How to give your business a strategic springtime spruce.

Sure, ‘business chores’ are about as glamorous as the household ones – but the good news is, they could prove to be far more lucrative and enlightening. Despite its many drawbacks, the recent climate has presented B2B marketers with a unique opportunity to not only play catch up, but even get ahead with their strategic housekeeping.

And if you’ve hardly had time to catch your breath? Well, it’s never too late to check in with your strategy. From reassessing your business priorities to polishing up that CRM strategy, by following a few simple tips, you’ll emerge wiser, and with a clearer focus. Yes, we love a silver lining too.

Realise the untapped potential of SEO.

If SEO has been on the back-burner, considered as more of a nice-to-have than one of the necessities, here’s your chance to make amends.

From quick wins to implementing a long-term strategy, arguably, this is where you can spruce to your heart’s content. SEO is all about incremental improvements and troubleshooting your pages regularly to check you’re still on Google’s Good List. Of course, Torpedo will be happy to lend a helping hand and put our expertise to good use – but if you want to go it alone for now, here’s just a few of the ways you can rocket your business up the search results charts.

Start with touch-ups little and often:

• Troubleshoot your site, checking for any broken internal and external links and any redirects or redirect chains – be sure to fix them all.
• Rewrite and optimise your meta descriptions to boost Click Through Rate (CTR) and SEO ranking.
• Optimise your images for search – all you need to do is use a file size that’s small enough (make sure the image still looks crisp) and writing image alt tags and descriptions.
• If you have physical locations, make sure your ‘Google My Business’ is optimised and up to date too.

And introduce some good habits for the future:

• Wherever possible, link out to reputable and relevant external sources. If they return the favour, this will boost your ‘link equity’.
• Make sure all pages (old and new) work well on mobile and and pass Google’s ‘mobile friendly’ test.
• Check page load speeds as this helps with user experience and SEO.
• Complete regular keyword research and use it to inform your future content creation.

Use tracking and analytics to your advantage.

Digestible, user-friendly data – that’s all you really want, right? If you’re yet to get acquainted with Google Data Studio then this could be a game-changer for your business. It’s the all-singing, all-dancing upgrade of Google Analytics where you can make bespoke real-time reports that are tailored specifically to your business’s goals, objectives and KPIs.

You can dynamically generate – wait for it – visually appealing graphs and reports and pull in multiple types of data and dimensions. Google Data Studio draws data from loads of sources such as Google and YouTube Analytics, but also connects with external sources such as Facebook Ads, Twitter, CRM platforms, and many more.

Put the ‘nurture’ back into email nurture streams.

If your email nurture streams were formulated a while back, or worse still, simply cobbled together with content you had available at the time, the chances are they could be improved to work harder for your business. These B2B sales journeys can be long and complex (and granted, that may be half the reason you’re reluctant to revisit them), but if you follow a few simple steps it’ll feel far less overwhelming:

• Interrogate your data – take a look at your analytics and search for trends. Work out what’s working for you, and what’s not.
• Craft personas for your prospects. Get to know your audience and use your best judgement to update the stream accordingly. Better still, ask some of them what they would find genuinely helpful.
• Evaluate your journey as a whole. Consider how frequently you’re getting in touch – you need to find the balance between being a pest and falling off their radar. Don’t forget, your emails should add value. Work out what existing content reliably converts and consider why that might be.
• Critique your content, and be brutal. Content that’s been crafted with a clear purpose is sure to be more effective. Is now the time to create bespoke work for your email nurture stream? If so, let your research heavily inform this.
• Finally, review it regularly. Okay, it’s easier said than done, but if you regularly check in to see how things are going, and make incremental changes, then you’re sure to see a positive impact on your business. Plus, it won’t be such a mammoth job next time round.

Understand the value of content marketing strategy

It can be easy enough to create content at break-neck speed, only to look back on it and wonder, ‘Why did we do that?’. There’s always been pressure to be reactive, and produce topical content. Timing can be everything and projects can storm ahead without giving the business’s objectives much thought. If you’ve been graced with a bit more breathing space than usual, let’s make it work for you. Take a step back to look at the big picture, ie. your content marketing strategy.

At Torpedo, we help our clients find focus by identifying the sweet spot between what matters to their business and what their customers care about. It sounds simple and in theory, it is. What takes time is immersing yourself in these topics and coming out with a clear and meaningful answer that rings true.

Think about your business and brand identity. What is your vision, and mission? How about your values? What does your brand believe in? Consider what your biggest challenge is and work out where your focus should be. Is the goal customer acquisition, conversion or retention?

And, if you don’t have the answers… do your research. Do some digging. Don’t assume anything. Get to know your customers better, and learn exactly what they want.

You have all sorts of resources at your disposal:

• Use free tools like Google Trends
• Break down silos and catch up with your teams – sales, social and customer service. What challenges or questions do your customers actually have?
• Find out more about your audience. Conduct research, create personas, run focus groups and user testing, try social listening or do some audience and market research.

With focus, you’ll be able to plan and create content that better aligns with both your business goals and your customers’ interests. Now’s the perfect time to lockdown your business’s strategy and connect the dots to find that sweet spot, so what are you waiting for?

Don’t neglect data integration.

When we do things in a rush, corners can be cut. Back-end data integration tends to be one of those crucial corners. Without your CRM system talking to your CMS or marketing automation system, you’re letting valuable data insights get away. Worse still, if you’re still completing a lot of manual data processes, you could be breaching stringent GDPR and CCPA regulations. But don’t panic just yet, we can help you get your data ship-shape.

Evaluate your existing data collection and storage methods

Where are you capturing data? You might be surprised at how many contact points you have, and how much more you could be doing with this. Think about what you’d like to ascertain from your data – what data do you need to collect in order to achieve this?

More importantly, work out where all this data is going. Data that’s shared over email or accessible in the admin area of your website are processes we’d steer you away from. Unfortunately, they’re bad habits that are surprisingly common. Manually inputting data is a big no-no these days because it’s far harder to control. For a more secure solution, make use of embedded MA or CRM forms – or better still, set up an API so the data is sent directly to your MA or CRM.

Research alternative solutions and consider your options

Firstly, you need to work out your requirements. Are you looking to identify better qualified leads? Do you want to streamline the data collection process? Are you worried you’re not GDPR compliant? Once you’ve done your research, you’ll be able to make an informed decision and implement the most appropriate solution.

Next you’ll need to accept that you might not be able to implement everything in one go. In fact, we recommend you work out your priorities and break any development down into chunks. You’ll also need to test as you go, to ensure everything will work in the way it’s intended.

Sound like a lot of hassle? Wondering if it’s worth it? Just imagine how slick it will be when your marketers can flag to the sales team that a known prospect has engaged with your content. It’ll allow your business to react efficiently and better align yourselves with your customers’ needs. What’s not to like?