#69 Content Marketing

When I started my marketing career, I had the privilege of working with 20 of the top 100 blogs, according to Technorati. My job was to help them grow their traffic… and most would say I was wildly successful at it. For example, I was able to grow TechCrunch’s traffic by 30%, and I was able to grow Gawker Media’s traffic by an extra 5 million visitors a month. Although what I did may seem impressive… it really isn’t. All I did was tweak a few on-page elements, leverage social media and cross-link to grow my clients’ search engine traffic.

There are LOTS of people out there that don’t understand what SEO is and how you do it. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told to go do my “SEO magic” by a client. These same people are hungry to see results to make sure that you are actually doing work that you were paid for. This makes showing progress and improvements to the client very important. Trust me, clients are not going to keep send you checks if you can’t show how your efforts are improving their site.

Websites are no longer just about expressing your message. They need to be designed to draw in visitors. And how do you do that? By first creating awesome, sharable content, and then getting people to share them. Here, having a contemporary, smartly designed website is not merely an advantage, it is mandatory. What’s more, with the rules of the game changing by the minute, what worked in 2013 will not be as successful in 2014.

Say content marketing, and most thoughts go straight to company blogs, social media marketing or web content. But there’s lot to learn from an early and extremely successful example of content marketing, the Michelin guide. MARKET asked Carl Stenson, Head of Communications at Michelin Nordic, to fill us in on how you build content on something exciting outside the actual product to market it – completely without talking about the less exciting product. Which in this case is something as unsexy as car tyres.

– I think we are seeing a revolution in marketing, where marketing departments are starting to look like publishing organizations. There is really only one difference between a publisher and traditional business and that is how the money comes in, says the content marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi in this interview with MarketMagazine