You put a lot of time and energy into creating content that generates leads for your business, so it makes sense to expect results. While it’s tempting to throw a bunch of content out into the world to see what happens, there’s a more strategic way to optimize your website to generate traffic, leads, and sales results.

A content audit is a process of creating an inventory of the content that sits on your website and evaluating the metrics to determine which content is working best and whether any content should be updated or completely eliminated.

Over two decades ago, blogs entered the world as an online diary, then evolved into a weblog, and eventually gained momentum into the powerhouse lead generation tool they are today. While their purpose has remained constant, blogs have obviously evolved in many ways. Today, running a blog is a common full-time career, a place where people can expand their knowledge, seek advice, and read reviews before making a purchase. 

Making up 85% of online shoppers, millennials (individuals born between 1981-1996) have been the focus of B2C marketing for years. As the largest generation in today’s workforce, this generation is grabbing the attention of B2B marketers. After all, millennials are growing up and moving from post-college jobs into decision-making, management, and even ownership positions. With this information in mind, it’s important to understand how this generation differs, what they value most, and which factors play a role in their purchasing and decision-making habits.

While meditation is scientifically proven to increase productivity and improve concentration, one of the most common challenges is staying focused—which is why Guided mediation was created. The same concept rings true when generating B2B content ideas. You have the knowledge and expertise in your industry to create valuable content, but you need a jump-start. This is where what we call “Guided Content Creation” comes into play through platforms like Quora or Reddit. It’s one of the tactics we use when building a robust content strategy for our clients. 

People love to vent about what they love, hate, are challenged on, or excited about. Often overlooked platforms like Quora and Reddit can help provide irresistible content for your B2B blog, plus they’re a goldmine for qualified leads—no matter which industry you’re in.

There’s no rule book or history to rely on that tells us where our content marketing efforts during COVID-19 will take us in future endeavors. Data from HubSpot’s 70,000 global customer base supports business slowdown predictions; however both sales and marketing metrics are rapidly changing.

Businesses are being researched more online, average monthly website traffic has increased, and online research has led to customer-initiated conversations with sales reps. There’s no question of whether or not quality content still generates leads.

With constantly changing data, a new normal, and an uncertain economic landscape, what should your content marketing strategy look like?

Content is powerful. In fact, if you’re looking to top the marketing charts (aka ranking high on Google or having great SEO), 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. Inbound marketing is rooted in a solid content strategy. Here are a few stats you need to see about content:

• 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. 
• 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.  
• Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.   
• 72% of marketers said that having a good content strategy was a major key to their success. (Source)

The question is not whether content is important or powerful for a successful marketing strategy, but the issue is where does all of this great content come from?

The primary purpose of marketing content is to drive traffic to your website and generating leads, but it’s not its only purpose. The content your marketing team creates as a part of the organization’s marketing strategy can and should be repurposed to support the entire sales process.

This includes resources like blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, Infographics, webinar recordings, and videos. Each of these resources can be used to reinforce your sales message, provide additional insight, and answer questions your prospects didn’t even know they had.

In short, they help remove friction as prospects move from the awareness stage, through the consideration stage, and into the decision stage. When marketing resources are appropriately mapped to the various stages of the buyer’s journey, the velocity of the sales process will increase, and sales cycles will shorten.

From driving traffic and leads to your website to providing valuable information and assets for your sales team, there are multiple benefits of having a content marketing strategy. In order to address your prospects' needs and problems as they travel through their buyers’ journey, continuous quality content is an integral part of each stage of the inbound methodology (Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.)

There’s just one problem: What do you write about? How do you generate content ideas quickly while still being strategic and effective?

Through years of experience, we’ve found that you ideally need to publish to your blog a minimum of 1-3 times a week, and publishing new premium content on a regular basis (quarterly, if not monthly depending on your goals). In order to produce 156 blogs (or more) a year, our experts share tips on how to generate content ideas.

Creating consistent quality content is one of the biggest challenges marketers face. However, “You don’t have to create content day in and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have in the hands of more people,” according to a post written by Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, on why bloggers fail.

Repurposing content allows you to reach different audiences through a new format, improve your organic visibility, and reinforce the authoritative content that you already worked so hard to create. If you need ideas on how to repurpose content, check out the infographic below.

Throughout this four-part series, we’ve discussed how thought leadership content can support your marketing and sales efforts to improve your sales and performance as well as tips for creating great thought leadership content and the different types of content you can create.

The benefits of thought leadership content are clear. If you want to support your brand's messaging and boost your exposure by creating genuine relationships and impacting decisions, then you need to know how to create effective thought leadership content, and also where to share it.

In our case for thought leadership content series, we’ve discussed how thought leadership content can support your marketing and sales efforts to improve your sales and performance and how you can create that content.

We know that businesses want to hire real people that are considered experts in their industry—and thought leadership content helps with both. If you’ve followed this series, you know the many benefits of thought leadership content and you have the top three tips that will help you create ideas as well as see what's important in the eyes of your prospect. Now, you’ll learn the different types of content that you can create in order to share your message.