Enough With Content Creation… Start Marketing

Content Marketing for Natural Search

You will have no doubt read many times that 'Content is King'. Few blog posts however do a good job at explaining why, especially from an SEO perspective.

I love the potential of content marketing, the key reason for me is its ability to help link build in a creative, engaging and fun way. Using content in this way obviously has a lot of compounded benefits such as creating new referring domains and increasing brand awareness to name but two. From an SEO purist mindset it is all about generating inbound links.

Key benefits to using content to help link build:

1. You have something to talk about on forums / blog comments - it's therefore more natural
2. You have something to gift to people / businesses - so they want you to participate
3. You have something to bookmark (and for others to do the same) - you further increase reach
4. Unlike media spend the benefits last, and if the content is good the impact grows

An Example

Imagine being a high street bank that had an average business banking department & website. Their objective is to attract more customers through online with a budget of £100,000. Currently they would employ a search marketing agency to analyse the market, review their website, set some target keywords and help them achieve number one rankings for "business accounts". Same old story and usually same standard results. The client often feels like they are not getting much value and they don't see the KPI shift they expected.

How can this be approached differently with content marketing?

1. Create 50 advice-based videos for a range of business types (Sole traders to Corporates)
2. Create 10 e-books using industry experts / selected partners (turn into top level articles)
3. Write 200 blog posts (mostly seeded from the e-books already written)
4. Record 5 series of podcasts (using content written from the e-books)
5. Write 50 press releases
6. Distribute the content through a range of networks and influential third party sites - and participate with your audience in those outposts or driving traffic back to a central marketing hub

Clearly, this would be phased throughout the year and you would structure it around several campaigns that are ongoing and process-orientated and targeted to those business types - a campaign for business start-ups, for example.

How might that content be marketed?

1. Publish your videos on 30+ video websites and engage by commenting and participating with the audience, getting feedback etc
2. Publish your e-books on online magazine sites and gift versions to influential blogger to review. also consider chopping up and editing parts of the ebooks as articles on sites such as Squidoo
3. Create blogs which can appear in search results or be used as guest posts on other websites
4. Publish pod-casts to make accessing your content easy as well as putting them on podcast review sites
5. Publish your press releases across press distribution sites
6. Bookmark and share all your pieces of content on sites like Digg and Delicious
7. Distribute all this content to your current customers - great value to them and they are likely to share

This has a compounded impact to results, and undoubtedly to SEO, since you now have a genuine reason to appear in 100's if not 1,000's of places across the web, you have content people want to read and share. Your brand will take on a new dimension and to bring everything back to SEO you will have created links your self but you now have an army of people sharing, commenting, bookmarking (essentially link creating) for you. Checkout the recent blog post with the social radar by Dave Chaffey which highlights those outposts driving traffic back to a fulfilment point.

Three final thoughts

1. What role does a search agency play? Unless they have experts in your industry that can co-ordinate & generate this content and be confident in participating in the market on your behalf then it will need to be done in house. You have to be genuine & add value to potential & current customers, can an external agency do that?
2. What are you going to do now you have a lot of interested visitors. How do you keep them engaged and communicate effectively with them - is there a real purpose on your site?
3. What content have you got to start this process and what are the easy to execute ideas to start using content marketing before it gets more sophisticated?

A book I would recommend: Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett can be found here.

Please, share your thoughts below.