30-second summary:
- Most marketers agree that creating content is a core business strategy
- SEO can help you capitalize on the content you’ve created and see lasting results
- Create content around common sales objections to improve the sales process
- Instead of going all-in on the best-case scenario of in-person events being able to happen in 2021, create a plan based on what you know works now and could continue to work into the future as well.
With 2020 pulling the rug out from under pretty much everyone, it’s no surprise that marketing has had to shift over the past year. The focus for many organizations was once in-person meetings and events like trade shows and conventions; it’s now mostly moved to tactics that can be deployed remotely. The biggest winner out of all this change has, without a doubt, been content marketing. In the summer of 2020, I surveyed 49 B2B companies to see how they are approaching marketing, and more than 80 percent of them agreed that content is now considered a core business strategy.
Content marketing is a strategy that doesn’t require any physical contact to connect with people. Content can be shared widely and consistently, regardless of where people are in the world. It can help current clients better understand the value of a company and even act to bring new customers into the fold. While the strategy owes much of its popularity to the pandemic, content marketing’s recent dominance is unlikely to go away once the pandemic subsides. Before 2020, many marketers had already been pushing for a more content-focused strategy. In many ways, this past year has created the opportunity for them to prove the strategy’s true worth.
How to plan a marketing strategy around whatever 2021 may bring
These past few months have been a time of experimentation for marketers, full of successes and failures. For some companies, weaknesses in this strategy, like poor SEO and a lack of budget for content development, have been exposed, even as the potential of content marketing has been proven. Now, the question for marketers is how to bring a content strategy into the next year and successfully meld it with a plan for a world beyond the current health crisis.
1. Focus on SEO
All the high-quality content in the world can’t help you if no one can find it. Make better SEO an important goal if you want to capitalize on everything you’ve done this past year. Perform a technical website audit to ensure your website is set up to be found by search engines and a keyword audit to ensure your content aligns with your target audience’s queries. Not only should your keyword research guide your content for the future, but it should also steer your updates of older content to maintain its relevance. Updating old content is often the most efficient strategy you can employ.
Don’t just stop at keywords, though. Perform a deep dive into your audience’s behavior to precisely determine what they’re looking for to increase your chances of turning visits into conversions. After all, what you think you know about user behavior and what is true can turn out to be wildly different. For example, according to HubSpot, popups are the most-used form for sign-ups, but they only convert three percent of visitors. Landing pages, meanwhile, have the highest conversion rate, despite being the least popular version of the sign-up form.
