Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With the caveat in the section above–that we’re often doing a little of both–and some informal polling of many esteemed marketers I know, here is where I’ve landed on social marketing vs. content marketing.

Social marketing is a channel where we find potential customers by listening to earned conversations and analyzing our owned accounts. We then interact with those people to move them through the customer journey.

You can use various tactics to make that movement happen. Content marketing is a tactic. It’s a method of marketing that allows companies to add value for potential customers by creating and distributing (sometimes through social) collateral like blog posts, videos, and web pages.

These pieces of collateral entertain and educate your target audience about topics related to your product. They’re intended to generate interest in your offering by reinforcing relevant problems, challenges, misconceptions, and, finally, solutions....

According to the recently-released annual Ranking Factors Study from Searchmetrics, Google has made some big changes in how its algorithm evaluates content and assign search rank.   

Content quality is the recurring theme of the study, which offers  important lessons and opportunities for content marketers, public relations pros, bloggers and anyone else publishing digital content on the web....

“High quality, relevant content is increasingly the focus of search. This type of content ranks better on average, and is identifiable by properties such as a higher word-count and semantically comprehensive wording, as well as often being enriched by other media, such as images or video.” – Searchmetrics 2014 Ranking Factors Study.

Human signals

Before we dig into tactics, first we need to look the signals that indicate content quality to Google.  Topping the list is a metric that is new to the top ten factors — the click through rate.  This is an important change and it emphasizes the importance of user actions as indicators of quality.  The majority of search rank factors are derived from social signals, and like the click through rate, these also indicate content quality.  User actions and social signals are derived from human interactions with content, and Google is assuming that people won’t like, share, post or click on content they don’t consider useful or interesting....

For most of you, customers can come to you from any country in the world. That means all of your potential customers -- the people visiting your website, reading your blog posts, and clicking on your calls-to-action -- might speak a myriad of different languages or live in totally different time zones. Once they reach your content, how well will it resonate with them?

As your international traffic grows, you'll want to be sure that you can convert that traffic into leads -- and that means keeping your international visitors in mind every time you write about a holiday or publish data with certain units of measurement.

In this post, I'll share some tips to help you create content that appeals to your entire audience, no matter where in the world they come from....