With pressure on marketing budgets across the board, many B2B marketing teams are once again looking for ways to do more with less. It’s time to refocus on content marketing best practice. Here are three actions you can take to squeeze every bit of performance out of your content marketing investment over the coming year.

1. Have a Content Strategy in Place

The most critical element for making the most of your content is to have a strategy. An effective B2B content strategy delivers more than content marketing; it supports your entire business architecture. It is how you forge a common understanding of your organisation and align strategic objectives.

Don’t approach your content strategy solely from the perspective of sales and marketing. Instead, invite key stakeholders from other departments (customer service, product development, HR, etc.) to the conversation, so you can:

Set Content Goals

To meet the demands of modern B2B buyers, companies must deliver a coordinated and comprehensive content experience. Doing so requires clearly outlining your organisation’s goals, what you want to achieve with your content, and what success looks like.

Increasing sales is only one output of your content strategy. Another content goal could be to publish content to increase talent acquisition and retention. Or to gather audience intel for product development.

Determine Your Content Pillars

Decide what you want your company to be known for—your values and area(s) of expertise. Also, consider your target audience and what kinds of information they need/expect you to provide. Finally, look at how different search trends, topic clusters, and keywords intersect with your business goals. Build your content calendar around content pillars that have a firm foundation in SEO strategy and will help support your digital presence.

Define Your Brand Voice

Consider your brand personality and what makes you different from competitors. You want to develop a unique, consistent voice for your company across different media. Doing so is important for creating content, but also for delivering an omnichannel marketing and sales experience. Your content strategy should weave together the various parts of your brand narrative to create a seamless experience that delights users.

Understand Your Audience

Great content is central to building and maintaining relationships with customers, employees, and partners. You use it to show you understand their motivations, pain points, communication preferences, and influences. This kind of relationship-centric mindset towards content creates value-laden opportunities for conversation and innovation. Tools like stakeholder analysis and influence mapping can be extremely helpful in building a deeper understanding of your audience.

Map Your Buyer’s Journey

Mapping your content marketing strategy to your customer journey will allow you to create appropriate types of content for different stages. From brand awareness to lead generation and conversion, you want to help B2B purchase teams by delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right person. Where your content resolves any questions they may have about your service, no matter where they are in their journey.

Measure Content Performance

The last component is defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content performance. A marketing automation platform is an invaluable tool for tracking and analysing this data. It can track how users interact with your content across your entire digital presence—website, video, search, paid ads, social media, and email. You can compare different channels, segment by content type, etc., to make more informed decisions.

2. Be on the Lookout for Content Decay

Another important step for getting the most performance out of your content is being vigilant for signs of content decay. This term refers to a gradual loss in organic traffic, rankings, or conversions.

As much as we might wish otherwise, no piece of content will perform well forever. Search intent will shift, information will go out of date, algorithms will get updated, and new competitors will enter the scene. These changes mean the performance of even the highest quality content will eventually decline.

It helps to understand the different stages of the content life cycle:

Initial Traction

Search engines must first index and analyse a newly published piece of content before it can start driving organic traffic in any appreciable way. There may be some small spikes if you have a solid email list or promote the work via a content advertising campaign. However, these spikes rarely last that long before traffic returns to an organic base level. If your content is relevant and optimised, it will usually start building traction over a few weeks or months.

Growth

Once your content gains steady traction, it enters the growth phase. It is ranking high enough in search engine results pages (SERPs) to drive organic traffic and gain backlinks at an accelerated rate. It becomes a positive feedback loop.

The better the content ranks in search, the more backlinks and traffic it gets. The more backlinks and traffic a post receives, the more likely it will rank well in SERPs. Again, the speed and length of the growth phase will differ depending on the content topic, relevancy, authority, etc.

Peak

Eventually, the content’s performance will reach a point where traffic is neither growing nor falling. Peaking can happen for a few reasons. For example, the post hits a natural ceiling where it has the top spot for nearly all the target keywords. Or it is limited by the total number of searches per month (a common issue for B2B companies in more niche industries).

Content may peak for a few days before descending into the decay phase. Or it may plateau and stay in the peak stage for several months.

Decay

Content decay sets in when a post hits a tipping point where search engines deem it increasingly less relevant. Essentially, it is the growth phase’s evil twin. The content is less competitive on SERPs, causing a decrease in traffic and backlinks, which results in search engines ranking it even lower. Later, rinse and repeat.

Note that content decay is not triggered by the content’s age, per se. Competitive topics have a shorter life cycle, where posts can reach the decay stage in a matter of months. Meanwhile, more evergreen content might last for a year or more before it turns stale.

Regardless, the result is the same. Without intervention, traffic will continue to decrease. Your piece will become a ghost, only seen by the rare visitor to the 13th page of Google results.

What Causes Content Decay?

There are many factors which can contribute to content decay. However, some of the most common causes are:

Content age. All else being equal, search engines (and users) will prioritise ‘fresh’ content as being more important or interesting.
External competition. A piece with more brand authority, a higher volume of backlinks, or better search alignment can quickly supplant your content in search results/social media.
Cannibalisation issues. This phrase refers to a situation where multiple pages on your website are targeting the same keywords and fulfilling the same (or very similar) intent. They can end up competing for rankings and hurt your site’s organic performance.
A shift in search intent. The meaning and context of keyword phrases can change. For example, before 2006, someone using the keyword ‘twitter’ was likely looking for information about bird calls. Now that term is dominated by results about the social media platform.
Topical depth. Your content can also become a less relevant resource as the topic develops. For example, a short ‘first glance’ piece about a new industry standard will eventually be overshadowed by more in-depth guides.

How to Identify Content Decay

There are several ways to spot potential or existing decay. For example:

Your click-through rate (CTR) or conversions are going down.
Traffic has plateaued or is steadily declining.
Keyword rank and impressions are dropping.

When analysing content performance, select a wide enough date range (at least 12 months) to see longer-term patterns. Once you have determined if the overall trend is going downward, you can zoom in for a closer investigation into potential causes.

It might be tempting to consign old content to the grave. However, as we’ll see, there are many things you can do to revive your existing work and trigger more growth.

3. Leverage Your Existing Content

Updating or repurposing existing content is one of the most effective ways to combat decay and stretch your creative budget. We know it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of content production. But you will miss out on an enormous opportunity if you ignore your existing content reserves.

Repurposing existing content isn’t just about saving money. Remember, brands and audiences change. The material your company produced ten years ago may no longer meet client needs or accurately reflect your brand.

It is an opportunity to go back and add even more value than there was in the original piece. It’s like going to a charity shop and finding old items that you can restore or transform into something interesting.

So, what are some ways you can go about reviving and leveraging existing work?

Refresh Its SEO

Review and refresh keywords, especially in titles and subheads. Fact-check any statistics and information, and update it accordingly. Add structured data to your content markup to make it easier for search engines to understand and represent your page in SERPs.

Also, update your internal and backlinks. For example, point internal links from more recent blogs or pages. Or create a link-building campaign focused on generating new external backlinks from reliable and trustworthy sources.

Transform It

Repurpose content across different mediums. For example, transform a long-form article into a video. Or divide into short-form ‘teasers’ for social media. It could also serve as a conversation starter for a podcast.

Likewise, if you have several small pieces that aren’t performing because of internal competition, you might merge them into a single page. (Just make sure you set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new primary URL).

Make It Interactive

Re-imagine how you present information. For example, you have a digital white paper with examples of how your product can increase marketing ROI. Rather than presenting a static blog post with marketing formulas using KPIs for a hypothetical company, create a calculator. This interactive feature allows viewers to plug in their own performance data and receive customised examples relevant to their specific situation.

Also, invest in high-quality visuals. Regardless of your industry, there is a way to tell a visual story that will catch people’s attention.

Use It in Content Marketing Campaigns

Instead of waiting for people to uncover older content, you can actively promote it. For example, use evergreen content to flesh out email marketing campaigns. Or reformat it as an e-book to use as a lead magnet to support an online advertising campaign. Another way to get fresh eyes on old content is to recommend it at the end of more recent posts.

Incorporate User-Generated Content

Another way to enhance your content plan is through user-generated content (UGC). Learn from reader comments and support requests to update FAQs and sales materials.

Ask if a satisfied client would provide content/data for a case study. Or if an industry partner would write a guest series to feature on your social media channels. Build crowd support forums on your online platform, where customers can share tips, insights, and more.

Make the Most of Your Content With 1827 Marketing

At 1827 Marketing, we help will help you design omnichannel content strategies that ensure your message is seen and heard. Our creative teams are skilled in breathing new life into existing B2B content and using it to create engaging experiences across diverse media. Our AI-assisted marketing automation platform can also create long-term campaigns that deliver a steady pulse of quality, evergreen content to amplify your reach.

Contact 1827 Marketing today and learn how we can help your business get the most out of your content.

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How to Squeeze Extra Return on Investment from Your Content Marketing