The success of a brand or business comes down to three key elements: perceived value, customer relationships, and digital content optimization. Each one is a key element for creating a successful buyer’s journey, and provides the traction to keep a sales funnel filled and running.
The success of a brand comes down to three key elements: perceived value, customer relationships, and digital content optimization.
Yet, the exact mix of elements that lead to success is different for each company and each person in the purchase decision process.
This is what makes crafting digital content breadcrumbs to the sales pipeline a bit of an art AND a science.
Blending metrics into marketing materials to reach digital content optimization goals and target buyer personas while also keeping pace with the needs and preferences of customers throughout the buyer’s journey is a true craft. Are you mixing the right ingredients to create something of value?
Pick the Right Ingredients for Truly Optimized Content that Converts
B2B firms in North America spend over $5.2 billion a year on content creation efforts alone—that’s 55% of overall marketing budgets. The stakes are high to demonstrate how content connects with revenue, and with so much money on the line, companies need numbers to back up marketing decisions. The challenge is page views, social media followers, and clicks on blog links aren’t going to cut it.
Companies need to show how data is tied directly to sales numbers or an increased interest in products and services.
Companies need to show how data is tied directly to sales numbers or an increased interest in products and services
While tracking and measuring the impact of your brand online is important, what a company decides to track is essential.
Monitoring certain aspects of the buyer’s journey, or the results of a few marketing campaigns, is like wandering around to collect confetti after New Year’s Day. There’s no real point. You only end up with a bunch of random pieces that make it impossible to determine the true health of your sales pipeline, and gain no clear insight on how to make it more efficient or profitable.
B2B marketers need to track the performance of content at every stage of content development and the buyer life cycle to:
- Measure which digital assets drive the right type of engagement
- Understand how to convert buyers at every stage of the funnel
- Find specific ways to support internal teams in order to close new business more quickly
This “trifecta” brings the marketing team much closer to creating digital content that’s relevant and optimized to convert.
RELATED CONTENT: The Marketing Dashboard Template for Content Metrics
What You Measure Makes the Company Stronger
Digital marketers that measure and track insights and impressions from the entire sales funnel get a big picture view—and proof—of what’s working. Relevant metrics, in turn, empower teams to create campaigns and digital marketing content that address buyer pain points with accuracy instead of lucky guesses.
Then, B2B organizations can make strategic decisions across the entire content life cycle that help them edge towards true digital content optimization.
To craft creative and engaging content that builds on the strength of your company’s metrics, focus on the must have’s:
- A quality metrics dashboard that tracks performance monthly, quarterly, annually
- Simple, consistent way to benchmark success of content
- Tools to communicate and share quantifiable results within the marketing team and throughout the organization
- A strategy to incorporate findings into future planning and content creation to hit pain points, client needs, and work marketing success hot spots
When tracking the right metrics for your type business, buyer personas, and products and services, B2B companies can make strategic decisions across the content life cycle to create a seamless loop of powerful content for the entire buyer’s journey.
With relevant, measurable, trackable data, you are able to paint the exact picture you want the customer to see and buy. It’s this mixture of art and science that makes digital content optimization a beautiful blend of facts and creative marketing.
It’s time to celebrate page views and blog clicks as the “nice-to-have” treats along the path to the real deal —digital content optimization through relevant metrics that show how content ties to sales dollars.