New Year’s goals seem even more significant this year. It’s time to take a fresh look at our personal and professional goals and our business plans. For B2B content marketers, wearing many different hats and juggling a multitude of responsibilities, the task of selecting what to focus on for a refresh is a chore in itself. To that end, here are four B2B content marketing resolutions that should be at the top of your list:
Hire right
We’re hearing from many senior content marketers that their teams are hiring and growing. If you find yourself in this situation, congratulations. Also, you have my sympathies. Hiring is hard. Really, really hard.
Writing job descriptions, reviewing resumes, spending time on phone interviews, coordinating schedules between interviewees and all hiring decision-makers, all while doing your full-time job. It’s tempting to cut corners.
But that’s the worse thing you can do because you’ll pay for it in the future by burdening your team with low performers. Invariably this comes back to haunt you with a host of negative results including low morale and missed business objectives.
This year, become best friends with your HR team - listen to their advice, have them help you with some hiring tasks (can they narrow down candidates by doing phone screen interviews?) and make all aspects of hiring a top priority. Spend time on quality hiring initiatives now and reap the benefits for years to come!
Update quality content
Find content that performed well in the past and refresh it using historical optimization tactics. With this strategy, marketers have seen increased organic search views and conversion rates. It also helps fill in your content calendar with less effort and resources.
Look for gaps in your content
As part of your content review, ensure that you have up-to-date, high-quality content for each step in the buyer’s journey, for each of your key buyer personas. When you're auditing your content, think beyond your corporate website and include the material that you share with your sales team, to help them close business. Once you’ve developed the content to fill these gaps, make sure it’s distributed through all relevant channels, and that it’s easy for the sales team to find and use. This resolution will plug leaks in your marketing and sales funnels, improving conversion and win rates.
Find new, better ways to distribute content
The last two resolutions mentioned above are about content creation. But we know content creation is only half the story. All our efforts in creating content that we can be proud of are wasted if the content is not seen by the target audience. That’s why 2021 should be the year of content distribution. But rather than pouring more money on paid distribution, look for low cost or no cost distribution channels. One often overlooked distribution channel is your employees. This year, make it easy for them to share company news and promotions via their channels with an employee advocacy solution like Please Share. Employee advocacy solutions have been shown to increase reach by over 500%. Engagement is boosted as well since content coming from an individual is perceived as more trustworthy than content shared by an organization. And those are just a few reasons to use employee advocacy.
Final thoughts
This month, focus your teams on a few new initiatives that will benefit your organization for the rest of the year and on to the next. By hiring the best talent possible, refreshing high performing content, developing assets that fill content gaps in the buyer’s journey and implementing new content distribution initiatives, you will be well on your way to achieving your 2021 content marketing goals.