A key piece that often ends up at the bottom of the to-do list due to the lack of time of the people in charge of its creation.
It is an understandable mistake to underestimate the importance of content creation and dissemination. Content strategies are medium- and long-distance races , so their results take time to arrive, while the investment required for their creation is immediately evident.
It's easy to get carried away with the analysis of "we spent X amount of money to create this content and it only got us 20 website visits and one contact... from a student. We have a resoundingly negative ROI. Content creation and dissemination are cancelled ." Okay, understandable, but poorly done.
Apart from the fact that to correctly measure ROI you have to take other factors into account, as we explained in the article How to measure the ROI of a digital marketing plan , you have to assume that content rarely works on the first day. That is its flaw. But its great virtue is that when it starts to work, it does so for a long time, constantly and tirelessly.
Unless we have a great stroke of luck – mixed with a lot of talent, obviously – and create something that goes viral, content serves two very important functions over time:
Increase the company's reputation
Improve SEO positioning
1. They increase the company's reputation
Content is one of the factors that contribute to a company's reputation, which we discuss in detail in this guide that you can download for free: ONLINE REPUTATION. Guide to creating, managing and defending it . But unlike other factors, content is unique in that we control it 100%. We create it, and we decide what we say and how we say it.
The content strategy, especially if it is integrated into an Inbound Marketing campaign , must be designed to turn our company into an intellectual reference within its field.
EXAMPLE: If we are an art gallery focused on collectors who want to invest, our content will be created to help these collector investors make the best decisions. It is not about talking about our art gallery and saying how wonderful the artists we represent are, but about explaining to our potential clients how to choose which artists to invest in and what financial procedure to use to obtain the best tax result.
Tax result? Yes, let us remember that our potential clients are not only collectors, but also investors. And it is even likely that they are more investors than collectors and their only interest in art is as an investment object. And we must do so for two reasons:
The first is obvious: anyone who wants to know about our gallery and the artists we represent will easily find us on the Internet. This audience is mature, and the content strategy is aimed at the "green" ones who we want to think about us when they reach maturity.
The second is that we seek to be considered list of timor leste consumer email experts in the world of art investments, not in a specific group of artists. Our content must speak to topics of general interest. It must educate the user. Help them.
You may be thinking right now that you are campaigning for the rest of the art galleries and, after making the effort, you will only get a small percentage of the market. It is like feeling like the "other" in the famous phrase "let others invent".
Our experience tells us that they don't. If you are the source of their knowledge, if you have helped them make the right decisions, if they consider you a reliable and expert reference, you can be sure that they will turn to you. At least in the first place. It is another thing if your artists or the prices of their works do not suit them. But that is another story.
2. They improve SEO positioning
Search engines keep their algorithms secret and constantly modify them to improve the quality of results while taking the user into account.
It is easy to see when two people, on two different devices, perform a search using the same search engine and the same search terms. The results they get are different because the search engine takes into account factors such as each user's browsing history, their geographic location, their behavior on different websites, etc.
The problem is that search engines do not clearly explain what these changes consist of and what we should do to improve SEO positioning. They simply offer general guidelines on what a website optimized for SEO positioning should look like. Therefore, there are many factors involved in the SEO positioning of a website.
Apart from optimising the website itself with the correct use of meta tags and appropriate programming, the generation of quality content is proving to be very effective. The search engines themselves say that they really like it: fresh and useful content.
For this content to fulfill its function, we recommend that you create it based on these keys:
2.1. What keywords does your potential client use?
There is little to explain at this point. It is a matter of investigating, using the numerous tools available on the Internet, what keywords your potential client types into the search engine to find the information you want to offer them.
2.2. Is your website and blog optimized for those keywords?
After the above research, make a list of keywords and optimize your content based on those keywords. This is a job that can be complicated and involve more changes than initially planned. For example, it may require modifying URLs and, as a result, internal links and "notifying" Google - through Google Search Console - of the changes that have been made. Does this seem like a hassle? Hire specialists because doing it right is a hassle, a long process, and requires being very methodical and having specialized knowledge.
2.3. Do you publish posts on social media that include those keywords?
We are not repeating the previous point, but we are referring specifically to those tweets and phrases that you publish on your social profiles with the intention of getting your followers to click on the link. But are you sure that those short phrases include the right keywords? Or are you using an automatic publishing tool, or a plugin from the website or blog itself that, so to speak, extracts whatever it wants to compose the post?
Write them down by hand. Take advantage of the resources of each social network so that the keywords are also relevant (for example, a hashtag on Twitter).
What content format is ideal?
The content format should be the one that best conveys what you want to communicate and remains within affordable production costs. In some cases, it will be a PDF document, a video, a spreadsheet, a seminar... the possibilities are many. You also have to take into account whether one of the objectives of the content strategy is to improve organic positioning in search engines. In this case, blog articles and videos, both well-tagged, are king.
