The primary purpose behind content marketing — which is something 91% of marketers do — is to provide your audience with valuable, relevant, and consistent information in your specific industry. In doing so, you educate your audience on topics related to your core subject and answer the most relevant questions with useful information for them to make informed decisions about the problems they have.
Most businesses regularly produce content in a bid to optimize SEO positioning, generate traffic, and deliver valuable information to their audience. But companies also need their content to continue working for them in the long term. And by turning pieces of content into strategies for B2B brand positioning, account-based marketing (ABM), thought leadership, and lead generation, they can expect higher revenue, optimum brand positioning, and more closed deals.
If it is true that a marketer spends four-fifths of their working hours creating content, only to see it dissipate into internet thin air with the passing of time, then the effort required doesn’t match the benefits acquired. The way we can even the scale is by leveraging this content — extracting the maximum possible value from each and every piece. Leveraging content offers several benefits, among them:
One thing that content marketers know is that creating content takes up a lot of time. In fact, around 82% of marketers working hours are dedicated to just creating content. If we can leverage already published content, we can free up some of this time for other areas of the marketing strategy.
Each piece of evergreen content is considered an investment for the long term, because it is a digital asset that can be reused.
When we leverage our content, we regurgitate the same information in different contexts, media, and formats. This allows us to reach a wider audience than we would have if we were only posting on a single channel.
Leveraged digital content helps to increase brand awareness. This, together with organic ranking and better visibility obtained through SEO content, ultimately leads to more visits and traffic to your website.
Now you know why you should leverage your content, the question is how can you do it effectively? Here are just some of the ways you can squeeze each piece of content for maximum returns.
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You can adapt one piece of content into a variety of formats for different purposes and/or audiences. Go through one piece of content and ask yourself if you can:
It is a good idea to tailor each piece of leveraged content for each channel. If you are ready to adapt your content, you can consider the following to save time and money in your endeavor:
Consider that it takes an average of eight points of contact, or touchpoints, to convert a prospect. Instead of directly asking for their business eight times, you can call or email to invite them to read or listen to a piece of content that is suitable for them and their needs. Offer your prospects a piece of content that interests them to accompany them to the next stage of the sales funnel through their favorite format.
A warm lead has a conversion rate of around 14.6%, versus just 1.7% for cold leads. This highlights the need to nurture the customer relationship, helping them go from cold to warm, and eventually warm to hot, and offering content to springboard your prospects from cold, to warm, to hot, is more amenable than simply asking to close a deal eight times, as well as being more effective, because you’re building trust and authority.
The first two touch points could look something like this:
Content automation serves to reduce dependence on human intervention in a content marketing strategy by using AI and machine learning. This kind of SaaS is fast gaining traction in the marketing world and is the second most-wanted purchase for marketing departments in 2022, because this kind of tech investment captures, organizes, and uses data to improve the customer experience, automate processes, and prove ROI.
You can automate your email marketing, blog and social media posting, and targeted advertising. Meta allows you to schedule posts in advance in their business suite for free, but if you are looking to automate a variety of tasks across a variety of platforms for a large B2B corporation, you are going to need a paid service such as Hootsuite, Buffer, MailChimp. For cheaper and free options, check out B-list SaaS such as Later or MailerLite.
One such tool is Mindpath. Mindpath, a Castleberry technology created in-house, is a content automation tool that identifies prospects through intent data and positions your content time and time again in front of these prospects. It creates content paths, strategically selecting the most relevant pieces of content for the individual customer and sending them along a logical path that ultimately helps to position your brand and be at the top of the mind of the decision-makers. This assists with brand positioning in the long term for the following reasons:
Another way to leverage your content is to ensure it is optimized for search engines, as this makes it more organically effective. The way to do this is by creating content that responds to the user´s search intent. To do this:
By creating content that answers the questions that your audience has, you will keep traffic coming time and time again.
Native distribution involves sharing the URL of published content with a third party that has alliances with relevant publication sites, such as Bloomberg. These third parties — StackAdapt as an example — share the specific pieces of content with selected media, based on a previous segmentation of the target audience. Once the audience is defined, they share the content with those specific media, and those media publish the content on their recommendation sections, in a non-invasive way. If the users choose to click and read the article, they will be directed to the original site URL — hence the native part.
Native distribution helps to leverage your content by increasing the number of potential readers or viewers of a piece of content. Rather than limiting the traffic to those who happen to read your content directly on the website. Native distribution increases the reach of the content to the right audiences. You can either choose to work directly with third parties or work together with a company that offers this service, such as Castleberry:
Consider using PPC advertising not to showcase your product or service, but to lead prospects to your content to heighten brand awareness. By asking for direct purchase through your paid ads, you are only appealing to your hot prospects, and ignore whole other audiences who with the opportunity to get to know your brand, could also become paying customers. Google Display reaches 90% of internet users worldwide, making it a viable platform for leveraging your content.
Discover which social media platforms your audience frequents and use their paid ad features to distribute content. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is a good place to start, but you can check where your audience hangs out through website analytics or Google Search Central which is free and determines how your page ranks.
If you discover through your analysis that the main referer is LinkedIn, for example, which is likely given that 80% of marketing leads in B2B come from this channel, you can create a Campaign Manager Account on this platform to put your content in front of a wider audience. Use Google Search Central or your WordPress or Squarespace analytics to discover who your main referer is, then check out the following list to discover how to use their paid ad options:
We suggest having your team share your content on their own LinkedIn or other social media pages. You can offer incentives or commissions for staff who attract the most leads using this method.
The best way to leverage your content is to make sure it is high quality and is targeted toward the right audiences, at the right time. And here’s the thing — the right time is all the time, which is why taking into account some of the suggestions in this article can help you to extract the maximum possible value from each and every piece of content you create.
Burton, Winston. “How long does it take to get first page rankings?” SearchEngineJournal. June 2019 www.searchenginejournal.com/first-page-rankings-how-long/313115/
Oyos, Rhiza. “How long does it take to get to the first page of Google?” Spiralytics, January 2020. www.spiralytics.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank-in-google/
Rosencrance, Linda. “What is B2B?” TechTarget www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/B2B
Star, Danny. “An abbreviated history of SEO and what it tells us about SEO’s future role.” Forbes, February 2020. www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/02/28/an-abbreviated-history-of-seo-and-what-it-tells-us-about-seos-future-role/?sh=5f45aca411ef
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