6 Tips to Evolve Your Content Strategy in 2020

An adage goes that the old must perish make way for the new to flourish, the same philosophy can be applied within the B2B set-up to evolve your content strategy in 2020.

As Ann Handley, the head of content marketing at MarketingProfs says, “Make your customers the hero of your stories,” this very much implies the current set-up of content strategy in 2020.

For it to evolve it needs to be conversant to the highest degrees of relevance with the prospects as well as the existing customers.

You can’t evolve your content strategy without engaging with your niche-specific communities in the first place. Your content needs to have a unique voice & appeal to be heard.

The voice of the content also needs to be echoed through brand vision & the type of culture a company propagates. Any discrepancy in what you project yourself to be & what ideologies you actually live by may bring a bad name to your brand.

In short inspiring customer success, optimizing the scale of customer-experience management (CXM) & living & envisioning the omnichannel ideologies that you showcase through your products & services is imperative to evolve your content strategy in 2020.

Instead of figuring out which product or services fits in the best to the needs of your customers, the marketers need to strategize & come up with the strategies to design exclusive products or services to suffice the requirements of the customers.

Hyper-personalized experiences are the key to win over customers & help not just in customer acquisition but, in turn, also bring more customers through positive word-of-mouth -marketing (WOMM) & a strong brand resonance across omnichannel.

Read more on 8 Reasons why B2B Marketers Should Prioritize Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Colleen Barrett, President of Southwest Airlines Emertia quoted, “To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your customers, you first have to respect those customers. This is why Golden Rule behavior is embraced by most of the winning companies.”

You need to meet your customers, where they are. This includes hyper-personalizing the experience being delivered by the pieces of content in real-time as well as across omnichannel.

If you're one of the marketers seeking to evolve your content strategy in the year 2020 & beyond, the following are the tips you just can't afford to miss:

1. Make ‘Intent’ data a priority:

According to a report by Stickbranding, 90% of the people don't have a requirement to buy when they begin researching a product or service the rest 10% are in immediate requirement of your products or services & can be instantly approached by the marketers through their products or services.

So, the process of lead nurturing is important. Equally important is tracing the intent of the prospects to research. ‘Intent’ data fetched from your website analytics as well as the third-party data platforms can help evolve your content strategy with a 2020 vision.

Intent data combines the demographic, firmographic, psychographic, technographic as well as the past browsing histories, cookie-data and the purchase histories of the existing customers as well as the prospects to deduce the most appropriate reason for them to research.

Once an in-depth knowledge about the prospects & the customers is available to the marketers, they can hyper-personalize the pieces of content being delivered to the prospects across omnichannel to optimize the conversions.

After the January 2020 core update by Google, it has been made apparent that the research methodologies of the prospects, as well as customers, are being prioritized less based on keyword centricity & majorly based on the intent from which the searches began.

According to many marketing experts, keyword-centric content will soon fall out of fashion making way for the pieces of content focused on the intent of the online searchers.

Read more on Google Algorithmic Update: SEO Best Practices for B2B Brands

Thus to evolve your content strategy in 2020, you need to track the intent data of the prospects & combine it with several other data points to make wiser business decisions to deliver hyper-personalized experiences of the existing customers as well as the prospects.

2. Tack & Optimize your Brand SERPs Queries:

Branding is one of the most important motivations behind content marketing. Marketers need to understand that search queries for their brand names in the search engines are vital touchpoints that need to be optimized to improve your omnichannel reputation. The way your brand name appears in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is a vital touch-point for people to see & machines to track to assign any credibility to your website – be it on the grounds of the ease of customer use or the grounds of customer relevancy.

Brand SERPs are equivalent to your online business cards that need to be tracked evaluated & optimized consistently for people, investors, clients, journalists, partners, readers as well as subscribers.

The online perception of your brand when the first page of the search engine displays it reflects on the image of your brand & needs to be optimized to evolve your content strategy for the year 2020 & beyond.

To evolve their brand content in the year 2020, marketers need to ask themselves the following questions:

1. Are their brand messages being effectively communicated by the SERPs
2. Does their brand name evoke positive sentiments the minds of the prospects, customers or even an anonymous person, enquiring online about the brand
3. Are they working to optimize the omnichannel reputation management framework of their brands - on the grounds of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
4. Are they analytically analyzing the data from website analytics & Google Search Console to optimize the perception of their brands on online searches

3. Optimize Your Content Strategy for Featured Snippets:

With the search intent game coming into play & keyword centricity taking bit of a backstage in determining how your content will feature on the search engine result pages; with the January 2020 core update by Google you need to embrace the following strategies to evolve your content
strategy in 2020 & to sustain in a fiercely competitive post-de-duplication world:

1. Perform the keyword research & categorize the questions being searched to figure-out the search intent or inclinations of the prospects & the existing customers
2. Search for the related questions, in addition to the questions being searched (Hint – The “People also ask” box might help)
3. Optimize for on-page & off-page SEO & strive to rank on the first page of SERPs
4. Improve the crawling ability & indexing of the pages of your website
5. Employ internal linking to fetch quality external sources
6. Design the Amplified Mobile Pages (AMPs)
7. Optimize your website loading time, URL addresses, images & the design & size of the font on your website & landing pages
8. According to HubSpot the optimal word count for featured snippet shouldn’t be more than 58 words
9. Add a Q&A page to your website, this will allow the audiences to submit the questions they seek answers for & accordingly you can optimize your content to evolve your content strategy
10. Track the User-Generated Content (UGC) from social media & diverse other platforms across the web & accordingly try to answer the most sought after answers to your prospects, leveraging the most engaging content format

4. Optimize Your Content For Local Searches & For Searches done in Local Languages:

According to Google, approximately 73% of online activity is related to local searches.

Customers often take the help of local searches to evaluate the companies in their area & evaluate which ones they would like to prioritize to suffice their requirements.

You can adopt the following strategies to optimize their content for local searches & for searches done in local languages:

1. Optimize Your Webpages for Mobile as most of the local searches begin on mobile
2. Using Precise Location Information & Keywords to evolve your content strategy for local searchers
3. Optimize Reviews on Google & engage with negative reviews to convert them into positive
4. Your website should be listed to be discovered by the search engine
5. Use different URLs for different language versions & use hreflang annotations to assist Google to search results to the correct language version of your website
6. Let Google know about your different language versions & make sure that the page language is obvious for the user to understand
7. Allow users to switch the page language & employ the language-specific URLs
8. Tag the content on your website for optimal geotargeting

To geotarget your website on Google uses the following:

1. Locale-specific URLs for your site or page
2. Hreflang tags or sitemaps to let Google know which page apply to which locations or languages
3. Specify your website’s target locale using the International Targeting Report if your website has a generic top-level domain such as .com, .org or .eu.
4. Use locale-specific URLs:  The URL structure should be framed in a manner that makes it easy for your website to be geotargeted in parts of it or even as a matter of fact for different regions; for example:
5. A country-specific domain such as example.de
6. Subdomains with gTLD such as de.example.com
7. Subdirectories with gTLD such as example.com/de/
8. Avoid URL parameters such as site.com?loc=de

Read more on How to Incorporate Geofencing in B2B Content Strategy

5. Optimize Your Blog Strategy:

To evolve your content strategy in 2020, blogging is a non-negotiable pre-requisite that needs to stay fresh & effective.

Keeping pace with Google's algorithmic update the keyword centricity must be replaced with the intent prioritization when it comes to blogging.

Also, the marketers should test-run & deduce an optimal frequency to publish blogs on their websites according to their niche.

Read more on How Many Blog Posts Should a B2B Company Publish Per Week?

While abiding by the principles of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) will be as important for the bloggers as ever in 2020, to evolve your content strategy in 2020 you should also consider executing a content strategy with a perfect blend of long & short-form content. Also, creating evergreen content & seasonal analysis & case studies both will be important for marketers.

With the video strategy proliferating the B2B marketplace, more than ever before in 2020, then you would also require to flaunt your vlogging skills to evolve your content strategy.

After the January 2020 core update by Google, you would need to concentrate on the following parameters to evolve your content strategy in 2020:

• Prioritize originality & accuracy to optimize your blog post for BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)

• Create thoughtful & in-depth content as well as the content articulated to each of the respective stages of the customers in their buying cycles

• ContentFly has predicted the following biggest content trends for 2020 for blog writing that can help you improve your overall content strategy in 2020:

1. Include more long-form posts
2. Include reliable facts, statistics & references
3. The pieces of content should be thoughtful & well-developed
4. The posting should be frequent & consistent
5. Use high-quality visual imaging strategy to draw a high proportion of referral traffic from social channels
6. Leverage Video & Interactive Media to better engage the audiences
7. The SEO copywriting should be of impeccably high-quality

Designing your blogging strategy to around user-experience & customer success will help you evolve your content strategy for 2020 & beyond.

6. Integrate Your SEO & PPC Efforts:

Traffic from organic SEO is free whereas for PPC traffic you have to pay some coast with each click that happens. The paid search results are displayed on the top of the organic results on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Using SEO & PPC complementarily can help you evolve your content strategy in 2020. The following are the advantages of adopting an integrated SEO & PPC approach:

1. Organic Searches can be optimized by feeding data from PPC advertising which includes both keywords as well as the conversion data
2. For high performing keywords the top funnel traffic can be increased by targeting clicks from both the organic searches & well as the PPC ads
3. Important but less converting keywords having extremely high costs for conversions can be moved to organic search from PPC targeting
4. Your organic listing & landing pages can be fed with A/B testing of your ad copies to establish the better performers amongst the alternative ad formats
5. Omnichannel remarketing & PPC boost organic search endeavors by delivering customized messages to the target audiences across multiple channels
6. Before committing to long-term SEO strategies you should test your keyword strategy by executing PPC ads
7. Leveraging commercial keywords allows marketers to target users at every stage of their buying journeys from research to comparison to purchase
8. An integrated & strong organic & paid visibility boosts brand awareness & inspires a sense of confidence in the prospects or the brand

Wrapping Things Up

The content marketing predictions & trend analysis for the year 2020 are similar to the of the digital content trends for 2019 in many ways. The traditional standard tutorials & educational content with never-ending dimensional are out of context after Google's core algorithmic update of January 2020. To evolve your content strategy in 2020, you’ll need your content to create more natural conversations. The timely delivery of the carefully articulated & hyper-personalized pieces of content to the target audiences, sometimes even in real-time, will be more important than ever before.

Valasys Media leverages a data-driven strategy to provide its B2B clients with intelligent & authoritative insights from a robust analysis of data. Our services such as Content Syndication, Lead Generation, Contact Discovery, Account-Based Marketing, Lead Nurturing & Appointment Setting have been tailor-made to help B2B marketers optimize their core business bottom lines.