While there are several factors that contribute to the advancement of B2B industries, B2B content marketing is a key element that unlocks its success. Now that the B2B buying cycle has become longer, content marketing has never been more significant to the success of B2B industries.

If you’re not using B2B content analytics to drive and inform your content marketing, you’re likely leaving a lot of leads on the table.

According to a report by Korn Ferry called “The 2021 Buyer Preferences Study: Reconnecting with Buyers”, which is based on a poll of 261 participants who work for medium-to-large enterprises globally.

Strategic planning on how to market your content proves to be an invaluable component to generating more leads. But how exactly will you implement it? Seeing that content marketing is indispensable, it’s only reasonable to analyze which aspects of your content bring tangible results.
Korn Ferry

What is B2B Content Analytics and Why is it Important?

Content Analytics, also known as content intelligence, is the measurement and analysis of visitor traffic and engagement with published content, such as blogs, articles, and podcasts.

Content analytics plays a big role in what B2B industries should (or should not do) when planning what to write or talk about. In order to achieve your content marketing objectives, B2B industries must regularly check their content analytics in order to make smart content decisions.

Tracking your performance enables you to focus on which content your readers are most engaged with, and consequently put your efforts into it. Furthermore, content analytics has the following advantages:

Allows you to focus on your content’s strengths and weaknesses
Determines which content high-revenue leads want
Improvement or revision of topics that are not generating adequate leads
Measure the efforts of SEO and how it directly impacts your website, leads, and revenue
Understanding how users navigate your website

Keeping an eye on content analytics provides great insights into how B2B industries create and promote content across digital channels.

One notable example of a company that utilized content analytics as part of its strategy is Microsoft.

Microsoft wanted to track its content’s performance. They used tactics that are heavily employed in the B2C ecommerce industry. They used heat maps and page-by-page engagement metrics.

As a result, they were able to narrow down where their audience focused their attention and gained an insight into how their audience behaved across different channels.

What Are Your Goals in Using B2B Content Analytics?

Understanding what your customer needs and setting clear goals will help you visualize and break down content analytics. It proves to be most valuable when your goals are aligned with the right performance metrics.

Are you looking to increase traffic? Generate more leads? Increase brand awareness? Whatever the case is, defining the objectives of your content analytics will help you effectively attain your target growth rates.

Xerox, a veteran B2B services company, wanted to expand its content production and increase traffic to its website. Xerox used content analytics and developed a customer-centric content strategy to scale content and deliver everything including case studies, e-books, and social content.

HotPads wanted to increase website traffic, and grow an engaged and loyal audience with original and highly improved quality content. HotPads turned to content creators to create and publish original story-based content to their website. They hired quality journalists and content writers to produce original content to engage their audience.

The result? Over 4,000% traffic increase in just 7 months!

What Performance Metrics Should You Be Tracking?

It may seem overwhelming for B2B content marketers to keep track of the metrics, given the sheer amount of it. That’s why it’s important to have clear goals of what you want to achieve by using content analytics to grow your business.

Using Content Analytics to Succeed in SEO

The following metrics will let you know if your SEO strategy is working (or not):

Search ranking: refers to a website’s position on the search engine results page.

Backlinks: links created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.”

Traffic: measures the number of visits to your website that are the result of organic or paid search traffic.

Traffic sources: the origin through which people found your site. Every session or visit to your website has the origin or source of the hit.

SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Moz’s Link Explorer will help you keep track of your search ranking and backlinks.

Using Content Analytics to Track Engagement

Social shares, mentions, and comments: By using your preferred social media platform’s insight dashboard, you can understand what content drives the most engagement.

Engagement rate: You may calculate your own engagement rate by dividing your total site traffic by the content a specific page gets, then multiplying it by 100.

Using Content Analytics to Generate Leads

Quality of leads: Quality is more important than quantity, and this is especially true in B2B content marketing.

Number of leads: While the quality of leads is more important, it’s still essential to track the number of leads you are getting.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): It’s vital to know what percentage of MQLs move to SQLs to be able to employ a different content marketing strategy.

Conversion Rate: Using content analytics to increase conversion and push users further down the funnel.

Returning Visitors: This shows how useful your content is for the users.

Using Content Analytics to Track the Impact of Email Marketing

Open Rate: This shows how often users open your emails. If open rates go down, try testing new titles.

Click-through rate (CTR): This tells you how many people read your content and want to know more.

Unsubscribe rate: This shows the number of people that unsubscribe from your emails.

How to Use Content Analytics to Improve Content Marketing

After looking at your current performance metrics, you will now have a solid framework of your content strategies’ strengths and weaknesses. Which contents are your readers ignoring? Which are they most engaged with?

Look for the factors and determine which topics are most important, most successful, and which contents are most helpful to users at every stage of the buying process. Furthermore, it will give you an insight into opportunities for improvement.

The data you’ve gathered will also help you locate where you need to promote your content. Analyze which platforms your target audience is most engaged in.

But it doesn’t stop here. Once you have the right message to relay to the right audience, on the right channel, you must still continue to track your performance metrics. What once might have been working for you, may change and may not be valuable anymore in the future.

B2B content marketers must evaluate, adapt and be ready to meet the constantly changing needs of the target audience.

Conclusion

B2B niche marketing must always go hand in hand with content analytics. Creating an effective content strategy can be overwhelming, but with the right metrics and goals, you can find opportunities to reach your specific target.