Beyond SEO: Rethink Your Content Marketing Strategy

Send To Pod

Original Article: Beyond SEO: Rethink Your Content Marketing Strategy

Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod

Follow me on Twitter to find out more.
----

---

This tweet of mine got over 900 likes and sparked debate about whether other marketers agree:

SEO strategy ≠ content marketing strategy

— Amanda Natividad (@amandanat) March 2, 2021

My point was that a solid SEO strategy alone can’t replace a content marketing strategy.

SEO is one means of accomplishing a strong content strategy. It ensures your content gets found organically by readers all over the world.

But organic traffic and search rank goals can’t be your only ways to gauge content’s success. When your site is new, it’ll take closer to six months for it to rank for anything. That’s due to the Critical Authority Threshold: the time it takes for your site to reach a certain level of authority, based on some combination of your regularly publishing high-quality, search-for content, the time it takes for Google to crawl your site, and link building.

So within that six months, it’s crucial to identify short-term goals for your content that ultimately set the path for long-term success in SEO and across the rest of your marketing efforts.

How Content Powers Your Marketing

Here’s a secret: In growing my content marketing career, the last thing I focused on was SEO.

Whether or not that’s ideal is debatable. But this article isn’t about that. My point is that I found ways, other than SEO, to guide my content strategy and gauge its success.

Historically, I’ve run my team content teams as “content as a service.” I thought less about SEO, and more about how content could power the rest of our marketing efforts. In fact, not focusing on SEO is how I was able to get buy-in for content from the executive team.

And for half my time at Fitbit, where I ran content for the B2B unit, we didn’t even have a blog. Given the brand halo of Fitbit as a whole, growing organic traffic wasn’t an initial business priority.

So my content was largely focused on lead generation, event support, and end user marketing. I created white papers and interactive content for use in demand generation efforts, ultimately growing our pipeline by several thousand new leads every quarter.

Creating those white papers gave me opportunities to reach out to thought leaders in my target audience for quotes, and to then invite them to speak at Fitbit’s conferences. Finally, I created educational and foundational materials — brochures, guidebooks, and emails — for the end users of our products, as well as our product marketing and PR teams.

But of course, not everyone has those same goals and uses for content. Every team and every business is different.

Thinking through the typical functions of a marketing team, here are several ways your content can fuel the rest of your marketing efforts beyond SEO:

Demand Generation

Ideally, content and demand generation teams are working hand in hand on the published work that’s distributed to the widest possible audience. This content can come in the form of lead magnets, gated assets, content syndication, and more.

And if you have a blog, your articles can serve as source content for your white papers and vice versa — white papers can be repurposed into blo...