There’s no doubt that digital marketing is one of the fastest-changing professions today.
Whether it’s keeping up with social media trends, Google algorithm updates, or learning what the hell an NFT is, it’s vital that your marketing team focuses on the right things this year that’ll have the most impact on your business.
This includes creating and repurposing content, improving your website performance, managing your community of customers and followers, and more. Let’s dive in.
1. Broadening your content production
Your marketing team may put a lot of effort and value into your blog, and that’s fine. Blogging is a great way to flex your thought leadership, provide product updates, build brand recognition, and rank well on search engines. But now is the time for your marketing team to start mixing in audio and video with your written content.
We know from recent surveys that people increasingly prefer video over all other forms of content. Podcasting has surged as well, especially for brands. In fact, when it comes to advertising channels, nearly half of podcast listeners said podcast ads influenced their purchase decisions.
It’s time to give your audience the content they not only want, but content they’re already consuming regularly from other brands and creators. Offer your voice to your audience, give them advice that could help them in their day-to-day jobs or businesses they run, make your content worth coming back for more. Audio and video open the door to a whole new way to promote your brand.
Getting started with video
If you have the right audio and video equipment, an on-camera personality, and some basic video editing skills, video marketing may be the route you want to take. Below are a few tips for baking video into your marketing teams content strategy this year.
Find the platform you want to publish your videos on. YouTube is a good channel to get started on.
Stick to tutorials, how-to’s, and other top-of-funnel video topics. Don’t oversell your product or brand. People watch videos to learn something, enhance their skills, or pique their curiosity.
Find a regular publishing schedule. YouTube rewards consistency.
Embed your videos where your written content is. This is an easy way to drive up views and subscribers on your channel.
Market your new videos to your existing email subscribers.
With nearly 300,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, Ahrefs has become a gold standard for B2B video marketing. Most of their content consists of SEO tutorials and ways to grow organic traffic to your website, without plugging their product too much.
Getting started with audio
Perhaps more approachable than scaling up a YouTube channel is launching a podcast. A good quality microphone is really all you need to get started.
Hone your storytelling, script writing, and interviewing skills.
Discuss topics you know your customers care about. You know this either from talking to them, taking feedback from your CS team, reading reviews, and seeing which blogs are getting the most traffic.
Interview thought leaders from complementary brands and co-market your podcast on each other’s website.
Distribute on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for maximum listenership.
Market your new episodes to your existing email subscribers.
Privy scaled its monthly listenership to more than 30,000 plays in just over a year since launching its podcast. Its CEO does daily bite-sized episodes (five or more minutes) for ecommerce marketers on ways to grow their Shopify stores.
2. Distributing, refreshing, and repurposing existing content
Great content doesn’t stop after it’s produced. In fact, most of your post-production work should focus on how you drive attention toward your content.
Distributing, refreshing, and repurposing your content is a must-have if you want to rank better on search engines, remain relevant on topics, and have consistent material to send to your email subscribers.
Content distribution
The days of sharing a link to your blog on LinkedIn in an attempt to get more views should be way behind you. Even a basic distribution plan allows brands to get more traction and length out of its content. Below are some simple ways to distribute content on multiple channels:
Publish a blog and send it to your newsletter subscribers.
Write a long-form LinkedIn post with the blog URL in the comments section.
Reach out to some colleagues at other brands. Get them to like, comment, or reshare these posts.
Add a banner to the top of your homepage promoting the new blog.
Bake in a process to redistribute this content at a later date.
Setting and forgetting your new content puts it on the fast-track to underperformance. Work with your marketing team to lay out a distribution playbook this year.
Content repurposing
Instead of always developing new content, you can use key nuggets from your existing content to create standalone assets. Some common ways you’ll see brands repurpose their content include:
Turning a blog into a YouTube video or podcast
Downloading your most viewed TikTok videos without the watermark and using them for display ads on Facebook
Collating old blogs into a longer eBook or free course
Or the opposite. Breaking longform eBooks into smaller, more digestible blogs
Resizing old images, posting them on Pinterest, and linking out to your blog
That blog you wrote a year and a half ago—when was the last time you checked how it’s performing? If you publish with a “set it and forget it” mindset, you’re not getting the most out of your content marketing and your content becomes susceptible to decay.
Be sure to monitor traffic trends quarterly. See what’s working and what’s starting to plateau. Get ahead of decay by working in regular refreshes every few months. Some simple ways to refresh your content include:
Adding new research or statistics
Breaking up long paragraphs into more digestible bytes
Adding new images or videos
Editing your title and meta descriptions
Updating the publish date to reflect how fresh the information is.
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Community management is the process of building and fostering relationships with your customers and subscribers to create a like-minded community that offers support, advice, a sense of belonging, and more. As work becomes more remote and employee interactions occur more online, community management plays an increasingly important role for brands.
Creating a space where people can engage with your brand may happen in a LinkedIn or Facebook group, a Slack community, on Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, or anywhere else your audience likes to interact with each other and your brand. Below is an example of how a brand may personally connect with someone on their pages:
The management part comes in when your marketing team takes time to engage with people by:
Answering questions
Responding to comments
Sharing helpful links, articles, videos, etc.
Gathering feedback and asking questions to learn more about your audience
Providing fun interactions and a great online experience
Addressing negative comments or concerns
Inserting yourself in important online conversations
These activities should be done daily to keep your community engagement high, which is also why Community Manager roles are becoming more popular.
People will start to see your brand as the go-to resource where they can connect with others and find solutions. They’ll also get to know the human side of your brand, making it much more relatable, trustworthy, and fun to interact with.
4. Improving your website performance
The marketing team of B2B brands can no longer overlook the importance of SEO, optimizing for conversions, and making sure your website is in its best shape as possible. After all, your website is often the first impression a potential customer may have from your brand.
If your website copy is stale and boring, if it takes too long to load, if it doesn’t even show up on Google—all of this and more can be just enough for someone to exit your site and look elsewhere for their solution. So use this checklist to give your website performance a tuneup:
1. Optimize visuals. Having large images is a recipe for lagging sites. Make sure your images load quickly and be sure to implement lazy loading to improve page performance.
2. Add more videos. Embed them in your blogs and on your landing pages when necessary. Adding videos is a great way to pick up video results on Google, which means more real estate for your brand. It’s also a way to get people to stay on your site for longer and educate those who may not want to fully scroll your pages.
3. Optimize your mobile view. When Google looks at websites today, it analyzes them by their mobile version. When building out new pages or optimizing old ones, be sure to preview what your site looks like on mobile. Text falling off the page, weirdly formatted images, and on-page glitches can deter visitors. See below for a good example of a mobile-optimized website:
4. Ensure consistent branding. Visitors should immediately connect with your brand’s messaging, tone, and design. Make sure all your pages weave the thread of your brand story throughout your stylistic choices and copy. Everything should be simple to read and understand. Talk directly to your target audience (we have some ideas for doing this in the next section).
5. Analyze your visitors’ behavior. With tools like Hotjar or Lucky Orange, you can add a heat map to your website to analyze how visitors are behaving. Use this intel to update your page(s) accordingly. For example, if you notice a section on your site being engaged with more than others, consider focusing on ways to improve that or make it more prominent.
6. Make your website easy to navigate. Add key pages to your top navigation and your footer. Link internally with your most important pages (these are typically your highest converting pages). Make navigating your website and finding information that’s important to your users—like features, reviews, and pricing—as accessible as possible.
7. Optimize for conversions. Your marketing team’s goals this year may revolve around sign-ups, free trials, and trial-to-paid conversions. To capture as many contacts as possible, consider adding a variety of display popups to your top landing pages. You can trigger these on any pages, any audience, any device type, on exit intent, and so many other options.
Other conversion rate optimization (CRO) methods include using your heat map analyses, shortening landing pages, testing copy and CTAs, and more.
As marketers, we cannot always assume we know what’s best for our customers and what matters to them most. So, here are a few ways for your marketing team to actually start listening to your customers and applying their feedback.
Running review campaigns. Popular review platforms like G2, Capterra, or Software Advice are great places to start gathering customer reviews, but gathering reviews can be a challenge. I recommend getting started using either of the methods below:
Incentivize customers with paid review campaigns by offering gift cards in exchange for reviews.
Have your CS team guide customers to leave reviews after their first onboarding or support call.
Add in-app pop-ups or tooltips asking customers to take five minutes of their time to leave a review. These reviews may not always be favorable, but you’ll get more authentic feedback here.
Listening to customer phone calls. With a heap of call recording tools on the market today, listening to customer phone calls is a must for marketers. Hearing your customers’ voices firsthand can:
At the end of the day, most of marketing’s responsibility is to educate and learn from its customers, drive new sign-ups and business, and work in tandem with sales. If you focus on at least a few of the items mentioned in this article with consistency, you’ll start to see results.
Don’t get too caught up in the flashiness of what other marketers and brands are talking about. Focus on what you and your marketing team can control and execute on.
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