I often write here with tips on SEO for WordPress, how to setup your WordPress site so that it does well in search engines. Less time has been dedicated to what is also a very important topic: content marketing.
It’s not new, content marketing has been around as an idea and practice in the main stream for the past couple years at least.
What is it?
Well let’s start with a popular definition:
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 layman’s terms, it’s writing, valuable content and publishing it online – regularly.
Want and example?
Well you only have to look here at our very own blog. We try and write as often as possible, we share content that we think our audience will be interested in and regularly share educational material – sharing our knowledge.
Some key points to notice:
- It’s not sales focused content, there’s very little if any sales angle
- The content is focused on us demonstrating our competence in our field
- Many of the blog posts introduce new ideas, things our audience can take away and do to make their own online presence more successful – it’s valuable
An interesting observation
This week, while talking to a client in the publishing industry he made this point:
“We all know print is in decline, interestingly though top 100 companies are snapping up the writers and editorial staff to work inside their marketing departments – creating content”. Companies large and small are on the band wagon – they know that getting eyeballs online is an important part of their success.
Content Marketing facts
Some of these stats are US based but still relevant.
- 67% more leads per month for a business with an active blog – source
- eMail marketing is still the most popular communications channel for B2B marketing – source
- This last one is from a 2012 report so while a little old the message is still the same: Companies that blog 15 times a month get 5 times more web traffic than those that don’t blog
The benefits of a well run content marketing strategy
- Regularly published content on your website is great for SEO – Google is hungry for fresh blog posts
- A platform for you to stand out from the crowd, let people know you’re a specialist in your field
- Good content will get shared, visitors to your site share quality content with their networks – putting you in front of even more eyeballs
WordPress, the centre piece of your content marketing strategy
Most sites that we launch for clients have a blog. The platform for their content marketing is right there.
WordPress has a number of tools that allow you to easily publish your new blog posts to your social media networks (think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.. ) It’s also simple to add sharing buttons to a WordPress blog so that visitors can share your content to their social media networks.
We’ve written a lot about Mailchimp over the years, our eMail marketing tool of choice. It’s also very easy to integrate with WordPress.
A well setup WordPress blog should be the central tool for content marketing. Focus energy there creating new and valuable blog posts knowing that they are shared to your social network and / or eMail lists without much additional effort.
Ok, time to stop reading and start thinking about how to start using content marketing for your business.