Content marketing is the new SEO. It is centered on irresistible content and amplified by social media. It includes blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, podcasts, and infographics. 87% of marketers use social media to distribute the content.- Search engines use hundreds of signals to decide who ranks for a given query. The most important signals they use are external, such as links to your content and social media sharing of your content. Uninteresting content is very difficult to rank in 2012.
- Liking content, sharing, commenting and tagging are the most common forms of engagement. Each of these are “social signals” used to rank content.
- Facebook mutes uninteresting content automatically based on engagements. 52% of customers have unfollowed brands because their content is boring or repetitive.
- Chasing the search engines is a losing proposition. Great content is insurance against future problems and future-proofs your SEO, protecting your content investment.
- Avoid automating social media posting, as it often gets 70% less engagement.
- Listen to your audience. What are they asking for? What does their behavior indicate? How can you fill the void? What content should you produce to fill it next time?
- The days of engaging with you exclusively via your website and email are over. You must engage with the customer on their own terms, wherever they are.
- Social interactions happen in social places – so many interactions will occur over mobile devices in far-flung locales. The opportunities to service mobile users’ needs are vast.
- Ultimately, the customer is in control of the conversation, and these interactions often have many spectators. This is your time to shine, share content and build trust. Resist the urge to take customer conversations “offline.”
- Grow a library of content that is easy to share – blog software is often the ideal tool. Use links to this content to supplement conversations and draw participants into your brand.
- Blogs are written by people, not companies, and must be open to two-way dialogue. The higher up the org chart the author of the blog is the more impact they have on sales and branding. Technical blogs are the exception sometimes.
- Nurture the content creation mavens at your organization as their importance to your competitive potential is increasing.
- Resist the strong urge to use social networks as channels for traditional sales and marketing material, or corporate-speak. It feels easy, but it’s not welcome in social networks. It’s one time when repurposing is not worth it.
- Know who the influencers are in your industry. Follow their social media feeds and nurture productive relationships with them.
“Content marketing is the new SEO.”
I have to disagree, quality content was always a good indicator for Google long before the recent updates, plus it was a great way of chasing long-tail keywords. I think the perspective is that more people realise that they need to do content marketing methods because rubbish link building no longer work.
So in fact it is not so much it is new, in my opinion, but more relevant than ever.
Excellent perspective. I think that many of us in the search industry knew this, but finally the decision makers are giving the practice a name and getting behind it. Perhaps off-page factors and social signals have reached a mass among the non-search community where their intuition has aligned with the concept.
Scott , It is true Great Content is the winner , because search engines like Google keep on changing with a great aim of providing relevant content to their users, so if a publisher has great content they will have a bullet proofed their sites from all these endless Search Engine updates. It’s cool to invest in SEO, but content has got to be number one priority.