By now you should see the importance of a well-crafted website, a thoughtful content strategy and how both affect a company’s bottom line. With that said, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed (and that’s OK, too!). Let’s take a step out of the weeds and focus on four best practices to help level-up your website conversion strategy.

Use content to guide visitors through your website

As soon as your visitor has finished reading a particular piece of content (or even before), your website should automatically determine and serve-up subsequent pieces of content that are relevant to your reader to keep them engaged. For instance, instead of linking to a dead-end PDF on a new tab, try linking to a webinar or blog post that keeps the visitor in your website’s ecosystem.

Whether it’s your homepage, a blog post, or a product page, relevant content recommendations need to be everywhere so the visitors who aren’t ready to ‘take a demo’ can stay on your site longer and learn more about your product.

Here’s a real-world example: Pragmatic Institute had spent two decades creating thousands of in-depth articles, webinars, podcasts, and tools, but it was too hard for visitors to navigate. When their marketing team integrated content recommendations powered by PathFactory’s proprietary content intelligence, it suddenly became a lot easier for visitors to dive deeper through the site (and subsequently the B2B sales funnel). Pragmatic saw 3X website engagement and 2.8X more views per session within six months.

Rethink your content gating strategy

About to hide that awesome tutorial
you just wrote behind a gate or form?

Hold Up!

Think about how your audience interacts with the content on your website. Are you serving up hyper-relevant, easily-digestible content? Great! Are you holding that content hostage until they type their email address into a form? Not so great. In fact, Insiteful reported that the average form abandonment rate could be 76% or higher; that means more than three quarters of your visitors are staying unknown, which makes them harder to market to.

Companies that tie their campaign success to the number of email addresses they collect need to explore new ways of attracting and learning about unknown visitors.  While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a content gating strategy, visitors want to consume content similar to how they do it in their non-work lives.

While MQL generation is important in all its forms (pun intended!), there are several other ways to leverage a content gating strategy without it feeling overly invasive. Here are a few ideas:

• Shorten your forms so they only ask for a person’s email address (not their company, title, revenue, number of employees, mother’s maiden name, and how they heard about you).
• Display forms to unknown visitors only. You already know (and should be tracking) your known visitors, so spend your energy putting together a profile for the people you haven’t identified yet.
• Try engagement-based gating, or only showing a form to your most-engaged visitors. If a visitor is engaging with your content for a meaningful amount of time, it means they’re interested in your solution. On the other hand, you could allow someone to consume a certain number of content pieces without filling out the form.
• Consider soft-gating, or using a dismissible form, so your visitors can choose if they want to provide their information before they read a piece of your content.

The goal with forms shouldn’t be what your company is getting out of them, but what your visitor is getting out of them. Give visitors a reason to opt in; something more than just the single content asset. They know you’re going to market to them after, so make it helpful!If you’re not convinced and would like to move away from forms altogether, adding a tool to your marketing tech stack that uses content intelligence might be an area to explore. This way you’re able to serve up relevant content to the right audience, analyze their consumption patterns, and generate individual-level insights that help make your first outreach email to your visitors an informed one. More on that later.

Organize your content in a user-friendly resource center

Once someone  lands on your site, the baseline experience you want your audience to have is a seamless one, where they easily find the information they need. If you already have the seamless experience locked down, you’re ready to move to the next stage which is creating a steady stream of relevant content that keeps your audience engaged and on your website longer. A great way to do this is to organize all of your content in a resource center.

A resource center has myriad uses:

• It’s a standalone lead-gen tool: by allowing visitors to self-serve and learn about your products, they’ll see you as a reputable  source of information, keeping you top of mind when they are ready to start having sales conversations.
• Resources allow for greater content shareability (and discoverability!): sales teams can easily share information or guides to visitors  based on what problems they’re trying to solve. Even better, once they get to the Resource Center they’re met with more relevant content that talks about the exact problems they’re looking to solve.

Done correctly, Resource Centers improve your search engine rankings: By taking both user intent and keyword research into account when building your Resource Center you’ll improve the quality of the traffic coming from search engines. In addition, you can see which resources are the most-visited and use that insight to inform your content marketing strategy.

Unlock deeper insights about your company’s content

The old adage still rings true: “you can bring a customer to content, but you can’t teach them to binge it”. Okay, we made that up, but it’s still accurate. When someone comes to your website to solve a problem or learn something new, you can’t control their behavior after the fact, but you can guide their behavior.

By adopting AI-powered technology as part of  your content strategy, you can start making relevant recommendations at a scale no individual marketer (or team of marketers) could achieve on their own. But it’s not just about recommending content, AI-powered content intelligence also helps with:

• Discovering what types of content resonate most with your visitors, and how you can use that information to your advantage when collecting leads for your sales team.
• Understanding your company’s content library, so you can develop at-a-glance insights about the content you already have (including length, difficulty, format, etc.) and use it to inform your content marketing strategy.

Here’s a real-world example about how Micro Focus used content intelligence to unlock deeper insights about their portfolio property TechBeacon’s content, resulting in $45M of MIO (marketing influenced opportunity) in Tech Beacon source campaigns.

Micro Focus had a word-class property sitting in its portfolio: TechBeacon. The thought leadership site offered deep, rich content from industry experts in app dev and testing, DevOps, enterprise IT and security.

TechBeacon supported Micro Focus’ range of enterprise software products as the first touch point in the consideration cycle. It relied on banners and promo links to drive visitors onto landing pages to gather contact info – except visitors were ignoring the banners and bouncing from the  landing pages. With limited insights available, TechBeacon struggled to decipher the true interest and engagement levels of its visitors. At the same time, disjointed data from an old CRM tool made it impossible to accurately measure TechBeacon’s impact on the bottom line. TechBeacon already had exceptional content but needed a user experience to match, so they decided to leverage Content Intelligence in their new approach:

• The company organized content into “guides”: dedicated collections of articles built around a relevant gated asset. This new approach integrated gated assets into the user experience as an invaluable resource, rather than an interruptive nuisance.
• By implementing an Intelligent Content platform. They were able to tap into a wealth of new data about their visitors and how those visitors engaged with different content. Content intelligence helped TechBeacon identify specific performance patterns, making it easier to predict which content assets would be more likely to stimulate interest.

With automated reporting distributed weekly updates to business stakeholders (expanding organizational awareness of TechBeacon) and proof of ROI and increased executive buy-in, TechBeacon ultimately demonstrated its ability to support business objectives.

Here’s a real-world example about how Micro Focus used content intelligence to unlock deeper insights about their portfolio property TechBeacon’s content, resulting in $45M of MIO (marketing influenced opportunity) in Tech Beacon source campaigns.

Micro Focus had a word-class property sitting in its portfolio: TechBeacon. The thought leadership site offered deep, rich content from industry experts in app dev and testing, DevOps, enterprise IT and security.

TechBeacon supported Micro Focus’ range of enterprise software products as the first touch point in the consideration cycle. It relied on banners and promo links to drive visitors onto landing pages to gather contact info – except visitors were ignoring the banners and bouncing from the  landing pages. With limited insights available, TechBeacon struggled to decipher the true interest and engagement levels of its visitors. At the same time, disjointed data from an old CRM tool made it impossible to accurately measure TechBeacon’s impact on the bottom line. TechBeacon already had exceptional content but needed a user experience to match, so they decided to leverage Content Intelligence in their new approach:

• The company organized content into “guides”: dedicated collections of articles built around a relevant gated asset. This new approach integrated gated assets into the user experience as an invaluable resource, rather than an interruptive nuisance.
• By implementing an Intelligent Content platform. They were able to tap into a wealth of new data about their visitors and how those visitors engaged with different content. Content intelligence helped TechBeacon identify specific performance patterns, making it easier to predict which content assets would be more likely to stimulate interest.

With automated reporting distributed weekly updates to business stakeholders (expanding organizational awareness of TechBeacon) and proof of ROI and increased executive buy-in, TechBeacon ultimately demonstrated its ability to support business objectives.