Wayne Lockwood: How to Build a B2B Content Library: A Beginner’s Guide

B2B companies are relying more and more on content marketing to promote and sell products. In time, brands hope to build a content library full of assets they can use to inform, educate, and persuade people to act. Your content library’s digital assets—including ebooks, images, videos, podcasts, and other useful files—play such a vital role in sales that it’s not difficult to see why digital asset management solutions are so important. Beyond merely serving as an online filing cabinet, digital asset management solutions can provide valuable safety, back-up, and metadata that details the asset’s content, ownership, means of encoding, and access rights. Content libraries that have implemented a cloud-based digital asset management solution can allow access from any device at any time—even mobile devices.

Providing on-demand content to sales reps, prospects, and customers can improve engagement, answer questions, and convert faster than has ever been possible.

Ready to build your content library? Here are some guidelines to get you started.

Auditing Content: Determining What You Already Have

Auditing your current stock of content will require you to use consumption metrics to see what channels prospects are using to find your content, how frequently they’re viewing it, and the depth of their consumption. To audit the consumption of the content on your website, Google Analytics is a go-to tool. You can get pageviews, find out how long someone stays on your site, determine where your traffic is coming from, and find out which pages they’re spending the most time reading.

Using digital asset management solutions to audit your site content serves a couple of purposes. First, it shows you the weakest points in your site’s search engine presence. That might lead you to optimize the keyword content itself, change title tags, or update the content with more timely information. Second, it can help you determine if your marketing efforts are paying off. Are people sharing your infographics? Downloading your white papers? Signing up for newsletters? If not, it may not be the content; it could be the marketing isn’t stirring up enough interest.

If you’re going to invest in digital asset management solutions, use your findings to make changes. Consider the information you gather from your content audit to be an opportunity to create lasting and profitable change.

Identifying What Content Your Audience Wants

If you’re having trouble determining what content will engage your audience, you’re not alone. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 51% of experienced B2B marketers are challenged with producing engaging content.

So how do you get inside the head of your audience?

Read reviews. What did they dislike about the product or service they bought to try to solve their problem last time? Address that concern in your content.

Pore through industry survey results. What are your prospects’ pain points? Explain how your product or service can address that challenge.

Use social listening tools. Hootsuite is just one example of a company that monitors what’s said about your brand and your competition with real-time social analytics to give you insights you can turn into content.

Find out what topics in your industry are getting shared the most. Buzzsumo is a simple tool that analyzes what content performs best within a related subject.

Don’t create the content you want and hope your audience will enjoy it. Create the content your audience wants to begin with.

Creating a Content Calendar

Once you have content ready, you need to schedule it for publication. Ideally, you’ll have a bank of content that you can schedule ahead of time. Working proactively is the best way to go. You never know when a coworker, who was responsible for writing a blog post, might call in sick, or you have tech problems that take your blog down.

Pick a cadence that makes sense for your company. If you have limited staff and resources, you might only be able to post one article every other week. Don’t set an aggressive content calendar. You want something you can adhere to without stress. There are content calendar tools that can help. Look for a tool that can help you assign tasks like content creation and publishing to team members. Assign tasks early, hold your team accountable, and keep a steady cadence of content published.

Managing Content and Media Assets

As you create content, you’ll have a lot of different assets to manage. You might use multiple different file types such as Word docs, .jpegs, and HTML5 files. You might use file-sharing software like Google Docs or Dropbox so multiple people can contribute to one piece of content.

Essentially, you can have content everywhere. You have to keep it organized, and there are tools to help. Content management tools can help. If you’re working with a lot of video and images though, you’ll need something more heavy-duty. By organizing your digital assets in a central location, you can give anyone access to the pieces anytime, anywhere and from any device. Sophisticated search capabilities mean less time spent searching for assets. Managing your content and media assets with a digital asset management solution also allows you to place watermarks on images, automatically embed copyright or contact info on images, and set embargo dates to control when image collections or press kits expire.

Evaluating Metrics

According to Marcom, 98% of top performers say that they measure marketing asset management in terms of revenue growth. It may seem like a generalization, considering that revenue can be impacted by so many factors, but consider that these same top performers report generating two to three times greater local revenue after implementing digital asset management solutions.

Besides revenue, one solid metric appears to be whether projects are delivered on time and on budget. Decreasing your marketing spend (compared to total revenue) is also a good metric. Digital asset management solutions can use big data to identify your ROI on individual assets by looking at who created them, how long it took, how much they’re paid, and what resources were needed. For metrics that will matter to your C-suite, look at how much your content is contributing to your revenue and how much pipeline is generated. your content is driving and how it is contributing to your pipeline.

Troubleshooting Common Problems

Sometimes you don’t even know you have a problem until you apply a digital asset management solution and realize how much easier everything is!

As you start to build your B2B content library, you can nip some of these common problems in the bud by asking yourself questions like:

Who needs to access these files and from which devices?
Where do our current processes get slowed down?
What functions do we wish we had?
Are we running out of storage space?
How easy is it to find digital assets now?
What permissions do we need on our assets?
Do our current collaboration features meet our needs?
Do we lack in real-time updates and notifications?
Is our current security an issue?

Just asking these questions can help you troubleshoot common problems with your existing content library and help you determine which digital asset management solutions can fix these issues.

How do you manage your content marketing? Tell me about it in the comments.

The post How to Build a B2B Content Library: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.