Integrating Brand, content marketing and SEO

How agencies can provide clients with an integrated service given the increasing connection between brand, content marketing and SEO

After a couple of years of travelling and lifestyle consulting, I returned to the UK in 2012 with the goal of setting up a digital agency. I knew I wanted us to be very hands on and do transformative work with a limited number of clients I loved working with. But beyond that, I wasn’t sure what service I needed to create to do this!

Source: InterGreater

It has taken me a year to work this out. But I’m there now and I’m inspired and it’s a journey of discovery I am keen to share.

First Steps: Recognising key developments in SEO and social media

I started this journey as a big believer in SEO having driven 50% of first business’s traffic Easyodds through natural search from 2005 - 2010. In the two years I’d been away from the UK though, the world of SEO had changed. The recent Google Panda and Penguin algorithm updates had led to major penalties for low quality links and content. What’s more it was clear that this was not a one-off as algorithmic updates were being announced on a weekly basis.

So high quality content was a must for SEO. But not just for SEO.

Source:Conductor

In the 2 years I was away social media usage had continued to rocket and Twitter in particular had started to mature as a content marketing platform. Various surveys and articles were telling me that over half of social media activity involved content sharing. What’s more as Google was on the hunt for new and improved data to verify quality and relevance, I thought social data must surely become a key part of its algorithmic ranking decisions at some point.

What better way to identify quality content than to measure relevant sharing and engagement levels as well as backlinks? So high quality content could lead to independent traffic and that traffic in turn could lead to better long term search results.

So now I knew that my service had to merge SEO with social media using high quality, targeted content as the binding ingredient. I believed this could also lead to long term stability. While natural search remained a monster short term line of traffic, Google was increasingly starting to fill its pages with its own products and data.

The launch of Google Knowledge graph, a potential Wikipedia killer seemed a giant leap further towards Google-owned search results. Likewise the social media giants of 2010 remained widely used but the marketplace was still evolving as the massive growth in Pinterest usage proved. But within that environment of change, creating great content and inspiring and engaging a targeted relevant audience – that seemed to be timeless marketing craft and as future proof as any service I could conceive.

Discovering the Brand Connection

The next leg on my discovery voyage happened through practical experience. My first big client engagement was on SEO strategy for the UK arm of a company called Borro a high level personal asset lender. At the point of arrival, they already had great domain authority due to lots of positive press coverage and backlinks from top media sites. But they had very limited, mainly advertorial type content which meant a sparse level of keyword coverage and natural search traffic.

Using their internal marketing data, we were able to identify some big additional natural search opportunities.

Many of their customers were originally looking for either for a service where they could sell their valuables or a traditional local pawnbroker. We forged ahead and created some useful and unique content for these customers including a local assets directory.

However once this work was complete, we discovered that there would be a negative brand impact from associating Borro with pawnbrokers which in turn created a reticence to strongly promote the directory. Although this is something we are still working on together and developing, the potential impact of our work in the early stages was diluted.

Great content may be the key to SEO and social media success but without full brand buy-in, great content can not prosper.

The Power of Brand Purpose and Passion

It took another client engagement to make an even more meaningful discovery. Earlier this year, we were engaged by Adbrain a new advertising software platform, prior to their launch to help with content strategy and execution training.

We spent time exploring the brand values that the founding team was implanting into the DNA of the new company and the passions that had caused them to create the business.

The fact that we were working so directly with the founders at such an early stage was very helpful in drawing these ideas out quickly and authentically.

Source: InterGreater

By the end of session it had emerged that the founders shared a passion for positive disruption of mobile advertising. They felt that mobile advertising and its tracking across different devices was very haphazard and were inspired by the idea of making it better in ways that benefits advertisers and consumers alike.

As soon as we uncovered this driving passion, great ideas of content we could create or share started flowing freely. We could engage in discussion around iconic and useful interruption advertising or new technical advances in the advertising or multi-device ecosystem and many other angles.

Excited by this experience, we started to focus attention in other client work to discovering a brand’s core purpose and passion. The results were amazing.

Finding this core inspiration was like content strategy gold.

Now I’ve experienced this, it makes sense. To succeed with the mission of creating shareable, relevant content, one must find themes related to a company that are not self serving and that its people are passionate enough about to get involved in an authentic dialogue. This is made possible by tearing back the layers of every day activity and delving deeper into a Company to find its core purpose because at the heart of most brands is a passion that originates from something deeper than just making money.

These ideas are beautifully expressed by Simon Sinek in his brilliant TED talk. He talks about how focusing on ‘The Why’, the passion and purpose of a company, has been so instrumental to Apple’s success. He frequently repeats his mantra 'people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it'. Applying this to our service, we have discovered that finding ‘the why’ makes content strategy easy and effective.

Conclusion of connection brand, content marketing and SEO

The upshot of these discoveries is that our service now starts with brand positioning (drawing out ‘The Why’) and content strategy. This leads onto product strategy as it is much easier to effectively design and message a website or a blog once an effective content strategy has been created. Finally we take that product and market it via beautifully crafted content with both social media and natural search in mind.

As I said at the start of this blog, our core purpose is to do transformative work with a limited number of clients we love working with. It has taken a year of discovery to get to a service we feel confident can help us achieve our goals. It may take another year to test and refine our theories but are greatly looking forward to this next part of our journey. 

Thanks to David Gross for sharing his advice and opinions in this blog post. David Gross is the Founder and CEO of InterGreater, a London based digital agency. You can connect with him on LinkedIn,  Twitter or Google+.