Content is an important part of any marketing campaign – whether offline or online. But not all content is equal. Content has different forms and each has an intended purpose. Content can drive search, outbound, web marketing, social and even in-person meetings and interactions.
When you can respond to a person’s needs with relevant information and easy, next steps; you are neither a marketer nor a sales person.
You are an asset. You are solving problems.
While this core concept is nothing new, there are so many more choices for how to put it into action. Just off the top of my head, I came up with the following list of organic content deliverables:
- Blogs
- Guest Blogs
- Video
- Landing Pages
- Infographics
- Illustrations
- Podcasts
- Case Studies
- Testimonials
- Email Newsletters
- Memes
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Webcasts
- Webinars
- How-To-Guides
A good friend of mine once said, “When people talk to themselves, we call it insanity. When companies talk to themselves, we call it marketing.”
Technology enables us to tell stories in so many creative new ways and reach audiences through new channels and devices. Yet we still face the fundamental issue as marketing professionals.
Is your marketing content just another form of your company talking about itself, or are you actually giving customers and prospects what they want?
Clarity in Search
Did you know that a basic search tells you a lot about what customers want? Do a search based on the keywords you think are important to your business.
What kind of content do you see on the first page of Google, Bing, etc? What are the questions your customers and prospects ask? How they phrase their questions may have very little to do with formal English grammar and structure, but these phrases and questions tell you what matters to the majority of searchers. Are there geographic trends by country, state, region, cities, towns or communities?
Your prospects are telling you what they want. Are you busy listening or still talking?
Give ‘em What They Want
Businesses have always made money by giving people what they want. Maybe they created a want or need before the public knew it existed. Maybe they just delivered what consumers already knew they wanted, whether it was faster, better, cheaper.
Content development for search marketing is a different animal than content marketing. We don’t just create content that gives online consumers what we think they want. Whether it’s more how-to blogs or YouTube videos, their behavior tells us what they have consumed. Their actions tell us what they want.
Yes, there’s value in content marketing. Yes, there is value in marketing automation. Yes, there is value in all forms of content – all babies are adorable, right?
Search content is one area where the data is already available and performance results show in a relatively short period of time. By giving consumers what they want through your search content, you win.