Several B2B companies are facing lengthening sales cycles and this in turn exerts pressure on the marketing team to boost lead generation as well as brand awareness. In addition, marketing professionals are compelled to continue cultivating new lead prospects while taking care of existing ones by way of a continuous buying process.After high quality and quantity lead generation, lengthening sales cycles was the biggest challenge faced by most B2B marketing teams as per an article on MarketingSherpa.
Here are a few SEO techniques that can help marketers handle lengthening B2B sales cycles.
One increasingly popular way is to engage in analysis of social media network. SEOs rely on social media analysis to seek out influencers that could sway the purchasing process along with network associations in their targeted organization. One excellent tool to get the profiles of influencing Twitter members that also possess organization association is FollowerWonk.
You should also combine PR campaigns to get industry influencers that are again based on targeted industry publications. Once you uncover them then using search queries based on specific names in Bing and Google can help you get social media profiles. You should make sure to look for associations on Google+ and Linkedln. You can further get industry groups as well as professional connections using that Linkedln profile info.
You can try using a browser add-on known as Rapportive to uncover related social media profiles in case you have email addresses. The above steps will help you get started in recognizing assets which play an important role in various touch points during the buying cycle.
Another SEO technique to make a distinction in search results is to utilize the Authorship Program offered by Google. By using this feature, your target market will be able to identify you by way of name and image. Furthermore, they will also be able to communicate with you and your business on a personal and professional level through Google+.
In case your posts as well as associated social media shares gain good authority on major search engines, your branded content too will achieve improved ranking, which in turn will boost brand equity. Authorship tagging is thus an excellent way to engage in brand development and exhibit thought leadership on major search engine results.
As a SEO expert you will also need to engage in content marketing optimization to receive desired results. Keyword optimization along with internal and external cross linking should help lengthen the value of your content over a long term basis during organic search results.
You certainly need to incorporate an effective keyword strategy on your web page as well as optimize crucial SEO page essentials such as HTML Titles, all text and image Tags, and Meta Descriptions, among others. In addition, you certainly need to incorporate related assets including videos, PDF files, and graphics to further please search engines. Your web-pages also need to include social sharing features as well as links that lead to sites that enjoy higher authority on most search engines.
Finally, all these SEO tactics need to be constantly monitored and improved on a regular basis. Monitoring quality metrics can help B2B marketers to keep track of the implemented SEO strategy as well as justify monetary and effort investments made in the content marketing campaign. Google Analytics offers several measuring tools through exhaustive reports.
Some of the crucial metrics that need to be monitored are page views, downloads, and sales prospects that trace back to page views. Google and Bing Webmaster Tools also provide several reports that track links received for use as content marketing assets. Reports that track social media channels by way of mentions from sales prospects and influencers will also provide important indications on the status of your campaign.
The above SEO techniques will help you to develop, monitor, and improve your marketing campaign even as it helps optimize and extend the life of your content marketing assets. These steps, in turn, will help you handle lengthening B2B sales cycles with ease.