B2B marketers need to build trust, develop authority, and, ultimately, generate leads. And to do this, they rely on publishing content — a lot of content — that engages audiences. But it’s not enough to simply produce content. You have to deliver it at the right time and in the right format — bonus points if you deliver it in a personalized manner.
Enter the content hub.
Content hubs can help B2B marketers deliver their materials effectively and personalized across various formats. More importantly, they’re a simple way to increase content visibility and help users find the information they’re looking for.
We’ve put together a complete guide to what makes content hubs so effective at engaging audiences to make clear why you need a content hub solution to power your engagement strategy.
What is a Content Hub?
A content hub is typically a single webpage hosting a collection of content relating to a specific subject. This content can take lots of different forms, from blog posts to on-demand webinars, but it’s typically all intended to provide valuable information, establish trust and increase brand authority.
Content hubs can be used for all sorts of purposes, including acting as touchpoints in demand generation strategies or serving as landing pages in email marketing campaigns designed to nurture leads.
They provide value by allowing businesses to centralize content that would otherwise be spread across a website, or even multiple channels. This makes it easier to curate content packages of highly relevant content that can act as assets in marketing campaigns.
They’re particularly useful for businesses that use segmentation to target specific audience groups with different content according to their needs, preferences or pain points. These businesses can create diverse content hubs to cater to each of their audience segments, helping them to deliver more resonant personalized experiences.
Key Reasons Why You Need a Content Hub
Content hubs can provide diverse benefits to businesses trying to reach, engage with and nurture a target audience. These are some of the main reasons to use them as part of your engagement-focused campaign.
Centralized Content Management
Using a content hub to centralize a collection of related content makes it easier to manage than managing content distributed across your website or other digital channels. You can see all of the content and assets you have relating to that topic in one place, simplifying the process of updating the content over time and filling gaps in your topic coverage.
In practice, this means you can be more efficient as you work to develop your business’s position as an authoritative thought leader. You’ll be able to identify missing topics more easily to generate new content ideas, won’t have to spend hours looking through content to find pieces that need updating, and can automate the publishing of new content.
Enhanced User Experience
In the same way content hubs make content easier to manage, they also make it easier to explore. Curating and centralizing content based on specific topics, pain points or audience segments gives users more focused content marketing experiences, allowing them to find the content they need without digging for it.
Content hubs can facilitate cohesive and seamless content journeys, with users able to navigate between different pieces of content without the friction of having to search through an entire website. That means you can build more powerful content funnels, creating journeys that mix formats like blog posts, webinars and e-books to engage users effectively.
Improved SEO and Discoverability
Increasing performance in organic search is a common KPI for businesses, allowing them to boost website traffic over the long term and attract lots of good-fit users at the top of the funnel. Content hubs are perfectly suited to the task because they adhere to several search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, including topic clustering and increasing crawlability.
Essentially, grouping related content together on a website by making them all accessible from a central hub page and building links between individual pieces helps search ranking algorithms to better understand each piece of content in context. At the same time, these links increase the discoverability of new pieces of content, meaning they can start ranking for target keywords faster.
Increased Engagement and Conversion Rates
Content hubs provide an opportunity for continual engagement, acting as an always-on resource that allows your audience to delve into topics and educate themselves at their own pace. Since they collect lots of related pieces of content in one place, they also create opportunities to trigger content binges, where users go from one piece to another and stay engaged for longer.
These fundamental properties make content hubs great for boosting engagement rates, and personalization techniques can expand the benefits to boosting conversions, too. By creating personalized content hubs that suit individual audience segments or accounts in account-based marketing, you can provide highly relevant content experiences that address key pain points and nurture leads toward conversion.
Increased Webinar Registrations and Engagement
Marketing a webinar in the lead-up to the live date is essential to drive registrations and ensure a good turnout. Content hubs can play an instrumental role in webinar marketing strategies, providing a valuable destination to send users to that offers lots of information relating to the webinar topic. This offers an opportunity to generate pre-webinar engagement, which can even provide insights into what specific subtopics your audience is most interested in.
Content hubs can also generate on-demand webinar engagement by attracting and engaging organic traffic through effective SEO. Make sure to have effective webinar signup CTAs in the content that makes up your content hub to maximize the opportunity presented by the organic traffic you attract.
Streamlined Content Strategy and Analytics
Centralizing related content in dedicated hubs makes it easier to track performance across specific topics. This means you can learn more from engagement data, getting insights into what content topics and formats perform best. These learnings can be fed back into your engagement strategy to drive more success.
This process becomes particularly streamlined when you use a solution like the content hub capability powered by the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform, which features in-built analytics. It tracks every audience interaction across all of your content hubs, providing valuable first-party data that you can use to refine your content strategy.
How a Content Hub Enhances Audience Engagement
Content hubs can be used for all sorts of purposes, but the bulk of their value comes through their ability to drive audience engagement. This is because content hubs have several key strengths that make them particularly well suited for generating engagement, including the following.
Personalized Content Experiences
Research from McKinsey shows that content personalization matters more now than ever before, with 71% of respondents expecting companies to deliver personalized experiences. Content hubs make this possible at scale, giving you the ability to craft relevant clusters of content that are tailored to specific demographics, needs, preferences, or pain points.
This can boost engagement, ensuring that every user you attract gets presented with content that’s relevant to their interests and provides genuine value. As a result, you’ll be able to build a bigger audience and keep them around for longer, driving other marketing KPIs like virtual event signups in the process.
Interactive and Multimedia Content
As opposed to other ways of collating content, like blog feeds, content hubs benefit from the ability to incorporate interactive and multimedia content. You can build content hubs that mix diverse content formats, providing rich and highly engaging experiences that cover a specific topic from lots of different angles.
This is particularly useful if you already have lots of multimedia content, or plan to make use of high-impact formats like webinars or virtual events in the future. Content hubs allow you to present users with content in these formats alongside more traditional blog posts and articles, providing something for every need.
Continuous and Relevant Content Delivery
Many content strategies revolve around creating strong clusters of content surrounding specific topics. Content hubs make it easier for businesses to deliver this content in a way that ensures continuous engagement, maximizing long-term performance and preventing older content from losing visibility over time.
That means they make it simpler for your audience to keep track of relevant content. They act as a single source for users to visit to check for existing information and new updates about topics they care about. Specific content hub platforms like ON24 also include automated content publishing features that make uploading content more efficient.
Create Your Content Hub with ON24
Content hubs can be a powerful asset for businesses looking to engage with their audience on a more meaningful, personalized, and continuous basis. Whether they’re used to drive engagement and boost registrations in the lead up to a virtual event or as an integrated part of demand generation marketing campaigns, they can be instrumental in achieving success.
The content hub capability powered by ON24 can help your business capture the benefits content hubs offer. It’s designed to make creating, updating, and analyzing content hubs a seamless process, with personalization, customization and automation features all built in. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our content hub solution and how it can boost your content strategy.
