👋 Hello Big Ponders!
As overused as the word content has become, there is no getting away from it.
A sustainable plan for generating new business needs to communicate the who, what and why to your future clients and customers.
You say you’re the leading blah blah blah. Well then, prove it.
Prove you are the expert in this conversation. Demonstrate why your company is the best choice out of all the available options.
Once you know the message you want to communicate then it’s about how you get your message out.
⚡ Core Message To Communicate
Examples of a core message in need of distribution:
“We are Europe’s Number 1 Low Cost Airline” ✈️
“We are the UK’s fastest growing iGaming app” 📱
“We are the most on-trend barber shop brand in Scotland” 💇🏻♂️
“We are Scotland’s most creative media company” 🎬
Distribution of your core message is where content marketing comes in.
For many businesses, creating ad-hoc content is a common mistake. From a lack of consistency of theme and confusing brand message perspective, it can often look to Google as if someone got drunk and ransacked a library leaving books randomly in odd places.
So marketing messages have to get the tone and feel right, while at the same time taking onboard the fact that it won’t matter one iota if nobody ever finds the content.
Today’s video picks up that baton and runs with it.
Click to watch the video.
Here’s the video chat transcript in full. Enjoy!
Video Chat Transcript
Andrew: Hi there. My name is Andrew McGarry. You're joining us for another Big Pond digital video with myself and Ari Pournaras. So today's topic is introduction to content marketing and optimisation. And it's been interesting actually so far this morning. I've actually asked a question on Twitter to get some feedback, and I'm already getting quite a bit of interesting feedback, so we'll see if any of that filters through in the chat. But on today's topic, you know, if we kick it off by saying, okay, let's define when we talk about because the word content is so overused, we're so used to hearing the word content, right? So let's define what do we mean by it? First, I'd like to just kick this off by saying, look, content marketing, it's this whole thing if you have a message and you need to be able to distribute that message to people. So for example, if you were like Ryanair, maybe that message is we are the number one low cost airline in Europe. Everyone's got this core message that they're trying to distribute. When you do that distribution that could be through written content, it could be through video, it could be through audio. But then you fall into the whole thing of, okay, well, we know what the message is. Brand marketers know what that is. How do we get it to people? Because if nobody sees it, it's not going to have any impact. That brings us on to this whole thing of what is optimisation? If we know what content marketing is and we're trying to distribute our message, what is content optimisation? And as this quick meme I've put together shows, do we do it for Google or do we do it for people? The brand marketers will obviously have great messages and tone for people, but what about Google? If it's invisible, it's not going to have much in the way of impact. Now, that brings us to content optimisation. Take it away, Ari.
Ari: Yeah. So this is a slide that I that I've got from SEMrush and it breaks down control optimisation in easy steps. And I think it's quite visual, so I thought I'd reference it.
Andrew: Yeah, it looks good.
Ari: So, yeah, it's basically the process of putting together content and optimising it to reach your goal. And so if you want to, for example, get the content in front of the right audience, the certain things that you should be doing that will work better for search engines. Like, for example, meta titles and descriptions. And typically, those are the things that if you Google something, you'll see all the different results. Yeah.
Andrew: What the name of the title is. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ari: Titles, descriptions... and you want to include the keyword. Now, previously we covered keyword research, so obviously that's the first step and that's defining, you know, the intent, the right keywords that you want to use. And so basically how to structure things. You know, if you're looking at a specific page on a website, it's hard to structure the information together to serve the user, but also tell the search engines what that page is actually about. And so, yeah, titles descriptions you want to focus on, including some of the keywords in the content too, headings, internal links, even if you can, if you have the time and you know you can go and optimise images, then that actually helps too. And so by ticking all these boxes, you ideally want to be in a place where you've got like the nice balance between actually serving the users and also serving the search engines. And so content optimisation, that's it.
Andrew: I mean, just to give a couple of quick examples, you know, when we talk about, let's say from a brand tone perspective, I've always been really impressed with the fashion company, Ted Baker. You know, if you read a lot of their search results, something is trivial as you just described, metadata could have like a really clever tone of voice in the description. And I think that's always worth paying attention to. And yeah, I mean, I think that when we when we look at that list, when you see the types of things, you know, for people who are not familiar with SEO, it may look complicated, but it isn't really, you know, it's just it's a simple checklist of things that you need to pay attention to. And I mean, again, if you were selling a product, I mean, it's very common to have the conversation where you see a product page that doesn't have the name of the thing. The classic example I always give is the dress that doesn't say it's a dress. It's just it's called, let's say, Midnight Shade. And Google looks at that and goes, okay, well, it's a picture of a dress, but Midnight Shade… is that a lamp?
Andrew: Is that a sports team? So yeah, it's this whole thing of connecting the dots and helping Google to connect those dots. And I mean, the kind of things that you've got down here, I would say is, sure, it's basic from an SEO perspective, but when, merchandisers, people working in the back end of any website, from a retail perspective, you've got to pay attention to detail. And even just from a simple like if you're a local business, for example, if you were making sure that if you're a local Tesco's, making sure you've got the right pieces of information to people know like when your store opens or like do you have, the way some services like you could go to, I don't know, like those your like those the Sainsbury's in your area have an Argos, like all of these kinds of things can be, can be included. And so in terms of, okay, like, so why is it important? So talk to us about this slide from AHREFS (SEO software tool).
Ari: Right. Yeah. So that goes back to what we said previously to that. You know, there's so many websites out there. You know, the list is like constantly growing. And so when you pull out a piece of content, in most cases, you're actually competing with hundreds of thousands of websites. And the reality is that most of these websites out there don't actually get seen. You know, that might get some visits to the home page, but they could be putting out blog content on a weekly basis and not getting any hits whatsoever. It's a scary sort of statistic, but it's actually true and it's from AHREFS and it just shows you that you want to be doing something different and you want to almost like look at the competition and look at maybe what the other results are doing in terms of content. You want to offer something that really answers the questions of the user that's actually consuming that content. Yeah. And you want to, you want to stand out. So just by churning out content, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, you know, it's not really something that's actually going to have any benefits to your business. Yeah.
Andrew: If it's not engaging. I mean, if you think about there's a big Champions League final coming up, you've got Liverpool are going to play Real Madrid, there's going to be huge search volume around that. And you can imagine, whether it's where can I watch the game or if I want the betting odds on, like what are the odds of of, let's say, Liverpool winning? You know, you could write a piece of content on that and you're competing with, as you say, like this huge, infinite amount of websites. Whereas actually maybe you could write a piece that says what was the craziest bet made ever on a Real Madrid match or something like that and come up with a unique angle. So yeah, I mean, as you've rightly pointed out, you've got to come up with something that is to some degree unique, but at least interesting and engaging. So people see it and go, oh, right (it grabs attention). So like craziest sports bets ever made or craziest haircuts. I mean, not everybody wants to write a BuzzFeed style headline, but I mean, you know, you look in the UK papers like the Metro and things like that. I mean, you know, for every 99 ordinary stories, it's the one story about, you know, my worst tinder date from hell that that ends up being the really popular one. Yeah, that's the one that stands out. So there is an argument for in any kind of plan, you know, not to be afraid that maybe one in ten or one in 20 stories is a bit more kind of... I don't want to say clickbait, but you know what I mean? Ultimately, it's that thing of can we get something with a bit more of a tangent that's a bit kind of quirkier and a bit more unique so that people respond to it. But yeah it's an interesting stat. Okay, so top tips quickly then.
Ari: Top tips! So write content for human consumption, not search engines. And once you've done that and you know, you want to put yourself in the shoes of the person that's actually going to consume the content and find it interesting. Yeah. Once you've done that, then you want to take all the sort of like SEO factors. So whether it's the meta, H1s, keywords and copy, you know, then you want to optimise your content and it's always good to to look at what everybody else is doing and try and make your content better or try to make it stand out. So you want to cut through the noise. And the last thing is, there's always loads of tips that you can actually find online. And the reality is there's no magic formula for actually doing this. You need to be testing it and trying different things. And some of them will fail, but some of them...
Andrew: ...will work! Absolutely. So there you go, folks. Always be testing. And I think that's you know, that's a great piece of advice to take away. So thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time. Thanks.
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