(Getting Started) How to Organize Your Content for Maximum Discoverability

Content is the force driving our most effective marketing strategies—demand generation, inbound, account-based marketing, and sales enablement. Is discovering your content important to your overall strategy? Of course it is!

As marketers are determining how to target their prospects with personalized content, the creation of these experiences becomes a hurdle they have to tackle.

The reality is this does not have to be a large hurdle. With some planning and work upfront, the creation and scalability of personalized experiences to carry out your marketing strategies becomes something you can do in your sleep! Temporary pain for a large gain.

Organizing your content effectively starts with asking how your customers, prospects, or employees are finding their information. Once properly organized—that is, in multiple user-friendly ways—your visitors will be better able to find your content, ensuring a better experience using and sharing it. 

Imagine, for a moment, walking into a department store and finding everything piled up into one massive pile in the middle of the store. You entered looking for a very specific item and you want to be able to find it quickly. That probably means this particular experience isn’t a positive one.

Organization is crucial to improving the performance of your B2B content marketing. Every piece of your content is an asset, but even the best asset is only useful if it is available at the right time and place to the right person. 

Many companies don’t perform content audits frequently enough, or skip them altogether. But if you take the time to find out what content you have, then add tags or labels, you can easily find this content and share it to your targeted accounts. This will also help you determine if you have any gaps in your content that need to be filled. 

Here are seven ways you can organize your content to improve its discoverability.

1. Organize by Type

This is most likely how your content is currently organized. You will have content segmented by ebooks, videos, infographics, blogs, etc. 

However, this should not be the only way you organize your content. Let’s face it, no one comes to your website thinking, “I would really like to read an ebook today!”

This form of organization can come in handy when keeping track of your internal content, but you are not creating the content for your personal use. 

2. Organize by Date 

Your most recent blog post is almost never going to provide the information that the reader is looking for. In simple terms, do not force visitors to dig through a bunch of unnecessary articles to find the information they are looking for. 

It can be beneficial to provide the option to search by latest content. By showcasing your freshest content, you are letting visitors know that they can expect relevant, up-to-date, consistent resources. 

3. Organize by Topic

Organizing your content by topic makes it easy for visitors to find the content that they are looking for in a clear and concise way. It helps those who are looking for a very particular answer find it quickly. 

4. Organize by Vertical

If your product touches multiple markets, it makes sense to segment by vertical. Doing so will allow visitors from those verticals to locate content that is relevant and useful.

5. Organize by Persona 

The importance of creating content for defined buyer personas is widely known. But what are you doing to ensure your content reaches these personas?

Can your buyer personas be widely named? If we think about CEOs, content managers, marketing managers, etc., these are classifications that we can separate our content into. You don't have to label these by the persona name, but you can take the time to organize your content around these personas. 

6. Organize by Segment

This is similar to topic, vertical, and persona. Organizing by segment provides more context to your content.  

7. Organize by Account 

Once you have identified your key accounts, you can start to leverage your content in strategic ways. This may include a content library, customizing premium content to target specific accounts, and organizing your content in a marketing stream for each target account. This requires a high degree of personalization, but will ultimately help your sales team reach key decision-makers.

Your content should not be a maze. 

Ensure you have multiple entry points into your content. This will allow different buyers to make their way, with ease, through your content journey. They should never hit a roadblock or dead end within your content. 

Organize your content strategically and make it discoverable, helpful, and relevant to get the most out of your content assets!

If you have a cool examples to share, or questions, please comment below and let us know!