The future of content marketing is here
For the past few years, there have been whispers in marketing circles that Google is suppressing organic reach. It’s much harder to get on the magically shrinking front page of the world’s largest search engine.
The experts at The Markup finally conducted an experiment that demonstrated what most marketers already suspected – Google shows you a lot of content to keep you in Google before showing you any organic results. Source → here
The future of content marketing is already here
Google’s output before and nowadays
It’s time for companies and marketers to think about what the true state of content marketing is. Simply creating dozens or hundreds of 500-word posts is not going to help your business.
ALL NEW IS WELL FORGOTTEN OLD.
Content marketing wasn’t invented to promote on the Internet. It has been around for hundreds of years. It’s a way to gain the trust of your potential customers and push them to start moving through your sales funnel.
The future of content marketing is already here
Poor Richard’s Almanac was a form of content marketing in which Benjamin Franklin promoted his print business. It’s one of the oldest examples of content marketing that you can literally touch today. By the way, did you know that Franklin was never president of the United States?
Brands as diverse as John Deere and Betty Crocker have been getting rich off of content marketing long before the first microprocessor.
The future of content marketing is already here
“Beard,” John Deere’s magazine, is one of the oldest examples of content marketing that is still very much alive today.
We tend to associate content marketing with blog articles because it has been one of the cheapest marketing tools of the past 20 years. It wasn’t until recently that companies started using videos and podcasts.
Those days when you could follow a few simple guidelines and get organic traffic from Google and Yandex are a thing of the past. But that doesn’t mean that blogging or content marketing is dead. It means finding new ways to deliver content to your target audience – your customers. You need to be more creative and disciplined in how you showcase your authority and expertise.
We can help with producing content and delivering it to your potential clients. Learn more about our content marketing service.
GOOGLE KILLS TRADITIONAL BUSINESS BLOGS
The future of content marketing is here
You don’t have to go to a website to get an answer to your question, the traffic stays on Google. Yandex is doing the same, adding its witchdoctors to the output and promoting its Zen and Q services.
The future of content marketing is here
Blogging used to be the best way to build almost any kind of online business. You could write quality posts and know that search engine algorithms would eventually find your content. If you want to grow your audience faster, just create more content.
Blogs can still be a powerful way to build a business. But it takes a lot more time and money. You need to build a full editorial team and invest in content production. Content today has to be far more detailed than ever before.
You’re not just competing with other blogs – you’re fighting Google’s desire to attract traffic within its own ecosystem. The most effective blog content is what’s known as “Skyscrapers” – loggerheads between 2,000 and 10,000 words long. They are much more expensive to produce, but when used wisely, they provide a much higher return on investment than short blog posts, which now seem disposable.
THE OLD MODEL AND THE NEW WAY
The future of content marketing is here
The old model of content marketing relied on organic traffic. How it worked:
- You wrote content that people found on search engines.
- That content encouraged people to contact you or sign up for your newsletter.
- Once you got a potential customer’s contact information, you could direct them through the sales funnel.
It was a great plan. But now it’s a very slow plan. However, if you have enough time – six months to three years – you can still count on organic traffic as your primary traffic. But most can’t.
The new way of doing content marketing requires that you either invest in social media advertising to drive traffic to your content, or expand your distribution channels to increase your organic reach. So content marketing is not always a good solution for new business.
IS EMAIL THE NEW BLOG?
The future of content marketing is here
Email has always been an important part of a digital marketing strategy. If you have someone’s email, you have a key to their heart. You can reach the customer directly. Direct marketing is the best way to convert marketing dollars into revenue.
You used to create a huge amount of content to generate newsletter subscriptions. Now you need to create fewer types of better quality content to generate email subscribers. Instead of publishing an article on a blog or social media, savvy companies save their best content for an email newsletter.
Services like Substack are betting big money that email newsletters will replace blogging as the primary form of long-term content marketing.
It’s far more profitable to invest money in valuable content as a lead magnet to build your email newsletter subscriber base than it is to write a million blog posts. If you have a potential customer contact, you can send them the same content you used to post on your blog via email. Your emails maintain a relationship with your audience the way blogs did. But with email, you have a much better idea of the effectiveness of your nested resources.
You can also drill down into the basic needs of your audience.
The future of content marketing is here
The buzz is that Google can’t really influence the newsletter. Can’t remove the newsletter from the search results because it’s not there. It can’t use content from your email to generate traffic for itself and leave even more people marinating in its ecosystem.
Email is about connecting directly with people, not through an intermediary in the form of Google’s search engine results.
CURATING CONTENT.
Curation doesn’t just mean taking someone else’s content and posting it on your site with a source. It’s a kind of filtering information for your subscribers. You save them time and find in a huge flow of information the content that will be interesting for your target audience to read. That is, you combine all the best that is online, within the framework of your site. Through curation, more and more people will trust you. If you love music, you’ll likely enjoy seeing the playlists that your favorite artists create on Spotify. These playlists are a form of curation. It’s a type of content marketing.
In March 2020, Taylor Swift created a Women’s History Month playlist on Spotify that caught the attention of other female artists. Do you think Swift was worried that her fans would find other artists and never listen to her music again? No, because that’s idiotic.
Curation scares companies. They’re afraid to let their customers off their backs. They don’t trust their customers. They have no confidence that the customer who left through the link will come back to them and buy their product.
RETHINKING YOUR SALES FUNNEL
The future of content marketing will require you to create and curate content across channels. You may want to use Apple podcasts, TikTok or YouTube videos, Instagram photos or Facebook longreads. But no matter where you create content, you need a sales funnel. You need a strategy for your content marketing.
It used to be that you directed all potential customers to your website or blog. Today, you still need your own website. But now it makes sense to direct traffic to a specific lead magnet or a landing page with a form to sign up for the newsletter. This lead magnet could be some kind of useful gift like a free PDF book or a comprehensive guide to solving some problem that anyone can access. All you have to do is leave your email.
You may find that curated content helps you gain a mailing list base faster than creating all of your original content. But you don’t just need to recruit a base of subscribers, you need to develop a strategy to grow those readers into customers.
If you think this sounds pretty much like the old way of building a funnel, you’re right. The only difference is how you use the content to get people to sign up for the newsletter. You don’t need a weekly blog to do this. You can get the results you want faster by changing the type of content you use to attract your ideal customers.
Content marketing and direct marketing will never die because they are based on human psychology. But John Deere is not using the same content strategies in 2020 that were used in 1920. Likewise, you shouldn’t use the same tools today that worked in 2000 or even 2016.
The best content marketing doesn’t depend on Google or any other platform to drive traffic and attract leads.
The future of content marketing requires empathy, creativity and adaptability. Instead of writing another simple 2,000- to 3,000-character publication today, take the time to show your ideal clients that you can help them. In order for you to really help your clients, they need to know about you. Order comprehensive internet marketing, help your clients find you.