Is Content Marketing Right for My Business?

The phrase "content is king" is an old cliché among marketers. And while there are great debates to be had over the accuracy of that phrase, the point to remember is that content is so valuable because all other areas of marketing rely on it for their very existence.

Perhaps most importantly to search marketers, content is the "raw material" of SEO.

Every link earned by marketers points to a piece of content, and the keywords people type into search engines are an attempt to find content. Every email, every tweet, every landing page, and every product description — they're all examples of content.

For one thing, content comprises the core elements marketers can optimize for search engines. Beyond just optimizing the words on a page, the metadata these elements provide to online content help robots from Google and Facebook, among others, understand the information they are crawling so it can be delivered for the right search query.

One of the best ways of describing what they all have in common was summed up brilliantly by Ian Lurie, former CEO of Portent, Inc.:

Content is at the core of what we do as not only SEOs, but as marketers. It’s the primarily vehicle by which we reach our goals, whether that’s delivering information to prospects, educating our audience, or making a sale.

It’s been said that content represents the entirety of the experience marketers deliver to prospects and customers, whether online or offline. As such, that means SEOs have lots of tools at their disposal:

So what is content marketing, then?

Content marketing is the use of content to help meet a marketing goal for your organization.

This could take shape as the acquisition of potential customers, retention of existing ones, making more people aware of your brand or your products, or any other such endeavor. We'll go into many of the most popular and effective ways of doing all of these things throughout the rest of this guide, but for now, let’s take a closer look at how content helps your organization along with the role you play as an SEO in ensuring content is as helpful as it can be.

One reason some companies hesitate to allocate resources to content marketing is it can be difficult to understand the benefits.

That is, since content marketing can impact so many areas of the brand (like brand mentions, web traffic, links, social media activity, conversions, etc.), it’s tough to credit content marketing for impacting any one area for the success of a piece of content or marketing campaign.

As an SEO, it’s important to realize two things from the outset:

1. It’s unrealistic to expect every action you take or every piece of content you optimize and share to be a success. In fact, much of your work as it regards content won’t yield any definable results — at first. That has to do with content marketing taking time to work most effectively.

2. Lack of clarity regarding the success of your content marketing efforts is not an excuse to quit. You have to start somewhere; the longer it takes you to get started, the longer it’ll take for you to see the results you hope for.

In that vein, it’s important to remember content marketing's benefits can be both tangible and intangible:

The intangibles

Strong brand awareness

Imagine the following conversation between two people in your audience:

Content gives your audience something to talk about. When they're talking about you, they're teaching each other about your company, often passing recommendations and links around in the process. This awareness of your brand is marketing gold.

Awareness is the first stage of the marketing funnel (which we talk about in chapter 2), and making sure your brand is on prospects’ radars is essential here.

Trust and authority

Being seen as a trusted brand who shares authoritative content is a big deal for search. If people trust who you are, they are more likely to view favorably what you share, making it more likely that your brand can be seen as a trusted authority in the vertical you serve.

As a benefit, the audience is more likely to share your content. Even better, because of the positive signals from people visiting, sharing and linking to your content, Google is more likely to view your brand as an authority, increasing the likelihood that your content shows up higher in the SERPs over time.

Indirect customer conversions

"What a cool post; I'd never even heard of this company before. Huh; they make software, too? I wonder what it does?"

If you're creating content that targets potential customers, you're probably bringing customers into your brand’s orbit and making it more likely they have a positive association with you.

More importantly, it increases the chances they’ll do business with you in the future. The real benefit is you don’t need to mention what you sell as part of your content to earn this level of positive association.

As we mentioned earlier, content marketing success results from prospects having numerous positive interactions — many of which you won’t even know about — with your brand over time.

Team coordination

"Hey, would you all mind setting up some social media promotion of this white paper I just finished writing?"

"I think this is the first time we've ever collaborated on a project."

Content marketing is a foundation upon which entire marketing campaigns can be built — and entire teams can rally around. Through the design, creation, and sharing of content, your SEO-focused team will collaborate with other internal teams. For example, you might work with the design/UX team to create illustrations; the content strategy team to ensure the content being created meets the needs of the target audience; and the social and community teams to make sure the content is effectively shared and promoted.

There are also quite a few benefits that show more tangible results and are easier to measure:

The tangibles

Website traffic

Traffic is an obvious benefit; it’s also one of the most important. Creating quality content enhances the chances of your website acquiring and retaining visitors.

Improved search visibility

Valuable content attracts editorial links, which tell Google you're important and authoritative. In-depth and thorough content can also help provide additional “raw material” that Google can crawl and use to get a more complete idea of what your company is about, allowing it to return your site for more relevant queries (including a great many long-tail queries).

Direct customer conversions

The better able you are to explain the unique value proposition of your products or services, the greater the chance of your brand earning their business.

A bit of clarity: None of the elements discussed above will happen overnight. The reality of content marketing, as you’re no doubt now familiar with, is that it takes time. In fact, you’ll often hear content marketing described using a flywheel: At first, it takes quite a bit of effort just to get the wheel turning. Over time, though, the wheel's own momentum lessens the effort required of you to enjoy the same results.

There's a fantastic visual that Moz founder Rand Fishkin has used to make this point: a graph of traffic from his wife Geraldine's travel blog:

Even though she’s a great writer producing SEO-optimized content on a user-friendly blog, it was more than a year before she saw steady traffic to her website.

She toiled for more than two years before the blog took off.

Did she all of a sudden become a better writer? Did her blog’s SEO magically come to life? Did visitors suddenly like her more? No. She simply kept working at it. Over time, she found her sweet spot: The content her ideal audience craved. As they discovered her blog, then read and shared her content, it brought more visitors to the site, many of whom linked to the blog and became part of her core audience. But none of that happens if she’d simply said “Content marketing either doesn’t work or takes too much time.”

Even great search marketers realize content marketing success takes time. This is maybe the most important part of why your brand should use content marketing: Most of the competition will grow tired and quit well before content marketing has time to work.

You can win the war of attrition by simply staying on the battlefield.

Let’s face it: most of us won’t have large teams to work with. In fact, if you’re like many SEOs, you might be the whole team.

That doesn’t mean that content marketing is impossible, though. If you find yourself working in a lean environment with little help to create content, your time might best be spent producing "evergreen content." Though evergreen content is not timely, its ability to create steady, long-term traffic makes a great bang-for-the-buck option.

Consider the Google Algorithm Change History, by our own Dr. Pete Meyers. He created this piece of content to keep track of various updates from Google, mostly for his own use. However, as he continued adding bits and pieces to it, the post became a go-to resource for those hoping to get a peek at the shifts in the search results. The page has attracted millions of views since being created in 2011.

How do you enjoy content marketing success with a small team? You focus on high-value, low output activities (evergreen content) and realize you don’t have to do it all yourself (curated content).

According to Matthew J. Brown, great content combines multiple elements of the qualities listed below:

• Relevant and recent: Instead of writing about how to create a great piece of content, write about the impact of a great piece of content on an event or topic the audience is familiar with.

• Long-form: Take a deeper dive on a topic than the audience is used to seeing, even if the information itself is familiar. What the Wait But Why blog did with the Fermi Paradox is a stellar example of evergreen content.

• Targeted to a specific persona: With at least some of your content, aim to knock the socks off a small segment of your audience or potential audience. This level of focus on meeting the needs of a small few can pay huge dividends in better informing you about what the larger community expects and needs from your brand. (Example: The Web Developer's Cheat Sheet.)

• Evergreen: We talked about this earlier, but focus on creating content that might not be timely but that can deliver traffic over the long-term.

• Interactive: Don’t be afraid to allow users to control their experience, whether that’s text, graphics, videos, etc. Check out how Paul Ford delivered a unique user experience with this Bloomberg Business article on coding.

• Personal: Who doesn’t like things tailored specifically to us? For example, you can use IP addresses to target content to your reader's area like The New York Times did with The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up.

• Not created from the standard article template: No matter what content your team creates and shares, strive to make it uniquely valuable in some way. That could be through the use of images, interactive elements, or an authoritative voice.

Maybe the most important element to remember is to dive in, get started, and don’t fear failure.

Content marketing isn’t some specialty vehicle only a few can use successfully.

It can be a rewarding endeavor for any brand willing to make smart decisions about content; capable of learning how that content is received and rewarded by visitors in search; and has the resilience to stick with it long enough to realize significant results.

We’ll show you how in the chapters that follow.

Content marketing does its best work when it's well-aligned to the marketing funnel Grab a cuppa and click on over to Chapter 2: Content and the Marketing Funnel — we've got things to learn and content to read.

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.