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To learn how to research properly, there are several techniques you can use.
1. Plan your research: to conduct effective research, you should plan one in advance. Make a list of all relevant topics, information, sources or terms you want to research.
2. Use search engines: Use search engines such as Google or Bing to find information. Try to use specific search terms to filter the results that are helpful for your research.
3. Use free databases: Use free databases such as JSTOR or LexisNexis to find specific information. These databases often offer a variety of scholarly articles, legal opinions, and other useful information.
4. Use experts: If possible, try to contact experts to get specific information or expert opinions.
5. Verify your information: Once you find information, you should always try to verify the sources to make sure they are reliable.
6. Be critical: be critical when selecting and evaluating information. Make sure you have a good balance of facts and opinions to make your research reliable and informative.
If you publish at least two articles, e.g. blog posts on your website per week and thus your sitemap grows piece by piece, this shows Google and other search engines that you continuously provide up-to-date information that potentially has a higher benefit for users. In the best case, you will benefit from a better, i.e. higher, search engine ranking - ideally on the first page - and thus receive more free search engine traffic, so-called organic traffic.
As is true everywhere, staying on the ball pays off
In the short term, the effect may seem small to you. But consider how quickly two articles a week and 52 weeks a year can add up to a triple-digit number of articles or blogposts. 100 opportunities per year to find and engage relevant prospects with entertaining copy on your topic and products. You often leave your competitors far behind in this regard.
Already after a few years you have considered and described your topic from all possible angles, pointed out all typical mistakes, created FAQs and How-To's for beginners, always discussed the latest innovations and thus created over time an article catalog and archive, from which you can benefit in the long term and that will help you in the long run to more visitors, prospects and customers (so-called long tail content).
This evergreen content forms the basis, the foundation for your future business success. So it's worth investing in content creation.
There are various sources and strategies for generating leads (both as a B2B and as a provider in the end customer business). Basically, a distinction can be made between unpaid (so-called organic) and paid sources of leads, e.g. in the form of Google Ads.
The situation for most companies and providers in the B2B sector is as follows: There is strong competition/stiff competition in the respective niche, high click prices, escalating marketing budgets as well as ad campaigns that do not work. The downward spiral of ever increasing costs with ever poorer conversion rates is supposed to be stopped with a further increase in the marketing budget - which often enough fails.
But what is the alternative to expensive online marketing?
With the help of so-called content marketing, you provide potential prospects and customers with free knowledge with added value and thus create trust. The goal is that the customers in spé deal longer with your offer and do not leave your website after a few seconds, but click through your website. The more articles, i.e. content, you provide on your website, the more this testifies to competence in your respective field and will increase the likelihood of a purchase.
In the best case, you manage to get interested parties to sign up for your newsletter, for example, to be informed about future discount promotions, make an inquiry via contact form or phone. It is important to obtain their consent to be contacted in order to be able to contact them in the future in the so-called follow-up process and to convert them into customers in the long term. After all, the majority of B2B customers only buy after the second, third or fourth contact. Here, it is also important to understand the so-called sales cycle in the business-to-business business.
If you have managed to direct interested parties to your site through thematically relevant articles or blogpots, the first hurdle has been cleared. Therefore, think about how you can maximize the number of visitors who come to your site for free (so-called organic traffic). These can be, for example, articles with titles that consist of specific questions as potential customers enter them in Google or other search engines, articles about current news in your industry or niche, product news or reviews.
The idea of monitoring mentions of one's own company on all channels sounds tempting. After all, measuring the success of sending out a press release can be quite useful.
For this purpose, there are a number of providers who monitor the media market on a daily basis with crawlers and specifically search for your company name in the monitored media sources.
For this survey and analysis service, which often includes the automated preparation in simple dashboards, often thousands of euros per year are due.
The easiest and most practical way or work around for the vast majority of companies is to simply create an Altert on Google News that will notify you when your company name is mentioned in an article, because - if it's not there today it's not relevant. With the ability to set the time period, for example, to one year, and the number of search results to 200, you can quickly copy the URLs to the articles, along with the teaser text, into a spreadsheet, and most importantly, for free.
Some providers already charge several thousand euros per year just for depositing these so-called press clippings (=links to the articles) - in addition to the costs of media monitoring or press clippings, which provide the URLs to be deposited.
As already discussed here, the costs for online marketing in the B2B sector are dizzyingly high and the number of actual clicks is vanishingly small due to ad blockers and & co.
With given completion rate, English conversion rate, of 1-3% of ad clicks on average, it usually cannot pay off to generate B2B customers via search engine advertising.
An alternative customer acquisition strategy is the so-called content marketing. Here the production of articles and texts is meant, which of potential customers googgelte topics and terms and/or keywords beeinhaltet.
Content is King.
With the content strategy you have the opportunity - provided you can regularly create and provide relevant content for your target audience - to get organic traffic via the search engines for free, i.e. at least without any further advertising budget.
For this purpose, a blog area has been established on the website itself, where new content, how to's, definitions of terms or the like are posted or posted. Another advantage is that all content, with which you provide free added value and insights for your potential customers, can also be subscribed to via rss feed.
Become a customer magnet with the right content strategy
In order for the search engines to reward your efforts for creating, optimally high-quality content, in the form of a better search engine ranking and associated higher traffic, it is necessary that they regularly publish new content and entertaining texts on your website.
Make yourself a concrete plan, when and how often you want to post blogposts or articles on your website and which topics (also: in which order) should be kept. As is true everywhere, you can only expect results if you stay on the ball. Consider exactly who you want to address with your content.