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Too many brands are relying on SEO and social in a way which places the onus of branded content discovery on the consumer, requiring them to actively search for the brand’s content or leaving it to chance that they’ll stumble across it through social media platforms.

Given that around 95% of B2B and 97% of B2C companies in the UK are practising some form of content marketing, it pays for brands to take a more active approach to getting their content in front of their target users.

“If you build it, they will come” doesn’t cut the content marketing mustard. 

Brands and marketers with experience in content marketing are aware of the need to actively promote their content to supplement search and social. They also understand that a concerted content marketing strategy is necessary to generate a strong ROI on content creation.

Brands can drive traffic to their content and build positive relationships with consumers by remembering a few content marketing tactics:

1. There’s more to life than SEO

SEO is, of course, fundamental to any digital marketing strategy, but there’s no guarantee on it being sufficient to drive significant traffic to branded content.

Used effectively, good SEO enables consumers who are looking for something specific to find it easily and click through to a website for more information. The best SEO is most effective when executed with extreme precision.

However, brands with a real understanding of content marketing know that the content they create is often only loosely related to the core keywords of their brand. For example, a leading bread brand might create an article for their site on the tastiest lunchtime sandwich fillings.

Yet with recent updates to search algorithms, it’s far more likely that consumers searching “tastiest lunchtime sandwich fillings” will be taken to content from a company who makes the tasty sandwich fillings, not the bread.

That’s one of the reasons why, according to research by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), only 45% of businesses rate their SEO ranking as a top measurement criterion for content marketing success. There’s more to content marketing than SEO alone.

2. Get the content out there

The main organisational goal for UK companies who undertake content marketing is brand awareness. Lead generation and boosted website traffic aren’t even in the top three things companies hope to achieve with content marketing.

According to the research by the CMI and DMA, promoting the content to raise brand awareness is what companies care about most. So it’s insufficient to merely promote it with some tweets if the company has only a few hundred followers.

Equally, there’s little value in brands developing content for their blog if it only receives ten hits per day. The content must be promoted, whether by emailing it to consumers who’ve opted in to receiving information from brands, or to prospective customers via content discovery platforms which enable marketers to place ads linking to branded content natively within relevant digital editorial.

Promoting content with ad formats which sit natively within relevant content ensures that the branded content is seen as part of a user’s browsing experience, rather than feeling like they’re seeing an ad.

3. Make the most of other relevant editorial

To communicate effectively with consumers, marketers have to seed their branded content around the internet in a way which reflects the many different ways digital content is being consumed.

The content marketing strategy must be compatible with consumers’ content consumption habits. Whilst some consumers actively search for a brand’s content, or come across it via a social media contact, many consumers move from one piece of content to the next via relevant links at the bottom of articles.

Brands and marketers who position their content within relevant editorial are maximising the likelihood of consumers clicking to their content and initiating relationships with the brand.

4. Rework, rewrite, repurpose

The CMI and DMA research discovered that companies in the UK cite ‘producing enough content’ and ‘producing engaging content’ as their top two challenges in content marketing.

It’s an issue partly because of how naively many businesses approach content marketing, assuming that they have to create new, shiny, high-quality content – whether articles, video, or images – on a regular basis and at great cost.

Many companies are overlooking the ways they can repurpose existing content to maximise ROI. A talented copywriter can turn the research conducted in order to write one feature article into several features, each making the same brand-consistent points in a diverse number of ways.

Similarly, a decent video editor knows how to turn a recorded internal meeting on new product developments into an engaging three minute Q&A to go on the company’s YouTube page. Ensuring you have access to talented content creators – whether in-house or outsourced – is crucial to developing a sustainable content marketing strategy for your brand.

5. Listen to your audience

By analysing comprehensive metrics of consumer interaction with the branded content marketers can assess which types of content are having the most impact with consumers and ensure future content fits this mould.

A home gym equipment manufacturer might find that consumers are significantly more likely to share and interact with their “Top 10 Worst Things About Public Gyms” content than their “Top 10 Best Things About Having A Home Gym” article.

This insight enables the creative teams to tweak their content creation towards what consumers actively want to engage with. Content discovery platforms which promote branded content enable brands to assess metrics such as duration of interaction with the content, viral activity, and the sources and volume of traffic.

If a certain type of content is failing to generate a response from consumers, it can be retired, in favour of the types of content which are garnering more attention. Good content discovery platforms are also geared for real-time updates, meaning marketers can place ads which display fresh, relevant, on-trend branded content which can display with each refresh of the page.

When executed effectively, content marketing can be a powerful tool in building brand awareness, and enables brands to build and maintain valuable relationships with consumers. Yet brands must be proactive about promoting their content, and can’t afford to simply rely on consumers to find the content.

An SEO and social media focussed content marketing strategy simply can’t provide the same guarantees for brands as actively pushing the content to ensure the quality content marketers have spent time and money creating is going to be seen by consumers.

Posted by katemorris

We have hired a few new people at Distilled—we’re always growing—but as I was explaining the Keyword Planner to our new hires I realized that we are all thinking the wrong way for the future of online marketing.

One of my colleagues, Tom Anthony, has a very scientific way of explaining it: The new query according to Google. He comes to the same conclusion I did: “We need to stop looking at keywords and starting looking at queries.” In short, we need to be focusing on what the user is looking for rather than specifically all of the ways they can phrase it.

I am not going to try to convince you of this. We are here. This is the world we live in, so rather than adapting the old way of thinking to the new search order (NSO?), it’s time to change our thinking.

What does this really mean to us as practitioners on a day-to-day basis?

We have to stop using the term “keyword” as much as we can. It will never go away, don’t get me wrong, but our focus has to change. This means speaking differently, reporting differently, and changing the conversation with our clients about their goals.

You are going to get asked for a keyword research report or a keyword ranking report soon. We as search professionals have provided them in the past, so it’s normal for your boss or clients to expect a certain type of data or report. However, with the changes over the last few years, it’s time to modify what we report to align better with the data we can get and the data that is best for our goals.

Start by defining your goals

We’ve said this time and time again: You have to define what you want as a business before you can really get to doing your job in the best way. Your company goals could be:

• to be a thought leader in your space
• to grow the business
• to launch a new product
• to increase your company’s share of voice in the market

These goals should be set by the company collectively, not just you. Your goals are based off of this. Your goals should be something measurable and impact the company’s goals. Let’s say that the company wants to grow their business’s revenue by 50% next year, website performance can help that with conversions, new visitors, and overall more traffic. Therefore your goals might look like:

• Increase overall website traffic by 25%
• Increase new visitor percentage from 25% to 40%
• Increase conversion rate from the website from 45% to 70%

Notice that keyword ranking and traffic based on keywords are not in here. It’s doubtful they ever have been part of your defined goals, but knowing your goals and the company’s goals helps change the conversation.

Now, what do you want to accomplish?

Time to start the hard conversations. You should be reporting on your goals from above and what actions you are taking to affect those numbers. At some point your boss or client will ask for a keyword or ranking report. When they do, ask what they want to accomplish with that information. It’ll give you more insight into what they are looking for and how best to report that to them.

Most likely it’s so they know what your efforts are focused on, and that’s understandable.

1. Start by explaining your goals and how they impact the bigger company goals.

2. Then, explain the changes to the information that is sent to analytics, and that reporting on the keyword level is next to impossible.

3. Finally, talk about how you want to stay dedicated to things that can be measured, and provide results to the company’s bottom line.

If they then say that the keyword is the most important thing for you to report on, ask why again. The answer is usually because that’s how you tell if your site is ranking for a term, or if your “SEO is working.”

Rankings happen for many reasons; the keyword or query is just the initiator of the process. You optimize a page to be the strongest it can be after you’ve made it the best page for a specific need or topic. There are multiple variations of keywords for any one topic, and therefore your focus should be on the page and the topic, not just one or two of potentially hundreds of keywords.

The two major factors in ranking that you can have an effect on are related to the target page. Having relevant content and strengthening the page are what you should be focused on as a search marketer. Look at the highest correlated factors to ranking from the 2013 Ranking Factors Survey. All of the top factors are page-related.

Your next question should be: If I stop thinking about keywords, how do I know what content to develop to rank?

That depends on the user. We as a profession have really lost sight of talking to the users of our websites. Think about any number of keyword research presentations in the past few years (I’ve done and seen a number of them) and you’ll see that many of them spoke to the Google Keyword Tool’s numbers being wrong and getting inspiration in other places, mainly where your target market hangs out.

If you want to know what content to write to “rank” for terms, ask the people who are searching for that topic what they are looking for and write that. This changes how we do research but I think for the better.

Changing reporting

I am going to leave you with how I have started reporting on page level changes and how “SEO is doing.” You should again be reporting on the metrics you defined in your goals, but you’ll need to replace keyword-specific reports. I’m referring to reports like the number of keywords sending traffic (RIP; that was a favorite of mine), branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic, and ranking reports.

Step 1: Define all search landing pages

This should be all pages on your site technically except those noindexed, but we almost all have an idea of what pages get traffic from search engines. If you are a larger e-commerce site with thousands or millions of pages, you can group these into categories or by page type. Whatever works for you.

Step 2: Prioritize the top landing pages

Remember the terms you always had to report ranking on? What were the pages that needed to rank? Identify those and make a prioritized list just like you would have with keywords.

Step 3: Pull monthly traffic over the last year for those pages

You can automate this of course, but if you have a small number of pages it can be done by hand as well. Traffic is what you want to know about, and you want it to be going up. If traffic goes down to that page, that is your sign that something changed, either the SERPs or demand for that content. Just like if rankings went down, you’d investigate why after seeing that drop.

Step 4: Pull related data per page based on your goals

For the goals we defined above, I’d also report on the percentage of new visitors and conversions. You could report on bounce rate or time on page as well. Below is something that I recently sent to a client (modified to be able to share with a wider audience, of course).

I then investigated the pages that lost traffic and they are on my list to watch next month. This is just how I decided to do it for this client and I am interested to hear how you are having to change your reporting to deal with the changes in our world.

Please share your thoughts below, and have a great week!

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