038. Leveraging Content and SEO to Improve Your Demand Gen Efforts

Hi and welcome to another episode of the Man Jan Studio. I am Gabriela Garcia, sharing this space once again with Emilio Garcia, giving you a friendly reminder that on this show we focused on demand generation and we are geared towards markers and professionals that are in the field. Enjoy and feel free to contact us through the comments for more information about the show and our company Bandify. We will be happy to answer once the episode is done. Okay, what are we going to take away today? Well, you'll learn how to use content marketing for the math generation in a B2B campaign. But how? By combining the power of these two, you'll be able to create comprehensive B2B demand generation campaign that drives traffic, attracts qualified leads, and ultimately grows your business. Having said that, let's dig into today's discussion. Nowadays, modern B2B buyers have grown independent and now they prefer to do their own research. So if you want to be that decision wrecker for your lead, you have to take your business to the next level. This is why content marketing plus SEO is what you need for your demand generation campaign. Let's discuss this. Furthermore, Emilio, do you think this is a secret or the secret for the mansion?

I think you know marketing terms come and buy all the time, right? And it's difficult because they blur into each other. Happens quite often that you come up with a term and then it evolves and changes and keep changing all the time. And so I think SEO, content and to some extent demand generation, they have layers that go together. But it's important at least to separate the biggest differences. I think so for me, the oldest of all them all will be content marketing because it has become popular now that we have digital assets or presence in the marketplace. But content marketing has existed for a long time. As long as we humans write and read to some extent that already existed. Now obviously what we mean by content marketing nowadays is all the reading content that you put usually on a website, but not necessarily. It can be content that is created in other platforms. It can be content that's primarily presented in the form of a blog, but again, not necessarily. Sometimes it's other type of content and formats, but what all of them have in common is that they are written in some digital medium. However, SEO is truly something newer, right? Compared to content. Sometimes I feel it gets so mysterious what SEO is all about. And the mysterious part is because the way that search engine works. So if Google or Bing were more transparent, or even if they were transparent, but it wasn't so complex to decide what piece of content show up at first place when you make a search, it wouldn't be that mysterious. But it is because of that reason, because it's not very clear for us, especially for the general user, how is it that a piece of content shows up for a person when they are searching. So I think that's the biggest distinction between the two. Content can be created not necessarily for search engines, usually geared toward humans, but SEO is the ability or the of the strategy of how do I make small or important changes on that content. What can I learn from the way that search engines decide to index content to improve the chances that my content shows up sooner and more frequently than other people or other companies content? So that's, that's the biggest difference between the two. And now what separates them from demand generation is that again it's not necessarily true all the time, but SEO and content are not necessarily worrying in the short term with the business creation portion of their effort, right? SEO at best is worried about rankings and exposure and definitely some measurement of traffic coming from organic sources for sure. And content obviously is also worry about being relevant and important to the final user. But their main goal is not necessarily to create business today. And that's where that's what separates it from demand generation which focus primarily on what can I do with all the content that has been created for the company and all the messaging and the things that make different a company to be present in the marketplace and earn and retain the attention of potential buyers and measure that impact up to the point of sale or to the in the CRM. So I think that's the difference that for demand generation the work that is done on the content part and the SEO part is used is an input for the strategy, correct?

Well now that you mentioned that, I think that like you said like different ways to see it. Now I have a like a note to this. Did you know that research shows that most B2B customers have progressed more than 70% through their decision making process even before interacting with a sales representative here. Hence it is up to markers to guide them through the process with thought leadership. Content, this is like what makes a difference, right? Like you said about content and CEO and in the format they consume it on the, on the channels they frequent the most. I think this is might be challenging because as you may have to adapt your content for those formats, as we all know now, people consume content in different ways and for those channels which maybe you haven't even considering being part of because of that difference that exists between those two. Right? Because like you said CEO Put effort on just measuring and content is more about that information that you share on that media. And keeping that in mind, what do you think are the strategies that might help you through this process? Well, I guess we will have to discuss about content SEO strategies for the man generation which are different and as they are many tell us, what do you think are the top ones or which are the top ones?

Yeah, I think again I don't think there's the only tips, right? Probably what you have some very good tips or strategies that you can use right now or tactics that probably is the best way to describe them. So there are many, but here are some of the most popular if you want to use that word or the ones that I'm sure you can start with and have pretty decent result. Obviously the first one will be that to do any SEO work you will need to a blog or a place where you will build content to begin with, ideally your website. But again, it's not the only place that you can do something like that. Sometimes you can set it up in a platform like medium. There's people using tools like LinkedIn Newsletter, which has its own benefits because then you get exposure to the audience faster, right? Again, at the end of the day, SEO is just how do I improve the chances that this distribution channel which is Google and Bing, show my blog content or my content to the audience that I want to. But on, on other platforms, sometimes that audience is pre selected, right? Because it follows you or because you have a network already. So there are many ways that you can set up a content strategy. But obviously building a blog on a website has the benefit that content is yours, right? So you are not on the desires or the way that the platform wish to evolve the content or evolve the platform and then your content is jeopardized because they don't giving you exposure anymore. If you have it on a website, it's easier. But generally when you are building blog content, you want to have some key things in mind. The first one I think we started with is you put your audience first, that's for sure. You are not writing content. This is something that some people forget about when they're doing content for ranking for search engines. You are not building content for the bots, right? You are not building content for for Google or for Bing. You are building content for humans. You want them to connect with what you are saying. And so you have to start with your audience. That that's the key thing. Sometimes people go, well, I need to use this specific keyword, I need to Use this specific description and structure. Don't focus too much on that because what matters is, is my audience interest on it. And so you have to know them very well to begin with, right? Ideal client profile, your buyer Persona. That's one important thing. After that obviously comes if you have a piece of content that is well written, can you do something else to improve the chances that it gets distributed across the search engines and that it gets shared in other platforms? So you optimize the content as much as you can, right. So I'll say that those are the two, the two key pieces on having a good blog, knowing your audience and optimizing as much as possible to search engines, which changes all the time.

Sure, I, I guess you're right about that because knowing your audience makes you actually aware of what are they looking for, right? What resonates with them, what is the best way to get in touch with them, trying to provide them the best content they can actually have. Like an idea of your company that makes them engage with you actually as a company. So I guess that is very important. And obviously the tools that you use to do that, right? The tools you use to get through that process and analyze your audience. I think there's several tools you can use and obviously we'll mention them. Furthermore and well, just to mention some, you can use Google Analytics, Google Ads, Keyword Planner and Facebook Insights and those will give you that information about them, demographics and stuff that you can actually find interesting. And obviously it's going to help you as a company to get in touch with that, that audience. Like you said, optimize your content for search intent. It is really important too because not only you know now what your audience is looking for, now you have the tools and you have the information to provide them that information that they are looking for and what they're looking for in online. That's the main, the main objective of it. And that will help you to build amazing content too. Just to make sure that you can do that, you have to make sure that every piece of content that you write and on your blog, it's, it's well written, it's well research and it will help you to answer that question, answer that idea that your audience has and you can actually help them through case studies to examples and statistics that are on today. Right? So I think that is a really, really important part to, to build that amazing content and help you to that process of focusing on your audience.

You mentioned something that is, is quite critical. I really like it is, yes, you need to know Your audience that usually people to have don't have a problem with that. They know the audience. The problem is that they don't know how they are searching for information. And that's when those analytics tools come into play, right? I might know my audience, I might know what kind of problems they have and what my solution brings to the marketplace and what do I do different but how they are searching for the problems that I solve. And that's where Keyword Planner and Facebook insights and all of that will tell you. Because you want to know two things where they hang around, right? Are they using more Google search or Bing, or are they spending more time on Facebook or YouTube and how do they research on those places? Because on YouTube, on Google they will search for stuff in Facebook, in LinkedIn, they will ask around their friends or people that they know. And so you will need to present the content in a different way depending on how they are doing the search. I think that's a great comment there.

Yeah, yeah, I think that is vital again, because like I mentioned before, it is reduced to the audiences that you have, how they consume that content and those channels that you have to adapt that information that you have to get through your audience and give them solutions, give them responses that they might need or might be searching for. Okay, let's talk about now, paralead magnets with SEO. What do you think would be like a good way to talk about this? Like try to expose this matter?

Yeah, well, this is where the area when I was telling you that SEO starts to blend in with demand generation. Right. Or content marketing start to blend in with demand generation. Yes. We want to earn the attention of our potential buyers and we are obviously willing to wait for the right time for them to make a purchase or to make a choice on our services. But while they are consumer content, there might be opportunities that they might not be aware of, additional content that is available and opportunities to engage in a more direct way through email or text or any other medium that we have permission for. And that's where those, what are they called? Lead magnets, Right. Get into play. It is a way of transforming some of that traffic, some of that ranking into actionable leads that we can start working on. And my general recommendation there is that you set it up in a way that the threat, what some people call the threat level of the offer, right. What you want them to get matches the information that you're requesting from them. That is a fair trade, if you want to use that term. Right. So if someone is consuming a piece of Content that is just a blog piece, very high level. And you have a lead magnet that says something like start a sales conversation today. That's too much because you will need a lot of information for that sales conversation. Or if you don't ask a lot, you will get a sales rep that will be mad because the only thing that he has or she has is an email address. So you need to ask more information, but that person might not be ready to buy in those cases. Maybe you want to say something like subscribe to our newsletter because you know you will get more content like the one that you're consuming right now. And that might be an interesting offer for someone that is at that stage. But if you have a case study, a white paper, maybe that person interested in taking that piece of content and consume it at their own pace later. And so it makes sense to share, you know, so give me your email, maybe your name and we might bring you more case studies or in depth information about the white paper. Maybe invite you to a webinar because it looks like you are deeply interested on the problem that we try to solve. And obviously finally, if they are looking for comparisons on your website or researching how you are different from the competition, it looks like it's the time to have a conversation. So the general idea here is the way that you transform all the content marketing SEO work into actual business is that having the light level of magnets or premium offers you start to offer people an opportunity to continue the conversation later. If that makes sense.

Sure. This is a note about this about pre lead magnets. Research shows that over 75% of users never scroll past the first page of the SERPs and the first result gets 33% of the clicks. So this might get you to think about well what can I do for just, you know, like increase that percentage. Let's, let's have another tip on this. We need to pay attention to the internal linking. What other pieces of content you have on your website that can make sure your lead magnet links to it like leads them to that piece of content. And this will encourage that people that, that audience to visit other relevant pages in your website and obviously if they want to and make you, you know, like increase that percentage of people getting engagement or being engaged with your content and with your website as through the whole process.

Yeah, and I was going to say internal linking is one of those things where you don't want to, you don't want to focus too much on the bots and continue to be focused on humans. There's A reason for internal linking which is similar to the offers. If you're consuming a piece of content and you want to learn more. Similar to what happens on Wikipedia, right? You're reading about something and there's a concept that is new to you, a link to an explanation to what that means is quite useful. And so when you build a webpage, they have internal linking because you want to accomplish that. Give the right in depth information or expose them to the right offer as they consuming that content. That's perfect. When you are doing it just because you want the, you know, the Google bot to kind of like crawl all the content and just that and putting, you know, links, external links that make no sense just to have them there. That's when you are prioritizing machines rather than humans. And again it loses the purpose. That's the only thing that I will say for people to be aware of. Right. Why you are doing that, not to over optimize it.

I agree. And let's now talk about prioritize B2B SEO. What do you think about that? What do you think about doing this into another strategy or being in another strategy for us as marketers?

Yeah, well, I think definitely you B2B companies need to prioritize SEO to, but again to some, to the extent that it is part of the overall strategy, as I usually mention prospects and clients, SEO belongs to a portion of a demand generation strategy that is focused more on demand capture. Because the way that people find your content is through search. So they have to have at least a knowledge of what is that they don't know or what is the pain they're trying to solve. But there are cases where people simply doesn't know. They don't know that there's a solution out there or they are expressing the symptoms but cannot name it. Put a name on the, on the problem that they have and they will not search. And so yes, you need to prioritize SEO for B2B but it has to be part of a broader effort to earn the attention of prospects that are not in the buy in the, in the buying cycle just yet, that are not showing intent, if that makes sense.

Okay, I guess that now B2B markers now we were like hugely dependent on the my generation strategies, right. Like this one and how they help you to produce that qualified leads and all that comes or involves that generation or the My generation channels. And I guess that might help you to you know like get through the process and through channels like paid ads and content marketing and influencer marketing, compromise and That's a huge part of the initial process of purchase for buyers when they are researching stuff. Okay, and now let's talk about investing in account based marketing to complement your demand and efforts. What do you think about that?

So yeah, I, I, I just want to roll back on something important. As we, we have been saying, SEO and content marketing are, you know, a big part of a demand generation strategy for, for a market, for a B2B marketing marketer. Sorry. And once you create that blog or any other form of content and you find ways to make it rank or distribute it on search engines, at least for that channel, you will have some success in terms of ranking and traffic. But something that happens quite often is that you have all this content and while you wait for it to rank or for the pieces that are ranking as good as you want to, what can you do about it? Because you have already invested a lot of time and energy and resources on building the content, but nobody's is seeing it unless it's ranking on the first place. And as you were saying right on the SERP results, if, if you are not in the first page and ideally in the first three slots, you are not going to get a lot of exposure and traffic. So one thing that the manager marketers can do is to distribute that content that hard. You know, that content that took so long to build on other platforms and mediums, ideally organically. Right. If you manage a LinkedIn page or a Facebook page or whatever platform makes sense for your business. But also to complement it with pay advertising, which I tell prospects and clients all the time, the thing that pay does is that it guarantees distribution. You are sure that you're going to be in front of the right people. And because B2B usually already have a list or an idea of the companies that they want to target. Not just the people that work at those companies, but the company actually that I want the automotive industry, I want the health care industry, that it makes total sense to use an account based marketing effort to make sure that the right people get the content. So think it in this way. Through account marketing based tools, you build a list, you layer on that, on top of that the buyer Persona and then you look at the content that you have and see what is relevant to each of them. One quick example. Obviously if you have top of the funnel content or like content, you want to send those across people that have not purchased from you, that are not your customers. These are prospects, ideally people that have never visited the website or is not aware of the brand. If you have more in depth content like case studies, comparisons and all that. Then probably you want to advertise to people that is aware of the company they have engaged in the past, but is not a customer or that is researching for your solution. And finally it's not the biggest audience. But if you have customers and you have new products, new initiative, in depth explanations about features, you might advertise to current customers and share with them how they can use the product or the service that you offer. So that's one way of layering out. Another segment that you can use is to base it on for example industries or company sizes. If you have case studies for a specific industry like automotive, then it will be ideal to pair the audience that is in that industry with the content that you have. Something that on search engines will happen automatically because someone will search for a case study for the automotive industry because that's the industry that they are. So use the same idea, right? The way that search engines match content and searchers is because the search engine knows what is that they're searching for. And in account based marketing or social media or display ad marketing, you don't know that you have no idea about their intent yet. But do you have some firmographic and demographic information that can inform what possibly will be their intent at that moment? They have never visited the website before or they are not aware of your brand. Probably not a good idea to start with. Buy for me, right? They are a current customer and user of your products. Makes total sense to talk about different things that you or features that you have for the products or upsell cross sell opportunities if, if that makes sense.

Okay. Okay. Now that we know what are the strategies we talk about the different ones that, that can help us through this whole process and know the difference between SEO and content marketing and how they provide solutions to your demand generation campaign. I would like to discuss now because we will, we will have that, that idea now that is what are those tools that can help us through the whole process? Like that can help us to accomplish our objectives and drive that effort that we make through the strategies to actually success. How can we measure that success or not if it exists through these tools. So Emilio, can you please just tell us what are the main tools that we can rely on this matter?

Yeah, obviously I want to say that unfortunately you need to, you need to measure. Right Is the marketing works. But. But marketers struggle with demonstrating that they are influencing revenue. And, and therefore you will need tools to measure it. And I will. You know these are not the only tools but they will cover the big blocks of things that worry a marketer and eventually management and decision makers. So the first one will be that you need something of a content management system. They're usually called CMS, the most popular being WordPress. But there are many more, right? HubSpot is another popular option too. And the point of the CMS is a twofold one. It makes easier to make content, right? You, you can build web pages using, you know, programming and coding and all that. It will take a long time. So the CMS helps you. It is pre built with the idea that you're going to use it to create content at scale. So that's one important feature or thing that it has. But the other thing that usually has is that it's optimized for search engines to some extent, right? It has the concept that the content is being written to be found on tools like Google or Share on social media. So it will give you those best practices along the way. And finally it will track to some extent the, the leading indicators of your efforts, which are maybe not impressions, but at least visits that you're getting new visits because part of the reason you're bringing that content is to bring new people time that they spend on the website, pages that they visit, engagement that they have with specific pages. It will depend on the platform. But you want to get an idea of how well is the content performing in terms of consumption and people visiting. That will be the first stage. The second one will be, well, we were saying that one way to take advantage of all the traffic that you have created is that you get leads through offers. But once you get the permission from that person to start a conversation, what do you do? Well, you need a marketing tool to allow you to communicate with that potential buyer in different ways in a meaningful way. And again, here there's plenty of them, right? HubSpot, Marketo. And there are very expensive ones, very inexpensive ones. But the whole point is you need a place where you can orchestrate or organize your marketing efforts. Nowadays those tools also have the customer relationship or management component or CRM, but they don't have to and usually are separated because sales has a different tool or database that they manage. But the whole point is that if you truly want to see the impact that your marketing efforts are having on the bottom line or in the top line of the business on revenue, you will need to have a look into the CRM. And it's very similar to what I was saying to the cms. It's not only a place where you can organize the sales effort to prioritize and nurture opportunities, but also to report on close rates and sales cycles and similar things, and especially on attribution, right? If you connect your marketing tool with your content marketing system, with your CRM, then you will be able to some extent to see the path, right? Is how many people came from different sources and how many marketing touches and sales touches happened before someone started an opportunity, how fast they are closing. All those things will come from the CRM. Finally, I want to say that in more complex implementations, usually the cms, the marketing platform and the CRM are separate tools and all of them will have different reports and management will struggle a little bit, you know, jumping from one platform to the other. And so sometimes it will make sense to have a sort of a business intelligent platform that will help you to put everything together and be able to tell a story which is at the end of the day, what you want to say. All that data, all those reports, they are not valuable by themselves. They are valuable because they allow you to tell the story. And the story is how that content that is being optimized for search engines, that is being distributed on social media and other places through maybe paid efforts or organic efforts, is bringing people to the website or to other digital properties and allowing you to start business opportunities and do it faster because you are out there doing it, right? So that's, that's a sense of the tools that you may need. Obviously everybody will start with the ones that make sense, but those are the most popular ones.

And I agree, actually something I think it's very important to know, right? It's that for the cms, we might think that all the people all around the world, it's a developer, right? But not we, we have to use the right one because not everyone knows the code, not everyone knows how to actually make a page, a website. So it is really important to have, like you said, a tool that will help you to that SEO process, right? Like give the best to it and actually help your company or your business to, to get the best of it. Combining that with a good, really good CRM. It is vital too because that will give you, like you say, like a path. It will give you the guide to what are the things that are working for your efforts or what things that you're, that are working to the whole things that you are doing and that are actually giving results to those objectives or final objectives that you have. Now I would like to close this, like close the today's discussion telling you guys that demand generation will encompass all the marketing efforts that we have been talking about towards attracting, exciting and engaging those prospects to like we said leveraging that SEO and content marketing, having them together and put that effort into your demand generation campaign and will help your sales team and your marketing teams to align and nurture that prospects or key prospects over the lifetime and this will help you to engage different points and different multiple channels that that we know that are going to be in the way. So I don't know Emilio, something that you would like to say? Something else that you would like to share to the audience?

No, I think you know this was a great topic to talk about. I'm happy that we have the conversation. I look forward for the next one.

Like me too. So hope you guys see the next episode. Remember to engage with us in the links that we're going to let you for the next episode of Demand Gen Studio and hope you guys see you the next time. Bye Emilio.

Bye Bye Gabby.