Content marketing and social media are core elements of inbound marketing. The below is an example of the power of content marketing and social media to extend brands offline. Content marketing can help open up other opportunities to be published across multiple channels both online and offline which will further help build brands and reputation. In April of 2011, Kuno Creative was invited to publish in FeedFront Magazine, Issue 14. The excerpt below touts even more content marketing benefits:
Content Marketing & Social Media: The New SEO
Why did J.C. Penney recently get punished in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page)? They were allegedly caught buying hundreds of links from spammy, low pagerank websites by the New York Times, who reported their findings to Google.
J.C. Penney took a black hat shortcut with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign, which is a clear violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They could have avoided the violation if their campaign focused on the new SEO – content marketing and social media.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the creation and sharing of content with the purpose of promoting a product or service. The focus of this content may not specifically be about the publisher’s organization or its offerings. Assets created for content marketing include a mix of problem-specific information and thought leadership.
For affiliate publishers, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines recommends, “If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.” In other words, publish unique problem solving content.
Social Media
Social media acts as a distribution conduit for content marketers. By distributing content via social media, the distributor potentially has access to millions of eyes that may comment, share, consume and/or evangelize the content.
The New SEO
Link Building
Content marketing and social media distribution lessens the publisher’s need to acquire backlinks using “grey” or black hat methods, because quality content that is properly distributed creates backlinks naturally.
Crawl Rates
Publishing valuable problem solving content daily, even several times per day, is ideal for content marketing in order to maximize its SEO value. The more frequently content is published on a website the likelihood of the website being crawled more increases.
Social Media, Increased Social Authority & Web Traffic
A robust publishing schedule will also drive social media engagement on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Google and Bing recently admitted to SearchEngineLand.com that their algorithms do look at several social media metrics when ranking websites.
As a result, social media engagement around a publisher’s content is more valuable than previously thought. when properly executed this engagement will lead to increased web traffic as well as growing the social authority of the publisher.
The above SEO benefits of content marketing are not exactly “new.” they represent a more holistic approach to SEO while firmly remaining within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Rather than looking to game the system, like J.C. Penney supposedly did, consider the white hat strategy of content marketing and social media for SEO.
The offline magazine article above clearly flaunts the benefits of content marketing. However, it’s clear the benefits are far greater than just SEO, online personal branding or social media marketing. Those benefits are touted in the aforementioned links. The use of content marketing overtime can also result in being published in offline industry magazines, being recruited to write a book for a publishing company or interviewed by a newpaper. These offline benefits can potentially help brands reach tens of thousands of new potential customers. Never underestimate the power of content marketing.