What is content marketing?
Marketing guru Seth Godin tells us what we’re selling when we’re using content marketing.
“We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.” Seth Godin
So, what does that mean it comes to bridging the gap between content marketers and potential customers? Where should we be focusing our marketing efforts and how do we deliver engaging content?
What Google says
Google says a lot of things about developing content marketing strategies for SEO. Most of what they’re saying is that we should be answering people’s questions or addressing their needs. It should be:
- Relevant
- Useful
- Authoritative
Which is great because it means you are thinking about your audience and you can use tools like:
- Google Trends (existing search requests)
- Google Question Hub (content gaps)
- Market Finder (identify target audience/markets globally – think ecommerce)
Taking the time to use these (and other) tools and plan our approach to content marketing strategy and individual pieces of content allows us to make sure we are addressing the needs of our target audience. It’s then on us to make sure what we’re producing (whether it’s video content, social media posts, blog articles or ad copy) not only hits the mark from a search engine optimisation perspective but is also emotionally resonant and, well… human.
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What makes high quality content?
We need to be aware of how people search and what questions they need answered, but this is not how we should think about the content we’re creating. If we are always putting the algorithm first we’re going to lose. We need to think about our target audience but we also need to be telling a story that’s worth telling. We should be aiming to:
- Map our audience personas
- Create something that is emotionally compelling
- Put ourselves in our audience’s shoes
- Test, learn and iterate
So, when it comes to content marketing, yes, we should be thinking about what’s going to work for search engines. But, more importantly, we should be thinking about what it’s going to do for the person who is on the receiving end of our content marketing campaigns. If what you’re doing connects with them emotionally or helps them solve a problem it makes sense that they’ll keep coming back.