Content is all around us. From your business’s website copy and blog posts to your Facebook presence, white papers, and YouTube channel, everything you create—in writing, video, and other forms—is part of the content that makes up your personal or professional brand. But if you aren’t approaching your content marketing strategically, you could be allowing other entities to tell your story for you or wasting both time and money creating content that doesn’t support or advance your goals.
Let’s take a closer look at the topic of content marketing and examine why it’s so important, its impact on your online reputation, its relationship to search engine optimization (SEO), and other ways it influences your company’s brand and success.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the practice of creating valuable, relevant content for a specific target audience, with the ultimate goal of driving that audience to perform a specific action—such as becoming (or remaining) a customer.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing can help you rank higher in search engine results, drive sales, position yourself as a thought leader, expand awareness of your brand, differentiate your business from its competition, and/or increase the loyalty of your customer base. And it is often less expensive than other marketing and advertising initiatives.
How Can Content Marketing Improve Your Online Reputation?
When managing your online reputation, you have full authority over some things—such as your website and blog—but others are beyond your control, such as what a newspaper or industry publication reports about you or your business. Content marketing provides a way for you to exert more control over what people find when they perform an online search for you or your brand.
Every piece of content you create, including your blog posts, white papers, tweets, webinars, and LinkedIn profile, falls under the umbrella of content marketing. And the search engines consider different types of content as more or less relevant and valuable, which affects where it ranks in the results.
Blog Posts
White Papers
Tweets
Webinars
LinkedIn Profile
Do you feel confident that your online reputation accurately reflects you and your company? Or does an online search bring up erroneous, irrelevant, or unflattering search results that you’d rather not see on the first page? Using content marketing, you can actively manage the narrative, so you can tell your story the way that works best for you.
If you are ready to start telling your brand story your way, contact our content marketing specialists for a free consultation.
What Is the Main Benefit of Content Marketing?
Content marketing offers numerous benefits, but the primary one is that it gives you a measure of control over what people find when they search you or your business online because it enables you to craft the story you want people to see. As a result, you are able to actively increase your brand’s reach and authority—whether your content marketing is for your business or your personal brand. But to successfully take control of the narrative, you must first understand how search engines (especially Google’s) rank specific kinds of content so you can focus your efforts on the sites and channels that are likely to offer the highest payoff.
What Qualifies as “Good” Content?
So, what exactly makes for “good” content? In essence, good content effectively addresses the query an individual uses in their search. More specifically, good content fulfills the following criteria:
When a person searches for a specific kind of information, they want and expect to find that kind of information—in other words, relevant content. Consider this: If you clicked on this link on the Blue Ocean Global Technology website, and this page covered marketing in general (pay-per-click, video, content, etc.) rather than expounding specifically on content marketing, as promised, you would probably be disappointed. Content that is truly about what it purports to be about is good for SEO and good for users.
Outdated content is rarely helpful or, like the previous criterion, relevant and is therefore of little to no value to searchers.
We’ve all had the frustrating experience of doing a search on something and clicking on a link that led to a sales pitch for a company rather than actual information about the topic at hand. Users want to find answers to their questions, not thinly disguised advertisements. Content that provides actual value by helping the reader learn something is rated highly by both search engines and users.
What Are the Elements of Content Marketing?
Content marketing encompasses a variety of elements intended for different channels, different personas, and even different stages of the sales funnel. For many businesses, blog posts and white papers are the most effective forms of content marketing, but a robust content marketing plan includes additional important elements—from articles on LinkedIn and in industry trade publications to webinars, videos, and e-books.
Developing a strategic content marketing plan on your own can be a daunting task. A proven content marketing partner such as Blue Ocean Global Technology is able to help you determine your priorities and direct your content marketing efforts.
How Are Content Marketing and SEO Related?
SEO is an integral part of content marketing. Content is ranked in search results based on certain characteristics, such as the following: Relevance, Age, The authority of the domain on which it appears, The number of links that point to it
SEO can influence your content marketing decisions by clarifying the types of content most likely to be seen as “valuable” by search engines and by the channels and websites that naturally tend to rank prominently, allowing you to focus your efforts most effectively. Simply posting on your website’s blog is not enough; you must look at the entire search ecosystem and develop a holistic content marketing plan that considers all the different factors.
How Quickly Can Content Marketing Start Working?
Content marketing is indisputably effective, but it is a long-term exercise—you rarely see the results of your efforts overnight. And because search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, you must likewise be constantly managing your content marketing efforts. Smart businesses and savvy professionals understand that content marketing is an ongoing part of their marketing efforts, using it to reach prospective customers, potential hires, partners, and others, and to ensure that people who perform a search for them online find positive and compelling results. Content marketing can do the same for you and your firm.
Blue Ocean Global Technology Content Marketing?
Clearly, content marketing is complex. It requires continually producing the right content for the right channels and—to keep current with the ever-changing search engine algorithms—consistently revising your content marketing strategy. This is why choosing a proven, trusted partner to help orchestrate your efforts in this area is so important.
Blue Ocean Global Technology should be your first choice. For more than ten years, we’ve helped businesses, executives, and professionals like you take control of their story with superior content marketing strategies. Schedule a free consultation with Blue Ocean Global Technology, and start getting the most from your content marketing efforts.
Schedule a free consultation with Blue Ocean Global Technology, and start getting the most from your content marketing efforts.
