You’re producing great content, but is that enough to make an impact? These days, unfortunately, the answer is probably “no.” The recipe for successful content is evolving due to a changing media landscape. Today’s business-to-business (B2B) marketers understand the value of getting in front of the right audience at the right time with the right message. To do this, many organizations have invested heavily in marketing automation, ad retargeting based on audience interests and segmentation, and content promotion via discovery platforms.
While many of these tools can help your content get noticed, organizations need to think beyond content development and distribution. This is especially true when operating in highly competitive industries, where other B2B organizations are also likely vested in creating and marketing remarkable content. In fact, a recent study shows that 93% of “the most successful B2B content marketers” believe that their organization is extremely or very committed to content marketing, but just 27% view their overall level of content marketing as extremely or very successful.
While there are various ways organizations can boost the success of their content, such as by improving content quality based on Google’s guidelines, researching hot topics and planning ahead, or amplifying content with creative design, one relatively unexplored yet effective method is to focus on delivering a scalable content experience with robust content categorization.
A scalable content experience comes down to keeping content organized.
This isn’t always the fun part, but marketers need to remember that content is used best when it’s tailored to the intended audience. Some companies can use the same asset for multiple personas, verticals or other audience segmentation strategies, including, at times, targeting at an account level. When we (marketers) take the time to tag and categorize our content, we can easily apply rules or artificial intelligence (AI) to serve the newest content to pre-established segments using a content experience platform or a simple search of your database/spreadsheet.
But remember, as your company grows, new segments and audiences will be identified. By taking the time to organize content right then and there, you can easily go back and distribute evergreen content to new segments when it so applies. How do you achieve this? Plan content with categorization in mind from the start. For example, at Geotab, where I serve as vice president of marketing, we annually develop a robust global editorial calendar that is organized by content type, topic, segment and audience. This allows us to develop a fully thought out content experience that can be tailored to individual reader interests.
Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle framework of “why,” “how” and “what” comes to mind immediately when thinking of considerations to be mindful of when delivering a scalable content experience. When it comes to content, it’s best to equate content as the “what.” The “why” is growth, which is the simplest summary of marketing’s purpose for being. The “how” is often the trickiest to label but is tied to your marketing go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Taking that into account, the better we, as marketers, define our GTM strategy, the better we can determine how to organize and categorize content to map accordingly.
For example, if you are heavily invested in sales engagement through business development rep/sales development rep outreach, it will be very important to organize content by tags that align to stages of the buyer journey. Similarly, if you are heavily invested in an inbound strategy, you would want to organize and tag content tied to search engine optimization (SEO) keywords to build streams of content tied to the search of prospects. The reality is that many marketers will be invested in a range of GTM strategies, including inbound and sales enablement, but also demand generation and account-based marketing. As such, you will want to organize content for multiple stages of the buyer journey.
When properly tagged and categorized, your content can be used for more effective engagement.
This is very much in line with the research by Uberflip and Heinz Marketing. In “The New Marketing Standard” 2019 benchmark report, which surveyed 283 B2B marketing leaders, it is clear that content is being used at multiple stages of the buyer journey to help accelerate the process. Specifically, the study found that B2B marketers reported brand awareness (76%), lead generation (72%) and customer education (59%) as the top three purposes of content, followed by sales enablement, buyer education, product release and event follow-up.
Further, ensuring that readers are seamlessly equipped with relevant, quality content can also benefit sales teams. The more customers expect a sales rep will arm them with the right research that isn’t generic, but truly hand-picked, the more they may come to trust and pay attention.
In summary, while marketing and communications teams will always be focused on developing and sharing the most informative and creative content with their internal and external audiences, it is important for organizations to think about how to rise above the “white noise.” Take a deeper look and begin to prioritize how you tag and categorize your content. This will help you provide a scalable content experience that increases reader engagement and makes content easily discoverable.