What is Content Marketing?
Any self-respecting SEO game plan will include within itself what is called content marketing. The term is pretty self-explanatory, in the sense that it’s marketing, which is centered heavily on the creation, use, and promotion of content. However, content can take many forms, and may focus on multiple aspects of your organization.
This is an approach that should be used not only for content marketing, but pretty much for every aspect of SEO. When you don’t know your purpose, it’s impossible to know which strategy will work best, causing you to waste time and money trying out different tactics. Of course, trial and error are a big part of SEO, but it depends on what scale. The famous line “Content is King” is thrown around pretty often in the SEO world, but marketers sometimes misunderstand the meaning of the term. Content is not a separate part of online marketing. It’s not marketing that can be done separately from other types of marketing, in the sense that it’s not separate from those forms of marketing.
Every aspect of online marketing depends on content. It’s all centered on showcasing content in a variety of ways to achieve different goals. For example, SEO, as an industry, is centered on optimizing content for easier categorization by search engines. Everything from the links to which the content is posted, to the metadata and meta tags which are next to the content is there for SEO to better accomplish its task.Keyword optimization is not a standalone part of SEO, but a means to easily bring consumers to your content. Emails, social media, landing pages, product descriptions; these are all a means to an end, with the end being consumers reading your content and making buying choices based on it.
This means that anything which communicates a message to your audience is content, whether it be long form, short form, or even visual media.
Marketing is all about talking to your audience and showing them why your products and services are the best out there. Content is how you do this, and that’s why any relevant SEO campaign needs to begin with content marketing.
How will Content Marketing Help my Organization?
Very often, organizations are scared to tackle content marketing because the results are so hard to quantify. You will see some effect on your return on investment, but many of how it aids your organization are not definitive, such as consumer’s interest and brand reputation. Just because you can’t quantify consumer interest doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant. In fact, consumer intrigue with your organization can be one of the primary ways in which you expand your profits and audience reach. So let’s look at those benefits which can’t be graphed on a chart and try to understand why they are so crucial to your success.
Video content can also help your website come up in searches if it is labeled properly, so make sure you tell the reader exactly what the video is about to encourage click through. The video also needs to add something to the blog and if it is original content, it will add that much more. So add your own videos. Readers will appreciate the unique content and be that much more likely to share it, which can also add to your search rankings.
Brand Awareness
If two people are talking, and one tells the other about how great your organization is, why they should look into it, and so on, they’re spreading brand awareness about your organization. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways in which your organization can be relayed to new consumers since they see it as the most trustworthy. Consumer is likelier to buy from an organization their friend recommended than from one they found online. Unfortunately, there’s no proper way to quantify word of mouth, which is why the role of content in this relationship often gets overlooked.
Industry Authority
Authority sites are generally mentioned in the context of guest posting and backlinks, but rarely does anyone discuss why they’re considered authority sites. As you guessed, the reason is their content! Authority refers to the view that the audience has of a website, and this can be acquired only by providing relevant, quality content. Websites that showcase their knowledge and integrity will be seen to have quality content, while those that simply upload content so that they have something there will not instill trust in consumers, pushing them to look elsewhere. Content authority almost always translates into product power, making you the go to choice for your industry.
Relationship Building
This one is especially difficult to quantify, and is closely related to brand awareness. When your content targets consumers, especially in the format of social media content, your organization inches closer and closer to the consumers as people. It’s no wonder that big corporations are opening Facebook and Twitter accounts, on which they interact directly with consumers. By shortening the gap, consumers are likelier to trust you and buy from you at some point, even if your content does not sell anything.
Team Creation
Content is so much more than just an article or a post. It’s a collaboration between distinct elements of your organization, including a portion of everyone’s work. For example, one blog post requires a content writing team to create the text itself, a design team to create illustrations, infographics, and engineer design elements, the web development team that optimizes the post for viewing on search engines, and social media and outreach team to spread the post across all social mediums and to engage with consumers about it directly. When you build powerful content as an organization, you unify all your departments in creating quality pieces that consumers can relate to.
While those are the more abstract, unquantifiable ways in which content marketing will benefit your organization, let’s look at the concrete benefits that it will provide for you. Much like anything in SEO, these are not guaranteed results. But, with the right approach and a hint of patience, they’re not that far out of reach.
Increased Traffic
Whether because of word of mouth, authority status, or even better categorization on Google, powerful content will attract more traffic to your website. They’ll want to come to your website because you provide relevant information, and they’ll stay because of your products and services. While the reasons for which traffic increases may sometimes be difficult to determine, the traffic itself can easily be tracked.
Enhanced SEO
The end-goal, as we’ve mentioned before, is improving your SEO through content marketing, and the effectiveness of your SEO is really simple to measure. The better your content, the more people will share it, repost it, and link to it. The higher the number of such links, the more importance Google will give to your website, viewing it as authoritative. Google can also process your immense library of content when showing results for consumer search queries. Simply put, more content equals more and better search engine optimization.
Conversions
As an organization, you need to be making a profit. That means conversions need to be rising or at least staying steady, and powerful content can directly cause that. When consumers believe that your organization is experienced and knowledgeable, they’re likely to buy from you. This, in turn, raises your conversions, which can also be easily tracked.
Our Strategy
- Audit: We examine the content that you already have in order to determine its effectiveness. We look at tangible metrics, such as ROI, site traffic, and conversions, and at non-tangible metrics, such as brand awareness on social media, consumer opinion, and actual content quality.
- Plan: Having a strategy is not enough. We also need to create a detailed plan with specific times and dates at which content will be dispersed and implemented. While some agencies may craft 20 posts, and post them whenever they have the time, we’ll craft individual posts on a daily or weekly basis, determining at which times of the day or week they’re likely to be noticed by your audience.
- Create: Next comes the actual content building portion, and as we’ve already mentioned, we have no issues there. Our team of professional content writers and creators will work to build content that speaks to your industry and your audience. If our deployment team is unsatisfied with a certain piece, they’ll work together to improve it towards our standards.
- Measurement and optimization: If you’re not tracking results, you won’t see results. It’s as simple as that. SEO and content marketing should be consistently monitored for effectiveness, using those quantifiable metrics that we’ve listed above. We’ll study these metrics together with you, to further strategize how our game plan can be improved.
