B2B Inbound Blog

B2B Lead Generation: Setting Content Marketing Goals

  

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Establishing key metrics and a tactical plan for B2B lead generation is essential when starting up a new website. Let's call this kind of website a marketing website. It's purpose is to attract targeted visitors and convert them to leads and customers.

A marketing website is not a sales or distribution channel. It's a marketing tool allowing you to attract, convert and develop sales-ready leads.

Too often I'm afraid, setting lead generation targets and tactics to achieve them are an after-thought. They come too late in the process. Knowing what targets to shoot for, and having an actionable plan in place to achieve them should come early - if not first in the new website launch plan.

Set Targets on the Most Important Metrics

The most important metrics are those associated with B2B lead generation. How do you find out what these metrics are? A great starting point is to know what metrics and activities have proved most successful in the generating of leads for other businesses.

I recommend "The State of Inbound Lead Generation - Analysis of lead generation best practices used by over 1,400 small- and medium-sized businesses" produced by HubSpot as a great starting point.

This will give you a data-driven approach to setting targets on metrics that produce the best results for your lead generation efforts. For the purposes of this post, I will focus on 3 key metrics the data suggests should be core to a content marketing plan for B2B lead generation:

• Keywords in Google's top 100 rankings
• Pages in Google's index
• Blog articles

Setting targets and tactics on social media engagement such as with Twitter is also important to your lead generation as the data shows. But, I'll deal with these metrics in a follow-up post.

A Format for Setting Targets and Tactics

Prior to examining the 3 key metrics you should set targets and tactics for, it will be helpful to suggest a format for setting and carrying out your content marketing plan. The format I've found most beneficial involves: Benchmarks, Goals, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.

Benchmarks

Take note of the following before setting your goals:

• How many keywords do you have currently within Google's top 100 ranking? Get this from your HubSpot: Optimize > Keyword Grader Tool.
• How many pages do you have currently in Google's index? There's a couple ways you can find this number. Do a search on Google: Go to Google.com and in the web search box type in the following: "site:mydomainname.com" (without the italics and replacing "mydomainname.com" with your main URL. Alternatively, your Page Grader Tool found in your HubSpot portal under the Optimize tab can give you this number.
• How many blog articles have you published? You can either check your Blog Analytics under the Analyze tab in your HubSpot portal or simply count the number of blog articles you've posted on your site. Note that blog articles also count in the index pages total.

Goals

 For each of these benchmarked key metrics you'll want to establish an improvement goal. It can really be as simple as: "Increase the number of Google indexed pages."

Objectives

Objectives further define the goals making them measurable and time-based. For example: Increase the number of Google indexed pages from 50 to 176 by November 1, 2010.

If you're just starting out with content marketing for lead generation, I recommend 4-6 month goals/objectives. Why? The data supports that HubSpot customers generate 4-6 times more leads after actively using HubSpot for content marketing between 4-6 months.

Strategies

Your strategies are going to define the main approaches you're going to use to reach your goals and objectives. Following our example of a goal and objective to increase the number of Google indexed pages from 50 to 176 by November 1, 2010, we may want to consider the following strategies to create and publish:

• Website content pages
• Blog articles
• News articles
• Video blogs/content segments
• SlideShare presentations

Tactics

With tactics you're going to give more details to the above and make them both actionable and time-based. For example:

• Create and publish one new page of website content each week for a total of 16 new content pages by my objective date of 11/1/2010.
• Create and publish 5 new blog articles each week for a total of 80 new posts....
• Have at least one tactic for each strategy supporting your goals and objectives in your overall plan.

Key Targets (Objectives) the Data Suggests

Referencing the report mentioned earlier, here are some key targets worth shooting for:

• Indexed pages in Google: Leads achieved double digit growth for every 50 to 100 pages indexed by Google. Sites with 311+ pages saw a 236% increase in leads as compared to sites with 176-310 pages. I suggest this is where benchmarking current site pages is important with understanding where you want to be and setting a realistic time frame to get you there.

• Keywords in Google's top 100 ranking: Lead growth is impacted once a site achieves top 100 rankings for a significant number of keywords (15+ keywords). Sites ranking in top 100 for 26-51 keywords generate twice as many leads as customers ranking for 6-25 keywords (10 vs. 5 per month).

• Growing your blog: B2B Marketing websites with blogs generate 67% more leads over those who don't blog (15 vs. 9 median monthly leads).  Median monthly leads increase dramatically (77%) with blogs of 52+ articles vs. blogs with 24-51 articles.

Putting it all together

 Marketing keyword-rich content through your website's content and blog results in increased traffic, incoming links and leads. Having a definite plan (benchmarks, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics) clearly focused on the key metrics that are known to drive results will put you on the right track to significantly increasing your website's lead generation efforts.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today." (Chinese proverb.) It's never too late to begin marketing content to generate more leads for your business. But the sooner you get started the sooner you'll start to see increased results.