How To Make Sure Your Content Reaches Your Leads

November 23 2019 , Written by Peter Wootton

“Content is King” – you get it! But here’s the dilemma; you’ve created all this content; yet, don’t seem to be getting the results you expect. At a time where 93% of B2B professionals have a content strategy in place1, it seems that content marketing can no longer help differentiate your company from competitors. False.

Before revising existing or creating additional pieces of content, it is essential to understand how B2B buyers proceed to make purchase decisions. While they rely more and more on content, they also have less time to dedicate to searching and reading all the documentation available to them. As a result, B2B buyers have become quite selective regarding the content they consider worth spending their time on.

There are four ways you can optimize your content in order to increase the chances of it reaching its target and being viewed:

Make Content Searchable

To find the information they seek, prospects go to Google – not your website. Thus, a big chunk of your content strategy should be focused on optimizing your content for search. Find the keywords that are relevant to your buyers and strategically use them to help prospects find you.

Here are some SEO tools we use at that have helped us improve our search engine rankings:

Google AdWords
LipperHey
WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

Provide Accessibility

Gated content is only valuable to your organization if it allows you to capture prospect information – nothing new here. However, you have to be cautious regarding the amount of information you are requesting from a lead in exchange for a piece of content. Indeed, B2B marketers have the tendency to request extensive information, reported a DemandGen survey2, upsetting the user’s experience.

A way around this is a technique called progressive profiling. With marketing automation software, marketers have the opportunity to gather their leads’ information over time as they come back to the website to access additional content.

Become a Resource With Credibility

As mentioned earlier, B2B buyers are subject to important time constraints; and, there is too much content available online for them to decipher the good from the bad and the relevant from the irrelevant. Instead, they will pull information from credible sources they know they can trust.

To maximize your content’s effectiveness, you will have to build your own credibility and become one of your leads’ credible sources of information. Here are some helpful tips from Inc. on how to become a credible expert.

Design for Readability

Optimizing content to comply with your prospects’ time restrictions also means producing content that can be scanned over quickly and is to-the-point. 64% of B2B buyers admit they find the content they come across wordy and hard to read.

Once again, remember your buyer will most likely not have the time to read through an entire eBook or Whitepaper. You should seek to provide valuable information in a concise way and make it easy for the buyer’s eye to navigate the document.

Visual information is generally easier consumed than text (there is a reason infographics have become so popular in the last few years…). Use pictures, graphs, diagrams and subheadings in your content to help the users get to the information they need without any obstacle.

And Don’t Forget…

Content can only have a consequential impact on your leads when it is delivered in context.

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