Why Great Content Just Isn't Enough
Posted by Stephen Moore on Fri, Nov 04, 2011
People hear about content marketing and they think they merely have to produce clear, compelling content. There is much more to content marketing.
This assumption stops a lot of people from being successful with their marketing attempts because they forget that great content is not enough on its own. If you trick yourself into believing that content is enough, you will forget to focus on the other elements of a successful online campaign.
Forgetting these complementary elements can kneecap your campaign before it ever begins. Great content needs to be found, needs to be spread and needs to get people to act.
What’s the purpose of having great content if no one finds it?
Search engine optimization (SEO)
To make your great content easy to find you need a search engine optimization strategy. Blogging and other forms of content are useless if no one reads them and the best way to bring people to your content is through search engines. You need to create readable content, but your content also must be searchable. How do you make sure that people searching the Internet find your material instead of your competitors? The answer: find and focus on keywords.
The first thing you need to do is identify the keywords people use when searching for your products or services or those of your competition. The second thing you must do is to incorporate those keywords into the content you create. The more keywords you rank well for in search engines the more business you will generate for your company.
Hubspot research shows that content marketing efforts that produce 16 to 20 search engine friendly blog posts per month get more than twice the traffic of those that produce four posts per month.
Social media presence
Producing great content that is easy to find is part of the battle, you also need to ensure people share your content with your network. An effective content marketing plan involves building a social media presence and engaging your followers and friends. Having this kind of social media presence lets your content spread so that more people will see, read and share what you write.
To make sure people can share and spread your content you need to include social sharing buttons for the major social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Having these buttons makes it easier for people to like and tweet and the easier it is, the more likely people are to share.
Generate activity
If you are blogging for business I’m assuming that your goal is to generate leads and revenue. If you want people to sign up for a newsletter, ask for a free consultation or download an ebook you need to ask. Better yet, tell people to act. Issuing effective calls to action is an important part of content marketing.
Businesses that have more than 200 blog posts will generate more than three times the leads that those with fewer than 20 blog posts -- if you blog more it is easier for people find you and easier to get them to trust you. All of that writing will be wasted and all of those leads lost if you do not issue a call to action.
Nurture your leads
Whatever your call to action involves, you need to make sure it includes asking for people’s email address. Collecting e-mail addresses will make it easier for you to contact leads in the future and to move them further along in your sales funnel.
Content marketing needs to enable repeat approaches and place as many hooks into your leads as possible.
Content in a vacuum is useless
Content marketing needs search engine optimization so people can find it, needs share buttons so people can spread it, needs a call to action so you can get people to act and a lead nurturing strategy so you can profit.
Don’t create compelling content and leave it in a vacuum.