Online optimization is usually associated with natural or organic search engine optimization (SEO). Optimizing your marketing content around keywords or phrases is the first step in your content marketing strategy. After all, that’s how your prospects and customers will find your blog and/or Web site.
However, there is another strong reason for optimizing your marketing content that has nothing to do with SEO. I am referring to optimizing customer engagement in B2B marketing.
Why is it important? Because B2B and industrial buyers tend to be more sophisticated in the use of online content in making their decision over the entire buying cycle. BtoB marketers need to create and deliver content that is relevant to those searching for their solution while mapping it to the prospect’s buying cycle.
To deepen and strengthen this relationship, marketers (and sales) must optimize the “return on time spent” by increasing the value received through each touchpoint. (Source: IDC Analyst Connection: Coordinating Marketing and Sales across the Entire Revenue Cycle.)
It is not just optimizing words within your marketing content. When developing content, it’s important to build customer personas, and create individual content paths for each of them. Since each has their own questions, concerns and interests, one needs to develop content around those specific issues.
Keep in mind your marketing content may exist in various forms and formats; company website, blog, email campaigns, press releases, marketing collateral and social networks. Some of these marketing assets will change over time. You need to have a process in place for your content optimization to evolve over time. (See Do I Really Need a Content Strategy?)
Take a good hard look at your current marketing content and ask yourself is it optimized for search engines and customer engagement? If not, then you need to rethink your strategy to get the most out of optimizing your marketing content.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.