If you read my last blog on developing content, you probably have a few things ready to go. But what’s next?
1. Good generally educational content inspires interest and establishes your company’s value proposition. So, use content to bring in leads from search, third party programs, outbound emails and partner programs. And to follow up events like tradeshows and webinars.
2. One of the best ways is to use content is for nurturing leads. More tips are here.
3. Maximize your content once it’s developed. If you have a webinar deck or an ebook, break it into one-page cheat sheets, infographics or blogs. If you’ve posted a blog or two on a similar topic, see if you have enough to expand to an ebook or webinar.
4. Group similar content and build an accelerator stream. If someone shows interest in one asset, send a follow up email offering something related. Or build that second offer into your dynamic web content or social outreach. If you can follow a prospect’s interest, they’ll happily provide more information to you via dynamic landing pages and quickly build up their engagement lead score.
5. Consider verticalizing the content to get better response. You can do this by size of company, industry, use case, region or tech stack. You don’t have to necessarily change the asset itself – sometimes you just have to change how you describe it.
6. Don’t burn your content for no reason. Don’t bring whitepapers to tradeshows because anything handed out will get tossed without being read. And you can’t offer it later for follow up. And don’t give to sales to send out. Sales outreach should focus on booking meetings or closing business.
7. Keep yourself organized with a content matrix. This is a table that lists all of your active content, a link to where it lives on your website and what programs are using it. Plus, any other information you’ll want at a glance like expiration dates if it’s a paid asset or a dated yearly survey. It’s a chore to do the first one, but trust me – it’s going to save a lot of time going forward, particularly when you have to update or retire an asset or you’re looking for ideas for programs.
8. Track, track, track! If you can identify which content is bringing in the most top of funnel leads or what’s moving prospects towards an opportunity, you’ll know what to use in your programs and which topics to expand into new assets. And you’ll never have to guess which poor performing content to remove from rotation.
Need fresh content or ideas on how to maximize the return on what you have? Contact me!