‘Quality Content ‘ is a term which everyone seems to be focusing on currently for getting a better search presence. SEOs go out of the way to encourage and convince website owners to create a blog and add content and then try to reach out to share that content in order to get more eyeballs to their site. It seems very logical but website owners need to delve deeper to understand the purpose and the logic behind creating and sharing content to get long term quality benefit from this whole process of Content Marketing.
Firstly, the term ‘Content Marketing’ itself is very misleading just as the term ‘link Building’ was misunderstood when Google introduced the ‘PageRank Technology’. Bill Slawski rightly shared on Twitter a few days back...We do not create content to market content but we create content because we want to market the product or service that we are dealing in.
"Content marketing" isn't about marketing your content, but instead about using content to market something!
— Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) November 20, 2013
Since Content is the medium via which we represent our online persona by expressing our company ideologies, product features, future plans of the company, discuss after sales issues, etc. we need to focus on content.
(Photo credit: AltimeterGroup)
Let us answers a few questions related to Content marketing to understand the true meaning.
- What Is Content Marketing?
- What Is The Purpose Behind Content Marketing?
- Why Do We Need To Create And Share Quality Content Regularly?
- Does Content Marketing Focus On Selling?
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing refers to creating and publishing of content in various formats and sharing it via various media in order to get more customers and boost sales.
What Is The Purpose Behind Content Marketing?
Though content marketing targets mostly at getting more customers but in the process if managed and executed methodically , meticulously and strategically it helps in brand promotion , communicating with customers and also helps improve goodwill .
Why Do We Need To Create And Share Quality Content Regularly?
Marketing can never be a one time activity. Even the most established business needs to have market presence in some form or another. From the internet perspective there are millions of sites being published on a daily basis and since the potential online customers most of the time reach your site via search engines your online presence faces that much quantum of competition also on a daily basis. As search engines become more and more sophisticated to integrate quality and quantity signals to websites from all over the web in their index the need to keep your web presence updated with more and more relevant information which is informative and knowledgeable becomes increasingly important.
Does Content Marketing Focus On Selling?
The long term objective of any activity related to marketing is to improve sales, increase profits and retain customers . Content Marketing has the potential for achieving all this but when creating content if the focus is only on sales and the content eventually turns out to be in the form of an advertisement then it may not serve the purpose. If the content is informative and offers solutions to the people who have reached the URL of your content via various platforms then it has the potential of reaching out to you, and such a prospect usually requires very less effort to get converted to a buyer (assuming all the content read by him has created a positive image in his mind about the company).
Content Marketing adds more footprints on the web for web presence but also becomes the crux of connecting to people on the web which in the long run help share the word of mouth which is the basis on which decisions are taken by online buyers.
Most of the time people don’t want to listen to what the seller has to say about his product as this is advertising but they want to know what the previous buyers have to say about the product as this becomes the actual feedback about the product or service which has more impact on the decision making process.
As in real life we are what are thoughts are and we share our thoughts via discussions, seminars, exhibitions, road shows , etc. on the internet we need to share our thoughts via blogs, social media sites, videos, comments, reviews, etc. and on the internet majority of the people use search engines to find information hence the search engines have the onus of correlating all these collective signals from the company blogs, social media sites, comments, reviews, etc. and display the search results after calculating the quality parameters to give quality results to its users. The search engines lately have upgraded their algorithms and are constantly upgrading their algorithms to integrate more and more of such signals so it has become mandatory for the website owners to focus on correlating more content to their web presence in very form to have a complete blended search presence.
Hence, the content you create, share or promote gets correlated to your online persona which has the potential of being found by the search engine users whenever they search for information connected to the content your persona is correlated to.
