • Boosting conversion rates
  • Problem identification
  • Solution building
  • Preventing customer churn
  • Improving lead quality
  • Boosting lifetime value
  • Differentiating your brand from competitors

Figure out your goal at each stage of the funnel and which types of content you’ll use to meet your goals.

Set Your Key Performance Indicators and Content Marketing Metrics to Measure Success

Next, pinpoint your KPIs. Your KPIs aren’t individual metrics. Your KPIs include a handful of metrics you’ll use to gain insight into your content’s performance.

Here’s where vanity metrics get useful again.

Page views, for example, don’t tell you much alone. However, when you add other metrics like lead downloads, conversions, and returning visitors, your page views can tell you a great deal!

Say your blog has had 1,000 visits a week for over a year. You’re worried your content isn’t working because your traffic hasn’t increased. Ask yourself

  • Are more visitors returning to read more content since last year?
  • Are visitors staying on your website for longer periods of time now?
  • Has lead quality improved?
  • Do visitors share more content with their colleagues these days?
  • Has your conversion rate improved?
  • Have you gotten the attention of more key accounts than last year?

If you answer yes to any of those questions, that means your content is indeed successful because it influenced visitor behavior. In fact, earning more traffic alone can be a negative if you’re not reaching the right people.

Improve Your Key Content Marketing Metrics

Your goal shouldn’t be to improve one single metric – like page visits or lead downloads. Instead, look at the bigger picture: How can you improve your entire content marketing experience?

Artificial intelligence tools like an AI recommendation engine help create the content experience your buyers expect and demand. An AI engine helps you squeeze every ounce of ROI and engagement from your content. That’s why streaming models like Netflix and Hulu are so successful. An AI engine brings the same technology to your B2B website.

Learn more about how an AI engine works behind the scenes to create an empowering user experience and improve content marketing success.

What’s Changing in B2B Content Marketing?

As redundant as the phrase is, content is still king.

Over the past year, we’ve all relied on content in all its forms to keep us occupied, entertained, and even sustain our businesses.

Content always mattered in B2B, but today it’s a matter of life and death.

60% of the most successful organizations say they have a documented B2B content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, only 21% of the worst-performing companies can say the same.

Indeed, whether or not an organization excels at content will dictate its future in the coming years.

And all aspects of content matter tremendously. Strategy, social media, writing, SEO – these shouldn’t be thought of independently. Every factor should work in harmony.

Marketers today need a broad set of skills in different disciplines: writing, strategizing, advertising, researching, promoting, artificial intelligence, etc.

What is B2B content marketing today, and what can we expect for the future?

What is New in B2B Content Marketing, and Where are We Headed?

If you haven’t this year, it’s time to reevaluate your B2B content marketing strategies and goals. Look at what’s working and what could use an upgrade. Buyer expectations have undergone massive changes over the past year, so staying current with your tactics is key.

1. Video Search Like YouTube is on the Rise

64% of B2B buyers say they’ve increased their consumption of related video over the past year, while another 51% say they’ve also increased their online searches.

YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine – only behind Google – so it’s a perfect place to promote your video content.

Since YouTube functions as a search engine, that means you should also optimize your video content like you would for organic searches in Google.

Research your keywords and explore what already exists. You’ll never earn views or engagement if you create the same thing as everyone else. Use your keyword in your title, tags, and description. Create informative content and encourage users to take action.

Bear in mind, YouTube rewards creators who keep visitors on the site, so use CTAs to promote more videos and use off-site CTAs sparingly.

2. Higher Quality Content is Critical

Two-thirds of all B2B buyers say companies give them far too much useless and generic content. Three-quarters of B2B buyers also say they have way less time to research content than they have previously.

If you don’t understand what it is your leads want from your content, they’ll never stick around to consume it. The same eBooks and case studies won’t work for everyone. When you create generic content for everyone, you create interesting content for no one.

Laser focus your topics and dive into your content with high-quality.

3. Buyers Don’t Have Time for Unorganized Content

Buyers also don’t have time to sort through content – no matter how high-quality – looking for something relevant and useful.

If they get to your website and nothing stands out, they’ll just go somewhere else.

Organizing your content by pain point, issue, vertical, or account makes it easy for visitors to find what they need. Your content can serve its purpose better when visitors can actually find it immediately.

4. You need Content for Every Stage and Every Segment

B2Bs also need to do a better job of creating content for different stages of the sales funnel and firmographics. The same material you create for marketing heads won’t work for CEOs and end-users.

Everyone needs different information from your content.

Unfortunately, many B2B organizations haven’t caught up with the importance of personalized content creation yet. They’re implementing personalized content distribution with AI, but their actual content doesn’t relate to distinct segments.

Personalization strategies can’t do their job if the copywriting and topics aren’t personalized too. Imagine if you opened Netflix, and it offered you nothing but 90s thrillers. No matter how well the algorithm worked, it wouldn’t matter because the content lacked diversity.

5. Content Marketers Need to Work in Harmony with AI

84% of B2B marketers already admit to using AI in some way. How they use it and what they use it for, however, is another story. Research shows most marketers still have some catching up to do.

Nearly half of millennial B2Bs – the largest decisionmaker segment at most companies – said brands didn’t meet their experience expectations within the past month.

While tools like chat and customer service are critical, the digital experience matters too. Your website is your only chance to connect with buyers where human connection isn’t possible.

Artificial intelligence-driven tools like recommendation engines are must-haves for every B2B marketer today.

6. Messaging Matters More (and So Does ABM)

Material conditions have changed drastically this year for almost everyone. Some companies are thriving like never before – such as Zoom – while others are struggling to stay afloat or shutting down.

Context matters. Words matter. Messaging matters more than it has in years.

Rethink how you approach your audience throughout every piece of content. If you haven’t yet, now’s the time to launch an account-based marketing strategy. With every organization facing such different realities, an ABM strategy is the only way to ensure your content hits the mark every time.

7. It’s All Digital Now, So Don’t Hide Your Content

Surprisingly, 45% of B2B marketers say they’re using digital tactics for the first time since COVID-19 hit. Across the board, 88% say they’ve increased their digital marketing.

If you don’t have a comprehensive digital content marketing strategy worked out, that means you’re letting competitors fill the gap and take your traffic.

B2Bs can’t afford to hide their content behind forms. They must make it easy for leads to find what they need – not restrict it.

Use AI to Boost Your Content Engagement by 280%

Artificial intelligence helps you squeeze every ounce of ROI from your content marketing. Instead of losing your blogs, videos, and eBooks to the void, artificial intelligence puts your content to use with personalized recommendations.

AI also helps keep your data clean and accurate. Your lead collection tool works in tandem with your content distribution to nurture visitors before they ever connect with your sales team.

Find out how Check Point software used Hushly’s AI-driven content engagement system to improve content engagement by 280%!

7 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important for B2B Marketing

hushly blog

The buyer’s journey isn’t what it was even ten years ago.

B2B buyers spend increasingly more time researching online and off, self-nurturing, and connecting with potential suppliers on more casual terms.

The latest Gartner research shows B2Bs only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. That 17% covers all suppliers too. In other words, your sales team only gets about 2% to 5% of a lead’s attention before they decide.

Gartner

Your digital experience is your main tool for earning trust and building relationships – and it all starts with content.

Here’s why content marketing is so important for B2B marketing and how you can use it to its full advantage.

Why is Content Marketing Important for B2B Marketing?

For content marketing to work, it must be 100% relevant for your unique audience segments. Research is key to understanding your buyer’s specific needs and problems. You’ll also want to set unique goals to track your progress and effectiveness.

1. It’s Vital for an Account-Based Marketing Strategy

84% of marketers using ABM say it delivers higher ROI than other marketing strategies. Account-based marketing isn’t just for connecting with new leads either – it’s vital for forging deeper relationships with your current customers and preventing churn too.

Engaging content is at the heart of every effective ABM strategy. You need relatable blogs, eBooks, case studies, whitepapers, videos, and podcasts for your various firmographics.

Keep in mind that you might not want to create ALL types of content. Instead, research what types of content your firmographics prefer. Some at the C-level might prefer videos while end-users at a company might rather absorb information through infographics.

That’s another reason content marketing is so important for B2B: It forces you to study your audience.

2. You Can Rank for More Keywords

If you want to take SEO seriously, you must publish consistent high-quality content. Brands that blog regularly earn 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t.

Content marketing is an effective SEO tactic because it boosts rankings across your entire site. Here’s a little example of how it works:

  • Develop high-quality blog content around long-tail, low-competition keywords.
  • Earn rankings for those easy-to-rank keywords.
  • Target broad keywords on your category pages, landing pages, product pages, and home pages.
  • Prove your worth to Google algorithms and searchers with low-volume keywords and your ranking will improve for broader high-volume keywords.

Content marketing isn’t an overnight solution. However, publishing regular content seriously pays off long term.

3. B2B Content Marketing Helps You Generate More Leads and Sales

Content marketing delivers 3x more leads yet costs 62% less than outbound tactics.

B2B buyers spend 45% of the journey researching alone so content is key for helping them learn about your company and products.

Make sure your content solves specific problems your audience faces. Research their conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit before writing content.

This level of research and quality matters. That’s why 75% of B2Bs with the most successful content marketing strategies say content is useful for earning sales and revenue. 

4. You Can Empower Leads to Self-Nurture

A whopping 84% of B2Bs with the most successful content marketing say nurturing leads is a top goal.

Unfortunately, most brands hide their best content behind a lead magnet form. That’s not an ideal situation for people arriving at your site on a mobile device.

Think with Google estimates that 70% of all B2B searches happen on mobile devices so removing forms should be a top priority in your B2B content marketing strategy.

Instead, use an AI-driven adaptive content hub with machine learning to help your visitors find the perfect piece of content. An adaptive content hub provides content recommendations – like Amazon or Netflix – so every visitor gets a 100% relevant and unique content experience.

5. Content Marketing Lets You Have Conversations with Your Audience

If your content is successful, people should feel compelled to comment, like, and share it with others – opening you up to new conversations and relationships.

Content marketing is important for B2B social selling as well. Your content, especially thought leadership content, gives you a launchpad for discussing nuanced concepts and ideas.

Email marketing is also a useful tool for promoting your content. You can study which links your subscribers click and study their behavior and interests to provide curated content in the future.

6. You Can Earn More Web Traffic

Earning more indexed pages in Google search results means you increase your chances of visibility and new audiences. Organic traffic tends to stay on your website longer and consume more pieces of content for each session too.

Searchers value content because it’s not salesy or promotional. Instead, it helps them resolve nagging issues they face each day.

Boosts in traffic can also come from sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, guest posting, and blogging platforms. The more content you publish, the more backlinks you earn to your website. Not only is that good for SEO, but it also increases your long-term visibility and traffic.

7. B2B Content Marketing Delivers Incredible Analytics and Insights

Every time someone arrives at your website, you have a new opportunity to learn about your audience based on their behavior.

AI-powered tools can help you take your insights from content a step further. When you use AI and machine learning to create a hyper-personalized experience, you can learn more about their stage of the buying cycle and interests based on their behavior.

Using analytics and insights from your B2B content marketing, you can find new accounts to target and fresh market segments as well. This can help fuel your future content marketing efforts and create a positive reward cycle.

Hyper-Personalize Your Content Marketing Experience

Crafting incredible content for your website is only half the battle. How can you ensure each visitor finds the most relevant piece of content when they arrive at your website?

Adding an AI engine to your website is fast, easy, and creates a hyper-personalized experience for every visitor.

Hushly makes AI and machine learning accessible to everyone. Learn how to empower leads with self-nurturing landing pages.

How to Combine B2B Content Marketing with Paid Traffic

In B2B online marketing, there tends to be two very distinct worlds.

As far as traffic to your website is concerned, there is B2B content marketing and paid traffic.

While you can use both, many companies strictly rely on one or the other. Those companies that do utilize both options tend to keep them completely separate, as well. They have totally different strategies for leads depending on how they end up on their sites.

This is a huge mistake.

3 Ways Content Marketing and Paid Traffic Can Be Used to Increase Leads

Not only is it a good idea to combine your B2B content marketing and paid-traffic strategies, but it’s also 100% necessary.

Unless you are confident that every lead will convert after seeing one of your ads or coming to your site through a search engine, chances are that there will be some overlap. A lead who sees your ad may not convert, but they’ll come back to your site later. If you’re using retargeting – which you absolutely should be – you’ll be bringing back site visitors through paid channels.

So, instead of keeping them distinct, here’s how B2B content marketing and paid ads should work together.

1. Use Your Content and Ads to Inform One Another

One of the biggest problems with treating content marketing and PPC ads as completely different from each other is that you miss a lot of opportunities to improve the assets of both.

For example, any promise you make in an ad that gains clicks should probably inform your lead magnets. Those also depend on the promise of something spectacular to get clicks. Of course, you can use lead magnets at the end of blog posts and as the actual offer in ads.

Likewise, if you’ve found that blog posts around a certain topic bring in a lot of organic traffic, this should also tell you something about the prospects conducting those searches. After they read your blog post, what will they want to learn about next? Is there an opportunity to create an ad, so you can catch those prospects during their next search?

2. Create Content to Replace Your Google Ads

Google Ads should have a spot in every B2B marketers’ toolbox. While you wait for your B2B content marketing efforts to pay off, you can still earn plenty of exposure on the first page of Google by creating high-performing ads and placing well-informed bids.

With that said, you should always strive to create content that ranks on the first page of Google for popular keywords that represent buying intent from your audience.

Far too many marketers create impressive ad campaigns around these kinds of keywords and then put their content-marketing focus elsewhere. As a result, they will always need to pay for that first-page traffic.

Instead, use the last tip to figure out what kinds of content would work best for these high-volume keywords, and then continuously produce content that will help you get on the first page for free. Pillar pages can be great for this because they give you so many opportunities to create this type of content instead of repeating the same post over and over.

Also, don’t forget to turn off your ads the moment you organically rank for a certain keyword. Otherwise, you’ll end up competing against yourself for attention – never a good idea.

3. Find Guest-Posting Opportunities with the Most Potential

Content marketing and PPC ads both share one very important aspect in common: they often depend on other companies’ websites.

Content marketing works best when it involves posting on other sites to earn backlinks and greater exposure. Generally, content marketers try to get their posts published on sites they know their market regularly visits.

The problem is that these sites don’t necessarily represent visitors who are actively looking to purchase. So, while you may earn a backlink, that exposure might not be worth much.

That’s why you should place ads on industry sites, too. Then, once you see where the most conversions are coming from, approach those sites for guest-posting opportunities. This will save you a lot of time you’d otherwise spend with trial-and-error guest posts.  

How to Immediately Increase Conversions for Your B2B Content Marketing

At Hushly, we’re big fans of both B2B content marketing and paid ads, especially when they’re used in tandem to generate more leads.

However, we also know that even when their powers are combined, turning those efforts into qualified leads your sales team can nurture into conversions isn’t always easy.

That’s why we created our platform. Without changing anything on your site or any of your ads, we guarantee that our software will increase your lead-gen and account-based marketing (ABM) leads by 51%.

Contact us today and we’d be more than happy to show you exactly how it works.

3 Simple Ways to Conduct a Content Audit

content audit

In B2B marketers’ never-ending quest to boost their websites’ rankings, attract leads, and earn conversions, a number of different tactics have been discovered.

Everything from keyword optimization, link-building, and schema markups have been revealed as powerful techniques for earning Google’s affection.

Yet, many B2B marketers shy away from – or don’t even know about – one of the most powerful methods available for improving SEO. In fact, withoutrunning a content audit, your site could continue suffering no matter what you do.

3 Ways to Execute a Content Audit Quickly

The idea behind a content audit is simple: you need to audityour content to find out what has to go.

After spending so much time and money on creating your B2B company’s content, why would you ever want to go back and start permanently deleting some of it?

Simple: it appears to help boost your rankings.

That’s because, if your B2B company is like most, you’ve probably posted a lot of content to your site over the years. Looking back, not all of that content probably hit the mark, either. You most likely have a number of webpages that have never even been visited. You have blog posts that didn’t gain any traction on social media or receive comments.

According to Google’s own analysis, “having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.”

In other words, unpopular pages are hurting your chances with Google.

Here’s how to change that – fast – with a content audit.

1. Find Your “Bad” Posts

The first step of your content audit is to check your analytics to see which blog posts have done absolutely nothing for you. In other words, which ones haven’t brought in any organic traffic or social media views?

If they’re older than a year, we’re considering them “bad” posts.

Anything that hasproduced results – no matter how little – can stay for now.  

Go a little easier on your webpages. If they’re service/product pages that may improve conversions once you finish your content audit and start seeing more traffic, consider leaving them in place by now.

2. Decide Which Posts Can Be Improved

This will most likely take a while, but the next step is to look through those bad posts and decide which should be permanently deleted and which have the potential to be improved.

Some will probably be completely outdated. For example, if your blog post was about predictions for the coming year and it didn’t get any attention, delete it. There’s no point to trying to revamp that one. If you wrote a blog about a product, service, or methodology that’s no longer available, that can go, as well.

On the other hand, if you realize that some of your content was a bit thin, but you think the topic was a good one, you’ve found opportunities for improvement. Simply adding to the word-count of a post can often do a lot for increasing its rankings. Could some of your posts use new subsections?

Linking out to external sources can go a long way toward improving your content’s rankings, as well. Look for opportunities to cite sources to high-authority sites.

Speaking of which, you want to go through everylink on everypage of your site to check and make sure it’s not leading to a dead end. Sending your visitors to “error 404” pages because of broken links will hurt your chances with Google.

Fortunately, platforms like Screaming Frog will make this mucheasier and quicker to do.

3. Check Your Conversion Funnels

A good content audit shouldn’t just be about increasing your traffic, either. Now would be a great time to look through your various conversion funnels, as well.

Are parts of your funnel dropping the ball? Maybe it’s at the very top simply because it’s not bringing in any traffic. Maybe the middle of your funnel is leaking because prospects aren’t getting the information they need.

Whatever the case, look for opportunities to improve your results. It might mean adding more content or even taking some of it away. You could find that entire pages need to be replaced to fix the problem.

A Content Audit + Hushly = More Conversions

After a single content audit, you shouldsee improved traffic. It’s not like eliminating pages that weren’t helping could ever hurt.

However, make content audits something you do twice a year, and you’ll keep seeing your results improve.

For even better results, let Hushly help. Our platform works with the content you already have – the good content, anyway – to increase conversions by at least 51% – guarantee. Contact us today to see how.

3 B2B Content Marketing Tips to Increase Exposure

b2b content marketing

Most marketers know that content is the essential ingredient for bringing visitors to their sites from Google.

That’s why B2B content marketing went from almost nonexistent among B2B companies about five years ago to a methodology that none of them would dare be without.

However, content can do a lot more than just improve search traffic for your site. Another important capability is its potential for increasing your company’s exposure.

3 Ways B2B Content Marketing Can Bring Your Business Greater Exposure

Greater exposure means more people see your content. When that happens, you don’t just see better search results. You see more traffic from more channels and enjoy B2B content marketing that converts much easier because those channels also bring you greater authority.

Here are three simple ways to make sure your B2B content marketing efforts get in front of more people.

1. Create Content Using Subject Matter Experts

There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing your content-creation needs. There’s also nothing wrong with covering the occasional general topic on your site.

However, if your company’s subject-matter experts are never contributing, your content probably doesn’t bring in as many views as it could.

That’s because B2B buyers are far less interested in general topics. They often have the same background as many of the people at your company. A CFO understands accounting, so they won’t be impressed by copy written by someone who doesn’t have similar credentials. It’s when a company can create expert copy that speaks to the actual experience that the CFO will be engaged and more likely to convert down the line.

Furthermore, subject-matter experts have insights that can be truly helpful and even actionable. For example, if you sell hardware for data centers, it will help if someone on your staff used to work at a data center and can create content about it. They can make recommendations based on that unique experience.

You can still outsource or use your marketing department to polish up the copy a bit, but be sure you bring some of your content more views by having a subject-matter expert write it.

2. Test Your Efforts with Analytic Tools

As opposed to advertising copy that came before the Internet, one of the biggest advantages of B2B content marketing is that you can literallytest how well it does, often in real-time.

That’s why you should be using software to measure just how well your content is doing in objective terms. Just some examples of these tools include:

Every company should be using these tools, but, again, they’re especially important for B2B marketers. We need to know where our traffic is coming from and get a sense of why, or we can face extremely long buying cycles that kill ROIs.

When you’re looking to grow exposure, you want to see which sources are bringing you the most views, so you can go back to them again and again.

3. Do More Than Just Publish Your Content

Speaking of which, don’t expect your website to do all the work when it comes to increasing your exposure. Unless you already have a website that is seeing impressive amounts of traffic, your B2B content marketing efforts will need to include a bit of elbow grease.

Aside from organic traffic, amplify your copy by using paid media to bring you even more views. Over time, you’ll be able to reduce your budget, but for now, it’s worth spending some money to build that exposure.

B2B influencers can be extremely helpful in this regard, as well. Getting guest posts on industry sites is another phenomenal way to make sure your content is in front of the right people.

Does Your B2B Content Marketing Generate More Clients?

B2B content marketing should be a priority for every company. Over time, it builds a reliable channel for organic traffic and easy leads. It can also help position your organization as an authority and thought leader among your industry.

Still, none of those achievements will mean much if you can’t use that content to convert leads into clients. In fact, when your conversion rate is low, content marketing can actually cost you.

That’s why we created Hushly. Our platform actually works with the content you already have. There’s no need to make expensive changes to your current website, either. All you need to do is install it.

After that, we guarantee you’ll see your conversions improve by no less than 51%.

Name another company that can claim the same.

Sound too good to be true? Just contact us today and we’ll gladly show you how it works.

4 Essential Online Content Development Habits

online content development

Are you struggling with online content development?

Do you watch your competitors publish post after post that always seems to do well?

Then, it might be that they simply have better habits than you.

The 4 Best Habits to Form for Online Content Development

That’s right. Instead of some secret writing technique or just blind luck, better online content development often comes down to having the following four habits.

1. Check Your Analytics Each Morning

The easiest habit you need to develop to keep your content marketing efforts on track is just to check your analytics every day.

You work hard to continuously push your rankings up Google’s SERPs, so you need to know right away if you’ve slipped down a spot – or maybe even several.

In that case, you have to adjust your editorial calendar immediately to regain ground. If you wait even a week, you might learn that more than one competitor has taken advantage of your absence, cutting your traffic substantially.

2. See What’s Trending in Your Industry Every Day

A big part of successful online content development is understanding the ins and outs of your industry. It probably goes without saying that you have that level of understanding, too.

Still, if you’re not checking in every single day, you’ll miss out on opportunities to jump on new trends, opinions, and other developments that could form valuable content. You never want to be “last to the party” when it comes to your industry.

Also, by checking in regularly, you’ll often be able to predict what next month’s hot topics will be, so you can stay ahead of the crowd.

BuzzSumo is a really great tool for this if your industry is fond of social media.

In short, this platform shows you what’s trending by keyword (among other features). Therefore, each day, you can set the parameters for 24 hours, enter your relevant keywords, and make sure you’re not missing any opportunities to join a growing trend that could net your new leads.

3. Read About Online Marketing at Least Once a Week

We understand you’re probably very busy, so adding one more priority to your already-growing list of things to do may not sound especially appealing.

Still, your competition is always one new insight away from finding their way ahead of you or increasing their lead further.

Even if you’re not the one who handles online content development for your company, it pays dividends to understand the industry’s back practices, so you can make sure your team is following them.

When it comes to online content development, some really great websites to bookmark and read over once a week include:

These are great tools for familiarizing yourself with the industry. Over time, you’ll also find it much easier to simply skim articles or even just headlines to make sure you’re staying on top of what it takes to publish winning content.

4. Make Networking a Priority

You don’t need to do this every single day or even every week, necessarily, but you should be regularly looking for opportunities to connect with others in your industry who are also focused on content marketing.

Obviously, you’re not interested in networking with competitors.

Instead, look to form connections with influencers or anyone in a shoulder market who’s publishing content you admire.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that the more content-creators who know about you, the easier you’ll find it to earn those valuable backlinks. If they read your content, like it, and link to it, you’ll enjoy an improvement in your rankings, which means more traffic. Far too many content-creators simply publish blog posts and hope someone will find and link to it on their own.

Secondly, you might find some beneficial collaborative opportunities in the future. This could bring your site some great backlinks, too, but it could also help boost your profile throughout your industry. Prospects who may not have otherwise been familiar with your company will learn about it by reading the content you’ve created with another authority figure they regularly read.

Use Your Online Content Development to Gain More Conversions

At the end of the day, the habits listed above aren’t just for better online content development. The whole point of creating better content is so you can attract more leads and prime them for conversion.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to simply use Hushly.

Contact us today and we’ll show you how we’re able to guarantee clients a 51% boost to their conversions.