Content Marketing Today

Five top takeaways from "Killer Web Content" by Gerry McGovern

Your business attracts potential customers online who are pursuing tasks that are truly important to them. When they arrive at your site, they want to find what they need as quickly as possible so they can complete the set of tasks that they have in mind.

According to content strategy guru, Gerry McGovern, your site will succeed or fail based on its ability to let your prospects complete their tasks quickly and completely. In his classic book, Killer Web Content, he offers a clear roadmap to delivering exactly what your customers need in the way that they need it.

If you haven't read his book, order it immediately. It's that good. He models his content commandments. He doesn't waste your time and manages to deliver the goods concisely, compellingly and completely.

There's plenty to take away from his masterful book but, until your copy arrives, here are five that I found most valuable for content marketers.

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External links to your site from high quality, relevant websites are one of the best ways to generate great search results.

Why? Because, from Google’s perspective, your site ranks better if lots of your well-respected peers consider your site worth linking to. It's like being friends with all the cool kids in high school. That makes you popular, too.

Unfortunately, the importance of generating quality links to your site opens the door to nefarious SEO practitioners who send out mass, evidently automated comments to a range of sites that have nothing to do with your company or your online presence.

A perfect example arrived in my e-mail this morning as a link to my article, "Six Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool."

The SEO spammer left this absurd and ungrammatical comment:

"I've implies looked at it by way of that point of view and happen to be enlightened.  I will have to obtain some extra information and report it back again. Thank you."

I don’t know about you, but that sure doesn’t motivate me to connect with the ‘commenter.’

How to Avoid Falling for This Kind of Black Hat SEO Spam Link Building Technique

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Simply Combine the Two Online Personalities to Get a Very Happy Ending

The frightening story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wove the tale of a saintly doctor whose alter ego was an evil murderer. Sadly, there was no happy ending.

In a parallel but more modern context, I found a company that suffers from a similarly split online personality.

If you first meet the good half—the blog, you will want to spend more time getting to know them. But, if you first meet the bad half—the website, you're likely to head off as fast as you can.

The company in question has a website with very little content. At the same time, it has an excellent but completely separate blog, that lives, like Dr. Jekyll, under a different name.

By integrating the two separate content components, this company could deliver compelling content that immediately engaged visitors. The result: a happy ending.

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If You Don’t, You’ll Be Just Another Generic Acme Corporation Whose Content Marketing is Doomed to Fail

Mission and vision statements may be important to your company internally.  They may even deserve a place on your website once your visitor begins to drill down to learn more about your company.  But they don’t belong on your homepage.

Why? Because they are all about you. They rarely have anything to do with your customer.  To capture your visitors’ attention, you must make your homepage content all about them from the first instant. 

Here’s an actual example of content marketing getting clobbered by the prominence of company-centric clichés.

Really Bad Real-world Mission/Vision Statements Scuttle Home Page of ‘Acme’

The following example makes the case better than I can. I swear that I didn’t invent these two paragraphs.  Nor did I use the automatic mission statement generator from NetInsight. Read these and weep. (I owe the company pseudonym to the always victorious Roadrunner who outwits any Acme products.)

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The brand-new and very revealing study from Junta 42 and Marketing Profs reinforces the growing dominance of content marketing in the business-to-business arena. 

Not only are the vast majority of business-to-business marketers employing content marketing but most will also be increasing the amount they spend.

Here are some highlights to give you a flavor of why you need to get a copy of this free study:

• 90% of respondents are using content marketing in 2010
• Content marketing is 26% of the total marketing budget
• 51% will increase content marketing budget in next 12 months
• Average annual content marketing spend: $379,600
• Small companies spend more of their budget on content than large companies
• Most companies combined in sourcing and outsourcing
• Social media ranks right at the top of tactics

The three following charts illustrate vital content marketing and social media trends within the B2B market segment:

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How to Get  Readers to Spend Serious Time with Your Core Content

Be brief. Be complete. Be Enticing.

Headlines have always been important in print publications. They are even more important online.

They grab readers’ attention and lure them into reading entire articles.  If you have lots of great headlines, avid readers will linger much longer with your content.

Solutions for Short Attention Spans

Today’s readers have short attention spans. That’s exponentially true for your online visitors. You have seconds to grab them before they move on.  You need to show why they should care enough to continue reading. Otherwise, your content marketing efforts will fall short.

Easier said than done, you might think. Fortunately, a quick scan of this morning’s online edition of the New York Times illustrates the 3 secrets that you can apply to your online headlines.

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It's All about the Maximizing the Frequency of Critical Keywords on Your Homepage

I have believed that integrating the two content marketing components was important since the very beginning of my own online efforts. 

Of course, your content marketing strategy relies on providing relevant, compelling, and frequently updated information that targets your best customers. By integrating a blog into the homepage of your website, you have the opportunity to do exactly that. You can write lots of articles and organize them in a logical way so that your visitors can find exactly what they need quickly.

But, until last week, I seriously underestimated why the integration of those two is so very important to getting found by Google and by your prospects. And, after all, getting found is what makes great content valuable to you and your organization.

Findability Flows Naturally from Homepage/Blog Integration

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Lessons from an Eye Doctor Website That’s Not Visible Enough for Search Engines

Of course, your website must provide relevant and compelling content for your prospective customers.

Ideally, that content should combine both text and images to grab your visitors attention and to keep them on your site long enough to get to know and trust you.

Here’s what is less obvious. Google does not see your site exactly the way your visitors see it. As far as Google is concerned, your website is a bunch of text whose structure and formatting make clear what is most important to the visitors who will benefit most from the site’s content.

Therefore, although you may have a beautiful website with strong visual appeal, it will fail in findability, unless Google discovers text information that it sees as truly relevant to a keyword search.

Google Needs to Find Text on Your Website Structured and Prioritized the Way it Wants

While I was doing competitive research for a doctor client, I uncovered  an example of a missed SEO opportunity by examining the website of one of his competitors.  I found it by doing the opposite of what real patients would do. I dug many pages down on Google search results. In fact, among the top keywords, this competitor’s best ranking is #32. For eye doctor, he comes in at #58 and for eye surgery he comes in at #113.  That’s much too deep for most patients who are looking for eye care solutions using the most popular keyword terms.

The problem boils down to failing to give Google the text and structure it needs to generate valuable search results.

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B Squared Marketing Shares Its Wisdom While Making It Short and Sweet

I might be getting carried away. But, I loved this very brief bit of marketing advice when it showed up on my iPhone this afternoon.  I think it proves how brevity can be the soul of content marketing brilliance in a social media milieu.

B Squared is an established SW Florida Advertising that does great work and has won a ton of awards. I knew that, but I hadn’t thought of them for ages until I saw their Facebook post this afternoon.  I was so struck that I had to write something right now.

Advertising Tip of the Week: Want to drive more traffic? Consider condensing a 3 to 4 month advertising budget to just 6 weeks and build a promotion around it.

Six Reasons Why This Makes for Fabulous Content Marketing

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Unless You Address This Top of Mind, Unspoken Question, You are Out of the Game

Imagine for a moment, that you are looking out at a hoard of your customers in an actual or virtual audience and that each and every one of them is wearing a hat.

And, on each and every hat, are the words "so what?"

Essentially, that's what they're thinking when you are talking, sending them an e-mail, inviting them to your website, sharing an eNewsletter, mailing them a brochure or presenting them with an advertisement.

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