Content Strategy is Just one Part of your Social Media Strategy

Back in 2001 Forrester Research asked people why they returned to a website and the overwhelming answer was ‘content.’ It’s still true today.

Success in online PR and social media depends on the quality of your content. It’s about engaging people and the key to engagement is discovering what your audience thinks is good content. It's not up to you to decide what to publish. Your content strategy should be based on what your audience needs and wants.

In social media people are creating, reading, saving, tagging and sharing content. If you don’t produce the kind of content they value, it won’t get re-published or shared.

How do you know what kind of content to create? Listen and observe.

In the past we had to rely on agencies to have a ‘bright idea.’ But when you really listen to your audience, content opportunities easily spring to mind.

Example: A mortgage company discovered that young mothers in their first home were very concerned about the housing market and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They were looking for information in language they could understand. The company saw that they could write articles and do video interviews with their experts in a way that would answer the questions of concerned young mothers.

Example: A natural soda company that makes ginger products saw lots of discussion on Twitter about the health benefits of ginger. Immediately ideas started to flow about how to participate in this conversation – studies, recipes, articles, videos.

Example: a non –profit involved in drug rehabilitation found out that women turn to blogs for information, advice or recommendations. (2009 BlogHer Social Media study.) And what they value most is a review or comment from someone who has used that product or service. Since women are the ones who most often call the rehab centers – a wife, mother or sister of the addict - it was obvious that they needed to create content around the stories of women who had saved their families with this program and get it to women bloggers.

Telling your story online in the right place to the right people gets results. But you need a well-thought out content strategy based on solid research to get those results.

Online PR




One of the best business books is The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al Ries.

In this book Ries explains how PR starts the fire - brands are built with PR. However the media landscape has changed so radically over the past few years, and people are finding information and news differently, so the practice of PR has had to adapt and change too.

It's all about online PR today.

Newspapers are losing readership in their print editions, but visitors to online news sites are up. Yahoo News has the biggest news audience in the world. CNN.com and MSNBC.com are close behind.

People go to social networking sites like Facebook and ask their friends for recommendations prior to purchase. and you can see the increase in the need for online PR in Google search trends - since 2007 the number of searches for online PR has skyrocketed.

If you want to reach your audience today you have to be online.

There are two sides to the story:

1. People are using social media sites and they are in active conversations with others about brands, product, ideas and causes
   
2. When they want info about a company they find the website the most authoritative source.

So make sure you have both aspects covered. Have a powerful social media presence and engage with your customers online. But remember to keep your website up to speed and offer Web 2.0 features. Add all your content to news feeds and make it easy for your site visitors to find you elsewhere online.

SEO Advice for Small Businesses

Robin Good of MasterNewMedia did two interviews with Massimo Burgio on the basics of social media marketing. I was interested to hear Massimo say that the one thing he would advise Robin to write more about is search - what people most need is information about search engine optimization.

And this is borne out by a survey of Top Marketing Trends for 2008 of 1700 MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group) members, conducted by Anderson Analytics.Almost half of those polled said SEO is top of their list for 2008.

It struck a chord with me. I get questions about SEO all the time.

Start with Keyword Research

In order to have effective SEO you must know what keywords you are after. You can use Digital Point (still free) or Nichebot (now charging a fee) to help you find the words and phrases that will bring you targeted traffic.

Type in the word or phrase you think you'd like to get found for. Then go through the list and see what other related words and phrases they have - and how many people search for them each day.

You'll be surprised to find that there are other phrases that could get you good traffic. When you have chosen a phrase go to Google and type it into the search engine. See how many other sites are competing for this phrase. You might want to start with one that is not very competitive.

A content strategy based on keyword research is the best way to get good results from your SEO actions.

Resources:

WebSense: effective internet marketing strategies for entrepreneurs

Content Strategy Workbook

An effective website marketing strategy should include blog and RSS feeds

Sally Falkow

There has been a lot of talk about where website marketing is headed in the next few years. While 2004 may have been called The Year of the Blog, it was not until the summer of 2005 that this trend really took off in the corporate world. You can hardly swing a cat without running into a blog seminar or workshop.

Now enterprise use of content syndication is heating up. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or web feeds, as many prefer to call them, are attracting the attention of corporate marketers.

What’s so special about RSS feeds?

They leverage your site’s most valuable asset, content. It makes it easy to display high-quality, relevant news on your site, and to syndicate your news and content elsewhere. You can use an RSS feed for a variety of content: product news, press releases, technical articles. The list is endless.

The number of people reading RSS feeds is growing by leaps and bounds. Feed Burner, a service that republishes feeds for clients to increase distribution, reports that subscriptions to the feeds they manage are growing by one percent a day. People who read feeds are the ones you want to reach—they're opinion leaders and early adopters.

When planning your website marketing strategy for this year, be sure to include blogs and RSS as part of your marketing and promotion tools.

Blogs make sense for website marketing

In an article in the SEO blog today, the advantages of blogging for business are highlighted.

"There are two major advantages Blogs offer search marketers. The ability to link Blog entries together to form an information-thread network provides search marketers with a number of tools beyond the improvement of the knowledge base. "

Blogs, if maintained properly can be an important component in an effective website marketing strategy

Your Website Is Part Of Your Marketing Strategy

Many people look at a website as a separate expense from marketing. This is unfortunate and the reason why many websites under-perform in their sales potential, says Stoney deGeyter in a good article in ISEdb today

Unfortunately, far too many businesses still don’t consider website development as a part of their marketing efforts, he writes. They’ll pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (which often produce significantly less return on the investment dollar) but fail to properly plan and execute their website or invest in effective online marketing strategies.

I couldn't agree more. Too many budgets have line tiems for all manner of marketing ideas, yet the website was thrown together years ago and now stagnates online. While the reast of world hurtles towards the 'live web' filled with constantly changing consumer-=generated content, a company website that is a static brochure will not get much traction.

You need to get familiar with the website marketing strategies that will bring you interested traffic you can convert to customers. You need to know who is searching for your kind of content.

WebSense is a website marketing ebook written to help small business owners do just that.

Using Search to Create A Brand

Six months ago no one had heard of shielding lotions. No one was searching the Internet for these words.

21st Century Formulations, manufacturers of the shielding lotion brand name Skin MD Natural, saw the power of Internet search and we worked together on a campaign to create awareness of the category and the brand name.

The content on the site was crafted so it was optimized for the search engines and met the needs of users who came to the site.

Each week we write an article on some aspect of skin care and shielding lotions, backed by scientific research data an endorsements from dermatologists. Using RSS feeds these articles are placed into Google News and syndicated to other news sites.

This month for the first time there are people searching for shielding lotion. Not many - true. But they are there. And when you do search that term the first two pages are dominated by his product.

These articles also created good search results on terms like dry skin lotion, dry skin prevention and dry skin treatment.

Every small business owner can use the power of good content to raise brand awareness on the Internet and reach the people who are searching for their products. All you need is a website marketing strategy