Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...Therein lies the fundamental difference between today’s SEO focused content and what content marketers offer. SEO is accountable to metrics like search visibility, organic search traffic and any measurable actions that lead to and result in conversions. The more content that can serve as a “hook in the water” of search results, the more the SEO can show an impact on the investment.

As I’ve been saying lately, SEO anticipates demand through an understanding of keyword popularity and content marketing creates demand driven by producing content based on the customer journey. Optimization is an effort to improve search visibility of existing content and digital assets as well as the creation of new content according to a target list of keywords.

Content Marketing is an approach that emphasizes the thoughtful creation of content for a particular audience designed to influence an action or outcome. Rather than keyword popularity driving content creation, an effort is made to understand the customer buying journey and to architect a content plan that provides the right kind of information and experiences along the buying cycle....

Since roughly one out of six Google daily search queries have never been seen before, you must provide relevant content marketing about your organization, brands and products that your current customers need and prospects seek to make their purchase decisions.

Your content by itself isn’t sufficient; it must be findable by your target audience. Therefore, content marketing and search optimization must go hand-in-hand to generate bottom-line results. To ensure your content marketing efforts super charge your search optimization, here are seven actionable marketing tips....

Content marketing is the new focus of digital marketing for practical reasons....

Internet marketers pay attention. Today’s experts have spilled the goods – the best SEO practices yesterday are not necessarily the best SEO practices today. With the Internet space increasingly becoming a part of everyday life, the competition has turned to producing the best web content that people will find useful and/or entertaining.

Quality content has been the direction set by Google since the beginning. Looking at the progressive changes in the Google algorithm, you can conclude that the search engine giant is serious about not wanting trash content on the web. The people who rely on the Internet for information and entertainment don’t want it either.

Transparency: the new priority The pervasive influence of social media and the influx of web content have made customers online more discerning about the content they consume. With the huge amounts of information and choices readily available for them on the Internet, customers have become more skeptical about believing everything they read and see online. Transparency has become of primary importance in the digital age of virtual reality, big data, and information webs. Thus, content marketing should be focused on building trust that leads to long-lasting relationships, which will ultimately and ideally lead to more conversions. Of course, it goes without saying that you also have to deliver on your promises and come up with a great product if you want your customers to trust you....

Search Engine Optimization is a vital part of creating and setting up a website these days. It ensures that your website gets more traffic and more importantly, receives relevant traffic. The common perception that prevailed was that any traffic is good traffic, however with the passage of time, this misconception has been put aside. If you have 1,000 visitors on your site daily, but only 10 are interested in buying your product, this is quite a waste of your hard work. Conversely, if you use the correct strategy to drive traffic to your website and are able to attract 100 visitors to your site out of which half are ready to purchase your product, you have struck gold.

One vital tool that can be used to drive relevant traffic to your website is social media. We all know that having a web presence is important. There is simply no better way to create a positive footprint on the internet than social media. It humanizes companies and makes them more accessible and approachable....

...because the search engines and folks like Matt Cutts have made it their mission toget rid of the crap and demand more excellence from businesses and SEOs alike, we now find ourselves in an incredible transition.

“Gaming the system” has been replaced by “Embracing the system”— a system that is now built around content that talks, walks, and thinks like the consumer– and answers every possible question or need they have. (Content Marketing)

And it’s because of this new model so many SEO companies are in huge trouble. In fact, I’d venture to say that over half of the SEO companies that are around today willbe gone within the next two years....

There is a five-step process to create compelling content that works really well. It starts with your customers and employees to drive kinship and purchase.

... Chuck Kent talked about this a bit in his guest post yesterday, and there is a formula to create compelling content we like to use internally. We stole pieces of this from Jay Baer and added some of our own. It goes a little something like this: Your customers and your employees tell your best stories. Harvest them, feed them, grow them, and tell them (staying with the grower theme).

I like to tell the story of a business owner I met in Omaha last year. As I worked with him, I discovered he has a very unique business model. He only hires blind people, which is an interesting story in and of itself. But as I dug more, I discovered some of those employees have done amazing things...

Get inspiration for your own business from 5 examples of powerful content campaigns that brands are using to engage active, enthusiastic users as contributors....

...The bonus for brands comes when consumers take their engagement a step further, by sharing their brand ambassador status with their peers on social media channels. In a world where people rely on recommendations from friends, this endorsement is invaluable, not to mention it helps brands continually release fresh, powerful content that boosts natural SEO rankings and reaches new audiences.

All the big brands are doing it (Nike’s Fuelband is a classic example), and many of them are doing it so well that their efforts are driving stronger consumer relationships, increased fan endorsements — on social media channels and beyond — and increased returns on their content marketing investments. For inspiration, take a look at five examples of powerful content that brands are using to bring users into their marketing efforts...

In a typical organization, the social media tweets away in one department while content writers toil away in another. The social team links to fresh content, sure… and that’s about the extent of their interactions.