Lost and Found! How to Ensure B2B Buyers Discover Your Content
“Why isn’t anyone reading this piece of content?? It’s SOOOO good.”
If you’ve ever thought that to yourself, we have a likely answer: No one can find it buried under a mountain of blogs and ebooks and videos and webinars and infographics. It’s been pushed into the deepest, darkest corners of your blog or content library and, well, without a map to its location, an iron will, and night-vision goggles, no one is going looking for it.
The problem with your content is not that it isn’t good. It’s just not easily accessible. You, like many B2B marketers, have neglected your content discoverability.
What is Content Discoverability?
Content discoverability is the findability of your content. How easy is it to find that specific piece of content on your blog or in your resource library? Sure, good SEO can help your content rank high on Google, but SEO is a tactic to drive website traffic and discoverability is the result.
Content optimized for search engines will help to uncover content in Google for prospective buyers, but what about all that kick-butt content they’re not currently searching for? What of that?
Content discoverability is all about how you structure your content, one of the key components of content experience. Here are three ways to improve your content discoverability:
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Organize Your Content the Way People Will (Actually) Look for It
The default has always been to organize content from newest to oldest. Heck, we all do it. There’s something about putting the freshest content up top that makes us feel like we’re on top of things. But really, this is only noticeable to your devoted fans who come back to your site on the daily and expect the homepage of your blog or Content Hub to change. For the casual drop-in, it doesn’t much matter. What does matter, however, is whether they know how to find what they’re looking for when they do land on your blog. (Thank you, sweet, sweet SEO and content promo strategies! 🙏)
There are a few different ways to organize your content. The most popular are by type or format (ebook, blog, video, infographic), by persona or job title, by topic, by industry, and by vertical.
As with all things, some simple experimentation will help you understand what works best for your audience. In the past, at Uberflip, we’ve organized our content a bunch of different ways and used heat-mapping tools like Hotjar to see which categories get the most clicks from our audience. But we’ve also done the research. And organizing your content by topic is far and away the winner!
Marketers who organize their content by topic see double the number of views than those who organize their content by type.
This makes so much sense. It’s not likely a prospective buyer lands on your blog or resource library and says, “Oh, I feel like reading an ebook today.” Instead, they come to you with a problem they need a solution for or a topic they’d like to learn more about. So if you want your content to be more discoverable, then start by categorizing your content the way people are actually searching for it first. Then, include other ways to search because this is not a one-size-fits-all scenario (things rarely are!)
2. Make Your Content More Accessible in the Navigation Bar
First things first, do you have a search bar? If the answer is no, get your web team / agency / front-end developer to get that going yesterday. Search bars enable users to quickly determine if you have anything in your library that aligns with their interests.
Secondly, look at the number of menu headings you have across your navigation bar. Are you taking full advantage of this prime real estate? Now that you’ve thought through the different ways to organize your content, start by plotting them across your navigation bar with separate menu headings. Keep in mind that sometimes prospects know exactly what they’re looking for when they come to your site, but sometimes it takes a word or two to intrigue them, or jog their memory. The more memory joggers you can put in your menu, the better the chances visitors will actually find something of value. Why? Because you’re able to offer more options, and that increases the likelihood that one of those will hit the nail on the head for your prospects.
In The Content Experience Report, our data scientist found that the amongst our customers (all B2B marketers, by the way), most had five or six menu headings in their navigation bar, while some had as few as two. But the marketers who had more headings saw as much as a 200 percent increase in content views. From this we could infer that more menu headings means more possibilities for content discovery and could, in turn, result in more views. But each business and industry is different. So try, track results, and try again!
3. Tag Your Content so Everyone can Find It
This last tip is a fun one. Metadata tagging is one way to make your content more discoverable for external audiences. Depending on your CMS, you may be able to use front-facing tags that show readers what topic stream your content fits in.
But it’s also a simple way to make your content accessible to internal audiences. By tagging each piece of content by things like topic, persona, stage of the funnel, and content type, other members of your marketing and sales teams can easily find and share your marketing content.
This becomes extremely useful when planning nurture sequences and doing sales outreach and follow-up. Tagging also ensures your content doesn’t sit unused like 60 to 70 percent of all marketing content.
Not convinced this actually contributes all that much to content views and performance? We found that content that’s tagged is seen twice as much as content that isn’t. That’s double the views! It’s an easy step that increases your content discoverability both internally and externally and ultimately results in more content views.
Shine a Light on Your Content
Now that you know the three keys to unlocking your content discoverability, be sure to put them to good use! Your content shouldn’t be hiding. Your marketing team didn’t work as hard as they did to create it only for a select few to find. Good content is meant to be seen, devoured, and shared.