What is Content Marketing?

There is much confusion within the online marketing industry, as to what actually constitutes as content marketing.

Some uninitiated to the practice of search engine optimisation believe, that content marketing is simply writing about a subject area to a specified would limit. We at Pack Digital Seo, believe that simply writing for the sake of writing will not bring you Seo merit and could even be viewed as a waste of company resources.

What is effective Content Marketing?

Due to major algorithmic updates such as Hummingbird, search engines are looking more closely at what your content is actually about, to match up the content with a users queries, more accurately.

In yesteryear, it was possible to rank your page by simply optimising title tags and placing a few keywords at strategic locations. Much has changed in the online marketing world since then and content marketing has got a lot more complex and strategic in its approach.

Effective content marketing, is marketing that is thought provoking, yet holds a good positive user experience.

Content marketing in 2015 and beyond should now focus primarily on user experience and better answering your searches questions.

Good content marketing is therefore highly researched content, that shows time has been spent on developing the content in order to generate a positive user experience.

This simply means that it answers fully a searches questions, yet presents the information in an interesting format.

The less work your readers and visitors have to do in order to find what they are searching for the better.

What forms of content marketing would you deem as ineffective?

Ineffective content marketing could be viewed as content which is just generated for the sake of it.

You can imagine on the web 100 competitors writing about the same current news topics related to their industry, you can see how it would be hard to differentiate one quality website from another one, if this was just their sole marketing strategy.

You must therefore differentiate, be different from the competition and separate yourself through creative work online, that will gain you recognition and please your target audience.

Why do you see 2015 as the year that different marketing departments may become more integrated?

Previously PR and online marketing and off-line marketing within some companies were all disjointed, disconnected pursuing their own marketing agenda’s.

We believe that PR in 2015 and beyond will become more integrated into online marketing in terms of content marketing and link generation, as well as becoming more in line with a companies off-line marketing practices.

Can you give me an example of this in the real world?

If you can imagine that your company is launching a new product or service at a high profile exhibition.

You should therefore work closely with the PR department so that the event gets as much publicity as possible, but also make sure that you are communicating online about the event as much as possible also.

PR raising awareness of the event the online marketing department afterwards and before writing content will help create back links and interest for your company.

If you therefore also work with the off-line marketing department and coordinate marketing literature that will encourage readers to visit the website you begin to see how a cycle can occur where all the marketing departments are flooding interest to each other in a cycle.

We believe that this will be of paramount importance moving forwards as the search engines move away from back links as a primary ranking factor more into the semantic web.

This new approach to marketing will allow you to integrate also your company social activity to raise awareness of products or services.