We’ve talked previously about how chaos can have a major impact on your B2B marketing strategy. With the right tools and a little bit of know-how, however, you’ll be able to measure your content’s effectiveness and avoid pandemonium. Here are four ways to improve your digital marketing today.

1. Assess Your Tech

Knowing how your budget is being allotted and if there are gaps in your workflow will save you time and money. Here are some guiding questions to ask your team in order to determine what technology stack you need to accomplish your goals.

• What kind of voicing do your personas prefer? 
• Is your message aligned so it will be consistent across all channels?
• Do you have list of which social channels your buyers and/or potential leads use the most? 

 Must-Have Core Platforms

• CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Kentico, Sitecore, Squarespace)
• Marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot)
• CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics)
• Content management platform (Kapost)
• Social media platform scheduling, monitoring, engagement (Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Lithium)

Once you have these key platforms in place, you’ll be able to start aligning key objectives alongside your chosen technologies’ capabilities.

2. Optimize Your SEO

While SEO optimization might be commonly mentioned more within B2C circles, it’s just as important to audit your SEO score within the B2B environment. To put it very simply, if it’s not something people can find on the web, B2B enterprises run the risk of falling between the cracks.

The SEO specialist on your team should ensure your content is optimized with focus keywords, Google-friendly HTML formatting, and a URL structure that correlates with your product keywords.

Using tools provided by SEO gurus like Moz, you can assess the overall score of your product page and decide where improvements are needed. Make sure you use the same SEO auditing process for all digital assets involved in your campaign, including case studies and blog posts.

How to Track Your SEO Success

• Traffic
  Using Google Analytics, track the volume of traffic and break it down into categories like organic, paid, and referral
• Heatmap analytics
  Collecting data from a heatmap will help you determine where people are clicking the most on your site. It’ll also show you the overall amount of time someone spends on a page, which will help you assess which pieces of content are resonating the most
• A/B testing
  Test different subject lines and calls to action to see what approach attracts the most clicks

3. Measure Your Content Reach

In our earlier post about marketing metrics, we talked about how to measure the reach of your content. This is a crucial part of auditing your B2B marketing strategy, not only for clients but also for your internal teams.

Measuring both internal and external reach will give you a broader picture of what content types, topics, and messaging are effective in the market.

Measuring external reach can be tricky. In fact, 17% of marketers in a Demand Metric study said they have no content effectiveness measurements in place, and 49% are using only basic metrics such as clicks or downloads.

Here are some basic numbers to crunch when you’re auditing your external reach:

• Number of engagements per month categorized by engagement type (downloads, page views, open rates)
• Number of engagements by content type, persona, and sales stage
• 10 most engaged assets per quarter
• 10 most shared assets per quarter

Calculating internal reach is often overlooked in measuring B2B marketing success, but it is critical to your overall strategy. If your sales, customer success, and other internal teams aren’t able to find your content, or don’t find it to be valuable with leads and customers, then you are wasting time and resources.

To create a closed feedback loop across your entire content life cycle, track the following key metrics:

• Number of month-over-month (MoM) internal views of assets
• Number of MoM internal downloads of assets
• Number of MoM internal shares of assets via email or social
• Amount of MoM referral traffic from internal shares

4. Track Your Social Channels

Social media marketing has become more and more prevalent in the B2B space. However, in a recent survey, content marketing and social media sharing were used by 71% of B2B marketers, but only about 22% of them rated these methods as “effective.”

Use the power of social media to broaden your overall presence and reach. Once you’ve integrated the most applicable social channels into your marketing strategy, make sure that tracking performance on those channels is top priority—and I don’t mean just clicks and likes.

Social media for B2B is more than just likes and retweets. At the end of the day, social marketing exists to drive a potential buyer deeper into the sales cycle and motivate them to engage—by clicking through landing pages, requesting a demo, or doing something else to earn a higher lead score.

You’ll want to track:

• Number of shares/reposts by leads
• Number of shares/reposts by influencers
• Number of engagements/impressions

Tools like SEM Rush and Google Analytics are crucial tools for tracking performance. Some social media channels have tools for auditing your strategy built into their platforms—Facebook Insights is a perfect example. This tracking tool allows you to measure crucial metrics like what time of day most of your users are online, post reach, and post engagement.

Think of digital marketing as an ongoing process. While your initial strategy might yield promising numbers, having a quarterly calendar in place to continually assess your B2B strategy is essential. Trends change, demand shifts, and strategies should always be open to change.