How to Get More Eyes on your B2B Content

Amplifying Your B2B Content and Increasing Reach

Hello content marketers. So you’ve taken the plunge and gone out and created purpose built, channel-focused content that’s geared to your perfect persona. Now what?

Just because you built it doesn’t mean that people are all of a sudden going to be flocking to it. With that in mind here are some tips on how to amplify your content and get it in front of more potential prospects.

1. Utilize a static offer on the front page of your website

This is an easy one. Your home page is already getting traffic so take advantage of that. This is prime website real estate. Try to put one or two of your most important content offers on your home page. Be careful not to give visitors too many options. Your goal should be to have your best conversion assisting and response generating content prominently placed on your home page. 

2. Email Your Customers and Prospects

Don’t forget about your email lists. Send email out to your customers and prospects promoting your content and landing pages. If you have a regular email newsletter then work to include your content and offers there.

Remember that email works best when you can segment your email lists and direct the content to your list based on your segmentation. If you have a piece of content geared toward CFOs then don’t send it to your entire list, segment your list by title and then send out the email only to CFOs.

In addition to blasting out emails, your team is probably sending email every day. If the content is important enough then think about adding it to your email signatures, at least on a temporary basis, to see if you can catch a few visits that way.

3. Promote your content on Social Media

Promote your content on a rotating basis on your social media channels. Don’t just post the content and do nothing, encourage engagement. Ask internal and external company advocates to share AND like to help promote. Give them a schedule of when content will be posted.

Don’t just post the content once and expect some sort of magical results. Rotate it into your social media pages on a regular basis for a few weeks or even a few months. If you feel like you’re saturating your followers with the same message then lower the cadence of posting after a while or vary the post language to mix things up a bit.

Some social media channels give you the ability to pin your most important posts to the top of the page. This way,whe n someone visits one of those pages your top content is immediately visible in your feed.

4. Use your own personal social media profiles 

Many B2B organizations focus only on the company feed for posting content, but remember that without engagement from individuals that “social” media is just media. Try to get as many people on the team to participate by sharing updates regarding the content out to their own social networks. This is easily done by hitting various like/share/retweet buttons.

LinkedIn also allows you to cross post your LinkedIn updates to your Twitter feed. If you have other personal profiles where you feel that there may be an audience for the content then share it on those channels as well.

When you’re sharing content make sure that you also share the content with individuals who might be interested as well as groups that your prospects participate in. On Twitter this can be done through @ mentioning somoene. On LinkedIn you can select the "share with individuals" option when you're sharing and select multiple people to direct the content to. Share content with individuals who you feel could be good brand advocates and kindly request that they share the content.

If you aren’t already in some LinkedIn Groups then do some research and join groups where you feel that the content would be well received. Be aware of the rules of the Group and what's permissible to post where. Thought leadership pieces that aren't overly pormotional are usually safe in the main discussion thread, but blatant offers may get rejected or moved to the promotions sections.

5. Use Your Blog

Build a series of blogs that tie tightly to the topic of your content and mention the content in the blog. It doesn’t always have to be a formal CTA, it can be a hyperlink off of a few words related to the content topic. There might also be some real estate on your blog page where you can offer out a download or a CTA button that links to the landing pages where you house your content and offers. Make sure your blog has sharing options so that the people who are coming to the blog have the ability to amplify the blog articles and other content with a social share or email.

6. Consider Long Form Posts On LinkedIn

LinkedIn now allows users to publish long form blog posts on LinkedIn. Here’s an example I posted about landing page offers. Here’s one from TSL’s President on 8 Secrets of a Marketing Rock Star. This format could be advantageous, especially if your company page doesn’t have a lot of social media reach. Your company pages may only have a few hundred followers but your personal profile may have hundreds or thousands of connections. If your content performs well enough it could end up getting some additional amplification via LinkedIn Pulse.

7. Use Related Web site Pages

You may not always get the privilege of being able to put your content on the home page. Sometimes your home page may already have some well performing offers and in that case you might need to find another home for the content you want to promote. Look for interior pages that are closely related to the topic and put a few text links there. If there’s a proper place to put a CTA banner or button plugging the content this could be an excellent space to try to draw in some clicks.

8. Create other Packaging for Your Content

You’ve already put the time and effort into building content piece one. Consider if the content is flexible enough to be created in other formats. Could you break it into pieces and have part of it built out as a slideshare or whiteboard video? Could you easily build out a blog that teased out the idea and then send people to the original piece for more information? Are there statistics in the piece that could make for a good infographic? Think about how different segments of your target audience consumes content and consider ways that you could repurpose the content in other formats.

A great strategy to save time and money is to build your ultimate piece at the start of your campaign. Figure out a direction for your biggest, baddest, most comprehensive piece of content and then start to break it into smaller pieces and subtopics. The bulk of your time and research will go into the centerpiece content and you spend less time building the companion material to support the larger content offer.

9. Consider Paid Amplification

If you’ve built great content but you’re finding it difficult to get traffic to your pages then consider the options for paid promotion. Ideally you’re building the content with the potential paid distribution channel in mind, but it doesn’t always happen in this order. Consider what channels the offer would perform best on.

Content geared toward the personal professional problems of the persona could be ideal for LinkedIn but not great for AdWords. AdWords may be a better channel for more direct offers. This is because the queries and keywords you targeted may be searches that signifiy more of a buying intent.

That same content may not be received as well on a social media channel where you're not targeting someone by intent, but by professional and demographic parameters--you don't know what they want, just who they are. Many of the B2B Organizations we work with favor AdWords and LinkedIn as their paid digital channels. You can read more about how to utilize paid amplification in our blog from last week discussing how to take advantage of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.

Don't let the content that you spent time and money producing go unseen. Put together a plan of action that incorpates a few or all of the above tips and you're sure to substantial increase in the views and downloads for your B2B marketing content. Haven't started building great content yet? Read my blog on the topic Building B2B Content That Your Audience Wants to See.