You’ve invested time and effort into your B2B content marketing and SEO strategy. But is it working for you?
When it comes to B2B companies, the only metrics that really matter are leads.
Regardless of whether you get 1,000 or one million people to visit your website, if you’re not getting leads, then your website content isn’t working.
Everyone defines leads differently, but here’s how we define them:
Cold leads – any random person who clicks on your website, social media page, LinkedIn or has a single passive or semi-passive interaction with your business.
Warm leads – people who have downloaded a white paper, asked to be added to your email newsletter list or taken another action that shows they have an interest in the service or product you offer.
Hot leads – someone who has asked for a meeting, for your pricing structure or for you to bid on a project.
The best B2B marketing strategies will create a funnel that works through those, from cold to hot.
But how can you ensure you’re on the right track?
These are the KPIs to look for, depending on your B2B content strategy.
This is stage one – getting people to begin to understand that you have a service or product they might one day want to utilise. Depending on the type of business you operate, they might find your website or social media pages through SEO, word of mouth or by clicking on an ad. But you’ll know that plenty of people will find you but never become clients, which is why your overall Traffic, Audience or Followers are rarely the best B2B marketing metrics.
You can do a deep-dive on all of the platforms, but if you’re short of time, you’ll want the top lines that matter. In Google Analytics, look at:
The longer they’re on your site and the more pages they’re visiting, the warmer they’re becoming as a lead.
If you’ve implemented a solid SEO strategy, then this will help your target audience find you, and once there, you want to be sure they have excellent content to keep them engaged. If you have a shoddy SEO strategy, you’ll get the wrong people in, so they’ll click away quickly. And if you get the right people in but have terrible content, they won’t stay either.
Time: Six months to a year
You’ll need to allow an absolute minimum of six months for websites and three months for social media platforms before you’ll be able to gain any meaningful data.
Why so long?
It takes a few months for Google and other search engines to start reading your website properly and recognising the quality of your content.
If you look at the data too soon, you’ll likely be given an erroneous picture.
When it comes social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, you’ll be able to get a pretty good idea of what’s working and what isn’t much more quickly, but you’ll still need to allow a few months for the platforms to start recognising that you’re creating meaningful social posts that audiences want to engage with.
Tracking warm leads is absolutely crucial to ensure you’re meeting the needs of your target customer.
Someone wants a meeting, asks you to bid or to send over your prices – hurrah!
Tracking this final stat is much easier. You simply look at how many you had in an equivalent period and compare.
But don’t stop there. To learn from this, you need to take a little time to try to figure out how they got here. Where did they start their customer journey? Which pieces of content did they engage with?
You can ask them, of course, but in most cases they won’t know. Can you remember how you first heard about most of the companies you buy from and which pieces of their content you found most intriguing? I can’t.
That’s because it takes numerous interactions for someone to go from cold lead to customer – stats suggest it takes at least six to eight interactions for B2C companies, but it’s usually at least double or triple that for B2B. A lot more thought tends to go into B2B purchases because they’re typically higher value and can impact a whole company, not just an individual, so you need to build up trust.
In some cases, you can track their journey with Google Analytics, your newsletter marketing analytics and other tools. But until you have done this with a statistically significant number of hot leads, the data will be useless, so don’t just track your latest customer and try to apply what worked for them to everyone. That’s a road to B2B marketing strategy that could go horribly wrong.
Want help with your B2B content marketing strategy?
At Proof Content, we know what it takes to move your potential customers through the sales funnel and work well with in-house teams to develop strategies, editorial plans and content pieces that work. Take a look at our case studies, data and testimonials to see what our B2B clients have to say about us about us.
For copy that hits your KPIs you need the right words in the right places. Solve tricky business challenges with a clever copywriting process.
We are powered by writers and business people, with a sprinkle of AI and a healthy dollop of clever processes.
Get our lovely jubbly tips and tricks and useful writing licks:
