What Do Content Marketing, Search, and Social Media Have in Common: Lessons from the Online Marketing Summit 2010
The Online Marketing Summit came to Minneapolis recently and one of the biggest themes of the day was the interdependence of content marketing, search, and social media in your marketing strategy. To kick off the day Joe Puluzzi of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute led a workshop on social media & content marketing. Below are a few of the take-aways for those who could not attend.
A Few Take Aways
- Content creation does not have to be hard! Joe Pulizzi, “…Consistency is key and not everything you publish needs to be an eBook or whitepaper. Everyday advice (small content) mixed with pieces of research and larger information that people want to talk about (big content) is much easier to manage.”
- Diversify your search engine marketing like you would a stock portfolio. Lee Odden, “Google dominates search, but should it dominate your marketing?”
- Be democratic with your social media efforts. Joe Pulizzi, “Mix in other’s content, not just your own and be sure to give credit where credit is due.”
So what do content marketing, search, and social media have in common?
People Crave Content -> People Use Search Engines to Find Content -> People Share Good Content -> Repeat
The answer to this question is nothing new and is a profoundly simple concept. Yet, it is difficult for many marketers to consistently apply content marketing principles to engage people in the cycle described above.
In order to engage people in the cycle above, you’ll need to consider a few tactics discussed at OMS:
- Blogging – but don’t just start a blog that looks like everyone else’s blog. Start by researching popular blogs in your industry. Could you take a contrarian point of view to other blogs in your industry? Could you focus on a particular niche and provide more value? The key is to make your content stand out.
- Optimizing your blog – don’t forget that the primary goal of the blog should be to improve your search engine rankings (people crave content -> people use search engines to find content!). If your blog isn’t within your company’s domain, get it there now. For example, this blog is at priorityresults.com/blog, which is better than blog.priorityresults.com, priorityblog.com and especially priorityblog.wordpress.com.
- Establish a social media listening plan now. Find out what your audiences are talking about and provide them with content they’ll want to share.
The list of ideas from OMS could go on, and on. Have you been to a great conference lately? Want to share some tips? Leave a comment. I would love to hear them.
