Picture this: you're a B2B marketer for a financial services company that provides retirement plan administration and guidance to small and mid-sized employers. You're always hungry for more leads to feed to your sales team, and you've acknowledged the fact that inbound marketing is the best way to attract new visitors to your website and nurture them into sales-ready leads.
A new visitor finds herself on your website. You don’t know it yet, but she’s incredibly qualified. She’s the business manager for a graphic design firm with 14 employees, and she’s on the hunt for a new financial advisor for her business since her previous advisor just wasn’t able to provide her with the right level of support.
She clicks around to a few of your pages to get a general feel for your organization. She wants to learn more about how to solve her problem, but to your dismay the content she finds on your site only marginally applies to her and, worse yet, it’s outdated. She clicks away from your site, heading back to her search browser where she finds exactly what she’s looking for on a competitor’s website.
This scenario can be easily avoided by making a commitment to keeping the content on your website—blogs, web pages, advanced content pieces, and so on—fresh for your visitors. After all, content is the very heart of inbound marketing, and making sure you have the right content on your site is essential to ensuring visitors will stay on it to learn more about your company and how you can help solve their specific pain points.
Here are three ways to ensure the content you’re producing will resonate with your website visitors:
Much like the trees, evergreen content refers to content that can stand the test of time—there’s little that’s perishable about it and it’s generally relevant throughout the years (like our Step-by-Step Guide to Inbound Marketing, for example). When planning out the content you’ll be publishing across your website, put an emphasis on creating evergreen content that will remain relevant without quickly outliving its shelf life.
In a perfect world, all content would be evergreen. In the real world, that’s just not always possible. While there’s certainly a feeling of great accomplishment when you’ve finalized a new piece of content like a “Complete Guide to Choosing a Retirement Plan Consultant,” having a set-it-and-forget-it mindset puts your content at risk of expiring and turning off potential customers, rather than drawing them in to learn more.
Get the most out of your content by keeping it fresh and updated. If you’ve created a tip sheet that was focused on tax legislation from last year, refresh the piece to give your visitors a more accurate depiction based on how things have changed in the new year. Make sure you share the newly updated piece broadly to let your visitors know that it’s the latest and greatest!
Just as having content that’s too specific for certain audiences can be a turnoff to others, having content that’s too general can also be a mistake. Make sure you have a good balance of the two by repurposing your general content pieces into more specific, vertically-focused pieces that call out your personas in the title (e.g., “6 Ways Small Businesses Can Save on Retirement Planning”). Repurposing your content to speak directly to the verticals you serve will help establish your expertise as a trusted advisor for those specific industries.
If you want to avoid finding yourself in the scenario mentioned in the opening of this article, make sure you’re carefully planning the content you’re producing and keep a close eye on what you’ve already published to make sure it’s resonating with your audience – and, of course, converting them into quality leads!
Topics: Content Marketing
