What happens on the internet in 60 seconds? 1,500 Blog Posts, 60 New Blogs, 98,000 Tweets, 20,000 Posts on Tumblr, 600+ New Videos Uploaded to YouTube, 6,600 Images Uploaded to Flickr, 79,000+ Facebook Wall Posts and over 695,000 Facebook Status Updates. What does all that activity have in common? It’s content, it’s social and presents a ripe opportunity for optimization.
Content Marketing is a hot topic and deservedly so. According to an AOL Nielsen study in May 2011, 53% of all time on the internet is content consumption. In the U.S. alone, 27 million pieces of content are shared per day. In the Junta42 and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing study, it was reported that 90% of marketers use content marketing and 51% plan to budget more than the previous year.
To help businesses, strategists and practitioners make sense of the opportunity, the first Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland, OH this week will bring together an impressive mix content marketing smarties, strategists and practitioners. My little slice of this content marketing pie concerns the intersection of Social Media and SEO as assets for an effective Content Marketing Strategy.
Specifically, I’ll be covering:
The Importance of a Holistic Approach – Organizations are achieving certain levels of effectiveness by employing Search, Social Media and Content Marketing strategies independently vs. not at all. However, the opportunity to really master the ability to optimize for consumer/buyer content preferences for discovery, consumption and sharing is too significant to ignore. A holistic approach to Content Marketing leverages optimization of content for user experience that includes search visibility and social sharing as well as engagement that inspires business outcomes for marketing, public relations, customer service, human resources and other functional areas.
How Exactly Do Social Media, SEO & Content Marketing Work Together? – The possibilities are exciting when you think about how both search and social media optimization can elevate relevant content visibility, especially to target audiences that are actively looking. The path from research to purchase involves interaction with search and social influences at an increasing rate. A study by GroupM and comScore reports that 48% of buyers were led by a combination of search and social media to purchase. The effect of interacting with search and social influences can vary by topic, phase in buying cycle, geography and person. Companies that incorporate Social Media and SEO in their Content Marketing Strategy can amplify their ability to be the most visible and relevant resource throughout the customer lifecycle. Additionally, social content and links can be influences (directly but more likely indirectly or conditionally) on standard search visibility.
7 Step SEO Strategy – Understanding relevant customer preferences for topics, customer pain points, position in the buying cycle and behaviors helps content producers and marketers research keywords, plan, optimize and promote content with purpose. Integration with other departments can co-opt resources for common benefit and of course no marketing initiative is effective without measurement – KPIs to conversions. The specific 7 steps I’ll cover include:
- Audience
- Keywords
- Content
- Optimize
- Socialize
- Integration
- Measure
Tactical Best Practices and Examples – Rounding things up includes a few examples B2B and B2C that illustrate at a high level, the implementation of these 7 steps and the resulting outcomes.
Readers of Online Marketing Blog know how enthusiastic and persistent I’ve been at promoting Social Media SEO and Content Marketing. The number of companies operating these functions independently is simply astounding. The opportunity to amplify or “Optimize” online marketing effectiveness towards reach and engagement is too significant to keep Social, SEO & Content in silos. I greatly appreciate opportunities to share this perspective at events like CMW.
If you’re attending Content Marketing World, I do hope to see you Thursday, September 8th at 2:00 PM for my presentation, “A Content Marketer’s Guide to Social Media & Search Strategy”.
For a deep dive into the subject, you might also want to check out,”Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing” to be published by Wiley early in 2012.
Infographic from Go-Globe.com
