Without well-written, engaging and optimised content, you are never going to produce successful campaigns in the digital world. That’s because in the digital world there are two kings. There’s content, and there’s Google. King of Kings.
When it comes to the world of digital marketing, Google is your master. Everything you do, every sentence you type, every blog, tweet, poke and +1 is a small sacrifice on the altar of the search engine, a prayer to the Great Google to bless you with kindness from the Indexing Spiders and deliver your page to the hallowed #1 spot.
Build it and they will come
Creating content is hard work; it takes time to research, write, edit, approve and publish. So having done the hard part, you really shouldn’t get lazy when it comes to distribution. Don’t assume that just because you have built it, they will come. You need to operate on a broad range of channels to ensure you don’t miss your audience, and make sure your content is working far harder than you.
While your audiences may not overlap across various internet platforms, you need to ensure you have a broad content strategy in place to make sure your content covers all of the bases.
Firstly, you need to be aware that duplicating content can actually be detrimental to search engine performance, so there’s more to content management that just ‘spray and pray’. You need to think carefully about how you make your content work for you.
I would recommend starting by deciding where you want your content to originate; this is incredibly important as the website from which the content originates will receive all of the search engine benefit from the back links and references your content generates. With that decision made, I would recommend looking at some automation – after all, none of us are time rich are we?
If This Then That
I was recently introduced to a fantastic content distribution tool called If This Then That, which enables you to bypass a lot of the more laborious steps you would encounter manually setting up RSS feeds. It enables you to simply, and quickly create a list of actions based upon input into social media platforms, websites, email etc. and replicates the content across additional platforms.
Tarpipe
An even better tool is Tarpipe; on paper it looks very similar to IFTTT, but where it differs is that it allows a much greater range of control over your distribution, so not only can you choose where the content is distributed, but which elements of it are transferred, and to where. This means you can set exactly which content is delivered to which platform; and it is this highly targeted approach to content delivery which gets the thumbs up from me.
So with a fresh approach to content management and a few more tools in the bag, make sure that from this day forward you are getting the most out of your content, lest the Great Google cast you into 4th page obscurity!
Mike Lorge is managing director for Sage Business Solutions. Go here for more.
