What is content marketing?
I was at a meeting recently with a manufacturing company to propose ideas for PR and SEO for the next 12 months. From the back of the room someone asked a question; what actually is Content Marketing?
The room went silent. I gave what I thought was a clear, but concise, explanation, followed by which the questioner responded with ‘Isn’t that what SEO companies do?’
Nowadays, as everyone knows, the lines between SEO and PR have been blurred. SEO companies are claiming to be able to write authentic content and PR companies are doing both the content generation and technical side of website SEO.
But back to the original question, what is Content Marketing and how important is it in the marketing mix for business to business companies?
Content Marketing is, according to the Content Marketing Institute (USA):
‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.’
So, in brief, this means pitching products or services as useful content to prospects or customers in an informative, non-salesy way to help them overcome a problem or fulfil a need.
This is pretty much what we have been doing for the past 15 years for clients, but in more recent times, the focus has been on generating this content for online use, on authoritative sites or with influencers, with a backlink to our client’s websites.
At the moment, we are working on a number of Content Marketing campaigns - many are for business to business (B2B) companies in the construction and manufacturing sector, but we’re also working for clients in the giftware, homewares and food sectors. The impact our work is having, in terms of improving search engine rankings, generating more traffic to clients’ websites and securing more conversions, is, quite frankly, impressive!
Often companies make the mistake of thinking they have to allocate a huge budget to SEO and put their trust in the hands of a technical SEO company that doesn’t actually give them a clear idea of what they are doing for their money. We don’t work that way at all.
Our Content Marketing and Organic SEO campaigns are very straightforward and tangible. Every month we work to a Content plan which we update regularly and share with our clients. We generate content - each piece is approved by our clients, whether that be blogs or online news stories and at the end of the month, we demonstrate what online coverage and backlinks we have secured. We monitor SERP (Search Engine Ranked Position) rankings and report back monthly to show how keywords and the site overall is performing. There is no smoke and mirrors in what we do and every month we provide a clear evaluation of the results, which we can share with the client’s team so they have full visibility of what actions have been undertaken. We also discuss and review regularly the keywords we are targeting to ensure they are inline with search traffic, to optimise your site’s rankings.
So, the next time you get an SEO company trying to sell you an expensive monthly package that you’re not quite sure what you will get for your money, get in touch with the Dragonfly PR team and we’ll explain exactly what we think we can achieve for you with a competitive budget, plus a clear plan of our activities.
It’s the reason we have retained so many of our clients for up to 15 years and why we have largely grown our business organically, through recommendation.
If you would like to discuss any Content Marketing, Organic SEO or Digital PR opportunities, please feel free to get in touch by calling 0114 349 5345 or email: hello@dragonflypr.co.uk.