Why is content marketing important or your business?

1. Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Business?
Presented by:
David Whiteley

2. Agenda
• What is Content Marketing?
• Why is Content Marketing Important?
• The 8-Step Approach
• The “Hub” & “Spoke” Model
• Content Curation
• Case Studies
• Some Useful Resources
• Questions

3. What Is Content Marketing?
DIGITAL
MARKETING
SE
M
SEO
CONTENT
MARKETING
SOCIAL
MEDIA
VIDEO
PRODUCTION
EMAIL
MARKETING

4. What Is Content Marketing?
• Content marketing is the art of providing relevant, useful content to your
customers without selling to or interrupting them.
• Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that
makes your customers more informed before they buy.
• Good quality content positons your business as the trusted expert in your industry
or niche.
• If you deliver consistent, ongoing, valuable information to your customers, they
ultimately reward you with their business and loyalty.
• This is a “win, win” approach because Google favours websites with high quality
content, so you will enjoy both improved rankings and higher conversions!
“Content marketing is a
marketing technique of
creating and distributing
valuable, relevant and
consistent content to
attract and acquire a
clearly defined audience –
with the objective of
driving profitable
customer action.” (Content
Marketing Institute)

5. Why Content Marketing?
• Traditional approaches to SEO either no longer relevant or much more difficult
• Google rewards the best and most relevant content
• Keywords still important but “Content is King”
• Customers now research online before they buy
• Good quality, relevant and useful content encourages linking and sharing
• Build authority and trust
• Win, Win – ranking improvements and increased conversions

6. The 8-Step Approach
1. Strategy Development
Strategy
Development
Research
Content
Creation
Content
Optimisation
Content
Promotion
Content
Distribution
Link Building
Measure
Results2. Research
3. Content Creation
4. Content Optimisation
5. Content Promotion
6. Content Distribution
7. Link Building
8. Measure Results
Convergence of
Search, Social
and
Content
Marketing

7. Strategy Development
• Start by setting measurable objectives (S.M.A.R.T.)
• Examples of goals:
- Develop and increase your brand awareness
- Generate more traffic to your website to create more leads
- Enhance your online reputation
- Encourage natural links to maximise your rankings
- Increase your competitive advantage.
• Consider whether your current content fulfils these objectives?
• Each piece of content should work towards these objectives and
needs to be relevant, timely and engaging
• Whilst rankings and visitors are important, the ultimate goal is
conversions and sales for your business

8. Research
Generating good content ideas requires research:
• Understand needs and what people are searching for
• Keyword Research
• Trending topics on related websites
• What is working for competitors
• Social media & news platforms
• Google / Bing / YouTube Suggest

9. Research
Generating good content ideas requires research
• Understand needs and what people are searching for
• Keyword Research
• Trending topics on related websites
• What is working for competitors
• Social media & news platforms
• Google / Bing & You Tube Suggest
• Google Related
• Answer Websites (e.g Yahoo)

10. Content Creation
- Blog articles
- Social media posts
- Top Lists
- Design examples
- Press releases
- Pricing and costs
- Comparison & reviews
- Interviews
- Webinars & Podcasts
- Resource pages
- Infographics
- Videos
- Product pages
- Case studies and testimonials
- Whitepapers
- “How to” guides
• The goal is to generate engaging content that positions you as the expert in your
industry
• Some examples of the types of content that could be created include:
According to Hubspot:
• Websites that have blogs get twice as
many inbound links as websites without
blogs
• Sites with blogs will get 400% more
indexed pages and will see a more than
50% increase in traffic over websites that
lack a blog

11. Content Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your web content friendly
for search engines
• Some important factors:
 Focus on solving people’s problems and helping them to accomplish tasks - by
doing this you will make your content highly relevant and are more likely to be
rewarded with good rankings
 Keywords are still important but copy should be natural
 Use keywords in all META tags e.g. Page Title, Page Description, H1 Tags etc
 Images and Video can also be optimised
 Local Search now offers great opportunities for geographically based businesses
 Optimising for mobile users is now essential
 Social media profiles also offer optimisation opportunities (e.g. profiles)

12. Content Promotion
Putting the ‘marketing’ in content marketing …..
• Content posted on your website can be promoted by leveraging search
and your existing social media interactions
• For ideas look at how your competitors are using social media
Some options include:
• Directly on your website:
 Download
 Blog / news section
• Paid Advertising (e.g. Adwords)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Forum participation
• Blogger Engagement
• Press Releases and media outreach
• Email marketing

13. Content Distribution
Whereas Content Promotion is about drawing attention to content on your
own website, Content Distibution is about creating and posting content on
other channels.
• Choose the places that work best for your business – typically this will be
where your customers “hang out”
• Rather than creating new content, look for ways to more widely distribute
content you already have
• You can distribute content using:
 Social Media
 RSS Feeds
 Content sharing websites
Some examples:
• Images – use Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr etc
• RSS Feeds – make sure these are enabled on your blog and added to LinkedIn etc
• Video – YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion
• Presentations – Slideshare, MyPlick & Authorstream

14. Link Building vs Link Attraction
• A major contributor to search engine rankings is the number of quality
links to your website
• With the introduction of the Penguin update by Google traditional
approaches to link building have become more difficult
• A better approach is link attraction is through high quality content
• If you generate awesome content and then promote it, you’re going to
attract natural links as the content gets shared
• Good content also makes it easier to request links (e.g. bloggers operating
in your niche)
• Linkworthy content generally gets more links from a variety of sources
which is enormously valuable to your rankings and overall success online

15. Measure Results
Its all about return on investment!
• Measurement and tracking using benchmarks and goals helps prove
content marketing ROI
• Google Analytics provides a wealth of data
• Things you can track include:
 Most popular content
 Visitor traffic and time on page
 Content downloads
 Goal achievement
Steps to take:
 Define what success means for your content and how to measure it
 Establish a timetable for measuring and using web analytics to gather
data on activity on your website
 Use analytics data to adapt your future strategy for optimum
performance

16. The Hub & Spoke Model
Approach:
• Create and publish hub content
• Create and publish spoke content over
the following 2-3 months
)

17. Hub & Spoke Model
Possible Hub Content:
• How to guides
• Whitepapers
• Videos
• Case studies
• Infographics
)

18. Hub & Spoke Model
Possible Spokes:
• Series of blog posts or videos
• Slideshare presentation
• Infographic
• Articles
• Guest posts
• Social media posts or tweets
• Email shots
)

19. Case Study – www.Calderstone.com
• Print Management Business
• On-Going Digital Marketing Campaign
• Catalogue Production Identified as a Key Product Area
• Hub & Spoke Initiative
• Catalogue Design Guide
• Additional Pages Added
• Outcome – Enquiries Increased from 3 in 2016 to 3 per month in 2017.

20. Find Out More
• Resources:
- Copy of these slides
- Digital Marketing Infographic
Visit www.mintcakedigital.co.uk/resources
Digital Marketing Infographic
• Useful websites:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/44-content-marketing-resources/
https://contently.com/resources/

21. Thank You
Any Questions?