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Content is a king

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Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two critical components of inbound marketing. Recently I read a few interesting articles about it. These is a summary of my findings.

The larger the organization, the more challenging it is to get approval and buy-in to build a sustainable content marketing program that will significantly move the needle in SEO

Your content marketing strategy will provide the biggest boost to your organic search visibility if you follow these four rules:

1) Know your key personas

2) Know and write to all stages of the buy cycle

3) Talk outside-in vs. inside-out

4) All write in the same direction

Know Your Key Personas

We all know how important it is to know your customers, core audience and key personas on the web. This applies directly to the content you create – especially for B2B companies – that usually have a limited content creation budget.

The clearer the picture of your personas are, the more targeted your content creation will be resulting in higher quality visitors that are closer to your ideal prospect.

Simply answer following questions:

• What are the main types of business problems the persona typically needs to solve?

• How does your product or service provide solutions to these problems?

• What are some specific tasks the searcher wants to accomplish?

• What are some sample search queries the persona might use?

• What can the site provide that will cause the searcher to accomplish this task?

• What is your business goal for the visitor? Lead gen? Newsletter sign-up? Sale? Inspiration?

• How will the searcher be motivated to complete this business goal? i.e., what’s the offer or incentive? What is the call-to-action?

With this intimate knowledge of your audience in hand, you can craft more relevant keyword and content topics.

Know and write to all stages of the buy cycle

Here are the four main stages of the buy cycle to build content for and the appropriate types of format for each:seo-content marketing

 Author: Scott Fasser, VP of Customer Experience at Optify

 

Talk outside-in vs. inside-out 

Knowing your key words that web users use via a search engine can help you drive a new way of your brand communication as well as modifying your basic message.

SEO helps reach more customers in an inexpensive way. If you don’t like words your clients find your company via search engine, you can invest your time and money into the keywords more relevant to you. But a wiser thing is to use what you have and create different communication by using your current key words.

The lesson here it to review your current and future messaging from the point of view of a persona that does not know about your brand, focus on true differentiation/value proposition and create content that they will understand without needing an explanation. Finding that balance between pushing new concepts and terms vs. serving the market where it exists today is an important input into your content marketing planning.

Write in the Same Direction

Content creation and SEO is no longer limited to the marketing department and copywriters. Blogs, social media, press releases, video, podcasting, etc. has created many ways to easily publish content to your company and other industry related sites. Profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, Pinterest, Google + mean that there are MORE places to fill with content. All of this communication impacts your brand and visibility – positively or negatively.

One of the most important things you can do to amplify your content strategy is to get as many people in your organization to understand how their work can impact the SEO program and what they should to contribute. By giving them the education and the game plan for what key messaging and keywords are reinforces the central promise of your business.

Simply one voice and one direction = you are the king.

 

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Market intelligence and strategy

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Do we need a strategy? Do we need to have  a market intelligence competency?

Yes, it is really important nowadays:

  • strategy,
  • tactics,
  • detailed plan,
  • fast implementation,
  • fast reaction on changes
  • and most boring – process analysis, testing and optimisation, and once again implementation into real operations

Is it a something more difficult than commercial creation or any promotional gadget preparation?

The answer is YES.

Why is it so important?

Because it gives a short and long term strength for your company.

Why is it so unique and most marketing agencies don’t want to propose it to its clients?

Because they want to present fast solutions for marketing departments – a beautiful commercial on the first page in newspaper. But what about customers? What do they need?

Yesterday I read a great article about Generation Y born 1980-1996 and “Cool brands stay hot”

It looks that not only me and my friends are overloaded with information, the same marketing tactics and push sales.

Digideo’s marketing strategy process looks very fast:

1. questions and questions – Every industry has its own specifics. Every company has a different situation – internally and externally, its age and development potentials. It means every company is unique and needs unique solutions:

  • what you did previously? how?
  • what results did you achieve from specific actions?
  • how much is the new customer acquisition?
  • what is the retention?
  • how much does your client pay you in average?
  • what is the cost of serving this customer? – it is a very rare knowledge. Simply many companies don’t know this cost. I can analyse it as well.
  • what services you have?
  • what services did you customer use more often?
  • did you try to contact your previous customers that used your services?
  • who else is in your environment? contractors, subcontractors, the supply chain, etc?

2. meeting with key employees

3. clarifying the goal and the scope of strategy after interviews

4. analyzing the situation: including competitors, SWOT

5. building strategy for particular goal with measures and KPI for processes

6. creating the high level strategy implementation plan = like a project plan with measures

It will take 2-4 weeks for small companies. For huge multinational companies – 2-3 months.

Why is it important to spend a time for it?

1. it gives you a direction, vision and knowledge about yourself and competition, environment around you

2. it sets goals and plan how to achieve them

3. it can look at your processes from outside and help in better performance, cost cutting for example

4. it will help in analyzing you current activities – ROI, efficiency, quality and result for company

5. and many others

MINUSES:

1.  TIME – yes – you need to find a time for me, for this job

2. COST – yes – it costs

3. changing environment – yes – it has to be reviewed after a particular period of time – half a year or quarter.

 

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