Content Marketing: More Than an SEO Tool
It’s certainly no secret that content marketing is one of the most valuable tools in any SEO arsenal and it’s seems that this trend is set to grow beyond expectation. SEO companies and businesses across the world are investing millions in the development of content strategies to boost rankings, but it doesn’t stop there.
A comprehensive, well-researched and fully developed content marketing strategy, however, can provide more than SEO value; a number of innovative and quite frankly, revolutionary, content marketing strategies have shown us that content marketing can be a powerful brand building tool. James O’Brien at ‘Mashable’ talks about the value of content marketing and absolutely hits the nail on the head; he states:
The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return.
To really engage an audience and build your brand image through content marketing you must give something back; that could be useful information, inspiring ideas or in many cases, entertainment!
In almost every post about content marketing there will be some mention of Red Bull and with good reason; Red Bull takes content marketing to a whole new level and the success of their content campaign is extraordinary.
How Can You Apply These Principles To Your Strategy?
The Red Bull content strategy is highly complex and involves many branches but for a small business looking to improve their brand image and rankings through content marketing, this is simply impossible to emulate. What we can take from the Red Bull strategy, however, is the basic principles and then apply these principles to smaller, more simplistic strategies.
Red Bull’s strategy is very simple in principle: content marketing is designed to promote and increase awareness of a product but is never directly correlated with the product itself. The basic concept can be seen in an array of Red Bull’s published content: thousands will watch a video of a man jumping from an unnerving height in a wingsuit branded with the famous bulls but would a video about energy receive the same number of views? Of course not!
Obviously a small plumbing company in Northampton won’t be producing high quality videos showcasing extreme sports but that doesn’t mean that their content strategy shouldn’t provide valuable, useful information.
Yes, the content strategies of smaller businesses in less ‘extreme’ industries won’t be quite as bold as Red Bull but it’s all about finding the right niche and being realistic.
What will your audience actually be looking for? What will attract the biggest viewing numbers but more importantly, what content will attract the most viewers that are likely to convert into customers? It would be pointless, for example, to produce highly entertaining and humorous posts about recent celebrity antics that attract 200 readers a month for a company selling carpet cleaning products!
So what does all of this tell us about the state of content marketing in 2013? It means that we all need to step our game up and think further than rankings. When it’s been proven how much value content marketing can bring to an SEO campaign and to a company as a whole, the question that remains is: why isn’t everyone doing it? Let’s take a leaf out of Red Bull’s book of content marketing wonders!
January 8th, 2013
Helpful article. Thank you so much. Did you know that Rank Tracker Tool is another useful tool to help optimize the SEO strategy? See http://www.ranktrackertool.com