By Emma-Julie Fox
The search engine optimization (SEO) community may be abuzz about content marketing today, but not everyone is convinced they should also join the bandwagon. To be fair, it is not easy to pursue such a campaign. It’s almost impossible to do it single-handedly because of the amount of work involved. Unless you’ve hired a trustworthy SEO company to provide you with all your SEO and online marketing needs, you may have a difficult time implementing a really effective campaign that will produce results soon after.
So if this is the case, how does one sell the idea of starting content marketing for a business or website, especially one that doesn’t have the luxury of inexhaustible funding?
The Good Points of Content Marketing
Shine the spotlight on the positive points of content marketing. Surely, your client or boss knows by now that it is one of the most effective methods of SEO and online marketing without flagging the ire of Panda and Penguin (based on the assumption that the content used are well-written, well-researched, contains valuable information, and aren’t stuffed with keywords and errors in spelling and grammar).
Put it all on the table. Content marketing allows you to do the following:
- Advertise a website, product or service subtly in general information articles that Internet searchers commonly look for.
- Build credibility for your website and the company behind it. According to a study commissioned by Custom Content Council, 61% of consumers are more confident about a company that produces excellent content on the Web.
- Develop a reputation within your niche of being trustworthy.
- Possibly have a wider audience in social media. Websites that produce interesting and engaging content usually get more followers in social media. It doesn’t even matter if they only post blog entries and don’t actually sell merchandise.
- Open a venue for direct conversation between you and your customers.
- Increase your chance of making your original material go viral.
- Save more funds, since content marketing is a lot cheaper than regular outbound marketing (ex: posting advertisements on other websites).
- Add more fuel to social media marketing. It is easier to make each social media post count if you already have available content that’s associated with your main site.
- Drive more traffic to your website (which can be a direct result of the success of the previous item).
- Generate a lot of leads for long-term marketing tactics. The best part is there is a very good chance you won’t lose most of these leads halfway through. By regularly producing quality content, people who sign up for subscriptions will not easily dismiss emails from you-or flag you as spam.
Invoke the Influence of the Majority
A lot of people resist following the trend by principle, and many in the SEO world are like that. Given that there are already plenty of proven benefits of content marketing, surely joining this particular trend should now be appealing to every online business. Besides, the fact that many others are doing this must mean that it really does give them something good. Marketers from various industries now allocate one-fourth of their budget to content marketing.
How to Overcome Difficulties
Any wise leader will be mindful of the difficulties his team will face if they choose to take on a certain path or project. You can expect that your boss, team leader, or client will also do the same. You need to be honest in pointing out the areas where you need more resources, manpower, and so forth. Now the deal-breaker is if you can’t provide plausible solutions to address those difficulties.
If your problem is you don’t have a content writer because your website doesn’t run a blog anyway, you can suggest outsourcing content writers. With 62% of companies outsourcing their content production, you should be able to find a content writing company too that can provide the quality articles you need for the campaign. Outsourcing content is more affordable than hiring your own team of content writers, too.
You can also present a proposal for labor-division among your SEO team. With the content already covered, your SEOs will just have to explore other websites and directories where they can disseminate your content. They also need to provide the content writers with parameters for the articles, like keyword density, list of words and phrases that must be included within the article, their most ideal positions within the article, and so forth.
Basically, the biggest hurdle you may face is in the content production department. You need to team up with skilled content writers who can produce interesting, unique, and well-written articles and blog posts. Once you have that, it will then be up to the knowledge and instincts of your SEO team to place those articles where they can serve their purpose best.
Paint a Pleasant Picture of the Future
Every business presentation or proposal needs to have credible projections for the future. Reality is a factor for determining these projections, of course, but another part of the equation is your confidence and determination to make something work. Those projections will double as your goals for your campaign (and we all know how important it is to establish goals). Goals give you a clear direction for your campaign, and they serve as your guide in figuring out the best ways to get there.
Observe how other websites deal with their content both on-page and off-page. Take note of similar patterns among the more successful websites and analyze the possibility of adopting a similar strategy for your own site. Couple that with the projected metrics for your site, and present your boss or client with a very attractive picture of the future.
=========== Author Bio ===========
Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, an SEO services company in Vancouver that helps businesses across North America improve their organic search visibility . If you would like to invite the author to write on your blog too, please contact Pitstopmedia.com.
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Melody McKinnon is an internet entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in a wide range of online business models, backed by a formal business education and enhanced by training and mentorship. She has owned or managed both educational and ecommerce websites. Her book, 7 Recession Proof Online Businesses to Start From Home, is available from all major ebook retailers.
Melody has worked with many businesses & brands in a multitude of capacities. She can often be found on CanadianDigitalMedia.com, CanadiansInternet.com, CanadianFamily.net, and AllNaturalPetCare.com, as well as other quality digital publications. Her content has earned reference links from highly-respected websites, magazines and university textbooks.
The best way to prove the effect of content marketing is to start a blog and write great content with pictures & graphics. It doesn’t take long for execs to see the writing on the wall and support follows.
Our clients’ sites really take off within a year of optimizing their content. It’s the only way to go these days, quality content.
Unless a business is deaf blind & dumb they must know content marketing is the best way to go. Either create quality content or hire a GOOD writer if you want to show up in top serps. It’s the most profitable way leverage the internet.