Content Marketing Consulting - London | What It Is & Why You Need It

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the hottests topics within digital marketing, nowadays more than ever. However, due to the popularity of the subject and the evolution of how people consume content, it is increasingly getting difficult to stand out and produce content that performs well.

What is content marketing exactly?

According to the content marketing institute:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

In simple terms: it is a key marketing practice that every brand needs in order to create quality content that resonates well with their audience and trigger new leads to their website.

Why is content marketing important?

Here I outline six reasons why I think content marketing is a key activity:

Brand awareness & reputation:
Content marketing is a very effective method of building brand awareness & reputation to new and targeted audiences.
Link building:
High quality content is more likely to be linked to, as it entices other sites to reference it and vouch for it.
Drive traffic & conversions:
Outstanding content helps you reach a broad audience by focusing on topics that are relevant to their needs, interests, and problems.
Educate audiences:
Content marketing helps brands communicate their values, USPs and product / service features to their customers and educate prospects on their offering.
Build a long lasting relationship with customers:
The more (and the better) the content you share with your customers, the stronger the relationship is going to be, helping you to retain your customer base.
Content marketing is cost effective:
Compared to other digital marketing channels, content marketing is a relative cheap method of generating results.

Content marketing and SEO

Content is the most important factor in SEO, in my humble opinion. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it is clear how they have put a strong emphasis on “content” as the decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from the 1st of August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire article).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website in order to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Content’s role within the marketing funnel

The word “content” gets thrown around a lot online, but it is good to make a few clarifications. There are different types of content, aimed at different goals within the marketing funnel.

I like to differentiate content as transactional and informational.

Transactional: content aimed at a commercial intent, present on the most transactional sections of your website – core product and service pages.
Editorial: anything designed to inform, educate or entertain and differs from commercial content as it aims to address a navigational and informational user intent. It can take several forms: from blogs and content hubs to supportive product / service pages.

The goal of creating editorial content isn’t sales and conversion driven. The goal is to influence the user behaviour at the very top of the funnel and not compete only at the mid-end of the funnel, where it is much harder to stand out. The end result of great editorial content is to create branded search volume and direct traffic, instead of competing in the mainstream market.

On the other hand, transactional content is the one that targets users who are ready to convert, by helping them make an informed purchase decision.

Brands and webmasters should develop strategies that impact the user at every step of the way, if they want to be successful. By making use of the right type & format, content plays a crucial role at every stage of the marketing funnel.

Source: https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/content-marketing/how-to-create-marketing-funnel/

Content with SEO in mind

Content marketing without the help of SEO is like driving a Ferrari with the engine of a Fiat 500: it does drive but not as fast as it should! Connecting the two activities together is what a lot of brands out there fail to do: they plan and produce content without SEO really informing their decision-making.

These are the stages where I think SEO is key help to content perform at its best:

Keyword research: the bread and butter of every SEO task – finding the most relevant keywords for the job, listing key metrics for decision-making, such as search volume, seasonality of the keywords, keyword difficulty and so on.
Search intent analysis: the audit of the actual search intent behind keyword clusters – this is where I see things going wrong very often, where digital marketers do not pay attention to the SERP and do not understand what type of results Google is showing.
Content strategy:based on the research done, it is the development of a content strategy that plans what content should be produced, in what format, and when.
Content calendar: the roadmap where the content is broken down by a brand’s marketing calendar, and posting content has been planned to the details.
Copywriting with SEO in mind: the actual copywriting but keeping basic principles of SEO in mind, such as metadata, image optimisation, internal links and so on.

Content is king, Yes!

~ but what makes it king,
is a great SEO strategy behind it!

Samuel Mangialavori

Digital marketing consultant

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