Is your marketing about creating content or answers? While best answer content is a topic we’ve been evangelizing at TopRank Marketing since our book Optimize was published 7 years ago and since, changes in voice search and what Google shows in search results has put Q and A content marketing into the SEO spotlight. The difference between optimizing content through AEO tactics or for PAA visibility with a best answer strategy is the difference between visibility on a single channel like Google and consistently visibility across channels for a specific topic. They use customer insight and understanding of intent to create best answer content that is easy to find in search, credible and a great user experience. So how do B2B marketers create best answer content? Customer Insight – Whether it’s keyword research, CRM or conversion data from your web analytics, it’s important to step beyond your own intuition about what topics to focus on and rely on data.Consider what is it that your brand should be the best answer for and what customers are looking for that best represents your solution. Some common characteristics of the best performing Power Pages include: Leverage keywords/topics in titles to inspire clicks Include page features that increase engagement (interactive, visual) Provide comprehensive content on specific topics: examples, research, models Cover related topics as well 5. What it takes to be the best answer: Specific, in demand topic More valuable and useful than other sites Credible High quality Engaging Device friendly, accessible Loads fast By doing the homework of leveraging customer insight and validating with keyword research, you can then identify the actual questions buyers are asking about topics important to your solutions. Answering those questions through a hub and spoke content publishing model ensures a deep focus and coverage of variations on your topic across the channels where customers are seeking answers. Having industry experts help answer customer questions segmented by stage of the buying cycle creates and a more credible and targeted experience.
For many B2B marketers content is a numbers game, especially as the number of channels for discovery and engagement grow right long with competition for attention.
We all know how the information overload story ends: buyers disconnect, they start to ignore marketing content and they lose trust in the brands trying so desperately to reach them.
Smart voices like Ann Handley in the B2B marketing industry have called for a focus on quality and even brevity over the hamster wheel of content mediocrity. Many have listened and yet many more B2B marketers are still fighting the uphill battle of creating uninspired blog post after blog post, ebooks, white papers, case studies and who knows how many social messages – and to what end?
Is your marketing about creating content or answers? Think about what your customers really want.
The failure to communicate by B2B marketers has numerous causes ranging from flawed thinking that more is better to content quality issues to what I like to call “invisible content syndrome”, or content without visibility to the buyer.
Answering buyer questions is nothing new. While best answer content is a topic we’ve been evangelizing at TopRank Marketing since our book Optimize was published 7 years ago and since, changes in voice search and what Google shows in search results has put Q and A content marketing into the SEO spotlight.
The new SEO is optimization for answers. Along those lines you can learn about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) which focuses on voice search. There’s also Google’s “People Also Ask” feature which now show up for 79% of search results according to Moz. The difference between optimizing content through AEO tactics or for PAA visibility with a best answer strategy is the difference between visibility on a single channel like Google and consistently visibility across channels for a specific topic.
Being the best answer is hard, but that’s the price for being in the winner’s circle of consistent top visibility. While it’s more difficult to achieve best answer authority on multiple channels than just Google, in this world of information overload, self-directed business customers are searching for useful, credible information they can use to educate, evaluate and make purchasing decisions.
If buyers don’t see consistent, credible and engaging “best answer” content across channels from your brand, they’ll begin to trust competitors who are.
B2B buyers are using Google but they are also asking their social networks, listening to influencers, seeing some ads, consulting with peers in forums, reading industry editorial, blogs, and a variety of offline information sources.
Successful B2B marketers understand their buyers preferences for information discovery, consumption and engagement. They use customer insight and understanding of intent to create best answer content that is easy to find in search, credible and a great user experience. They also create a cycle of optimization where ongoing performance analysis is used to refine and improve.
So how do B2B marketers create best answer content?
Josh Nite from our team has outlined a few good best answer content examples here. Let’s also look at some…
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