As SES Chicago reaches its final sessions the audience is still alert and ready to learn at TopRank CEO Lee Odden’s afternoon presentation on “Content Marketing & Optimization.” According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of time to the year 2003. With so much information being shared what can we do as marketers to make our content easy to spot and easy to consume?
Can Customers Find Your Content?
Content creation is so much more than marketing, it is a way of engaging and enticing potential customers to take action. Optimized content can make sure that customers interact with your brand. There are many types of content that companies publish and many different audiences that a company should interact with. Content creation is one of the most effective form of online marketing, it also happens to be the most difficult.
Tip 1: Popular B2B Content Tactics
If 90% of B2B marketers are using content creation as part of their tactics what are the most popular tactics for releasing this information?
- Social Media
- Articles
- Events
- eNewsletters
- Blogs
Tip 2: What Can Be Searched Can Be Optimized
Any type of content that shows up in a result from a search engine is an opportunity for optimization. What are some examples of content that can be optimized?
- Products and Services
- Corporate Information
- News/Press Releases
- Help, FAQ
- Knowledgebase
- Job Listings
- Landing Pages
- Fulfillment
- Curated/Aggregated
- Media: Video, Audio, Images
- Blogs
- Tweets
- Status Updates
- Comments
- Tags
- MS Office Docs
- PDF files
Tip 3: Customers Use Multiple Resources
Odden asked members of the audience if they have ever asked for something such as a restaurant recommendation from their social network and then took that information and validated it using a search engine. It was a unanimous yes! Be aware that accuracy and multiple points of communication and information will make it much easier for customers to find and interact with your brand.
Tip 4: Identify Your Customer Segments & Personas
There is a set of questions that each company should ask themselves about their customer’s online behavior before launching a content strategy. Those questions would include:
- What are your customers content preferences?
- How do they discover, consumer, and share content?
- What are they looking for on search engines and discussing on the social web?
Tip 5: Ideas For Creating Better Content
In addition to content planning and an implementation strategy there are six very helpful ideas for creating content as part of an online strategy.
- Engage with your community an pull from that experience
- Don’t be afraid to ask for topics
- Look at popular questions on sites such as Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Q/A for inspiration
- Mine web analytics data to determine which keywords and questions drive traffic
- Review the logged queries from your internal search engine
- Turn to your staff to see what they are being asked most often
- Monitor Journalist queries on HARO for story ideas
Key Takeaways
A holistic approach to content creation and optimization proves to be more sustainable long term. As we saw there are many ways to optimize current content (in multiple forms) and create better content based on the information that can be collected about your customers. Were there any other tips that members of the audience found to be useful in our journey through content creation today?
