content

A brilliant blog from the brilliant Mike Teasdale from Harvest Digital on some of the most important issues marketers are facing when trying to get content right - and identifies some common pitfalls.

Content strategy is one of the most interesting and rewarding areas of digital marketing. From a channel perspective it sits across customer experience, social media and organic search.

Want a visually appealing, well structured, content rich website? Tick.

Want to analyse its performance? Not so much.

Content marketing is fast becoming an integral part of the marketing mix, providing a dynamic channel from which brands, publishers and agencies can drive awareness and customer engagement to create a deeper relationship with consumers.

In fact, research from Outbrain reveals that more than 90% of respondents predict that content marketing will increase in importance for them over the next 12 months. The research, based on a survey of more than 1,300 digital marketing professionals examined the strategies, objectives, and challenges that marketers are currently facing.

‘Content is king’ as the old maxim goes and whilst there’s still an infinite amount of truth in that statement, the intriguing sub-plot that developed over the past decade or so could perhaps be framed as ‘visibility is a close second’.

Many a beautifully scripted site bearing gifts of great content has got lost in the vast, cacophonous sea of information that is the internet.

From early paid link schemes, through unnatural links to the frowned-upon ‘carpet-bombing’ practises of Link Farms, there’s been an ongoing search for new and improved ways to optimise website rankings.

The algorithms used in search engines have long been the subject of much keen analysis (and equally keen tinkering with a view to manipulating) but the latest phase in online behemoth, Google’s development intends to restore some much-needed transparency and trust to the SEO process with Google+ Authorship Markup.

In a collaboration with international online marketing agency, Distilled, Facebook have released their first video providing users with advice for optimising their Facebook Pages for search engines.

The video, "SEO for Facebook Pages" covers the basics on how businesses can optimise their Facebook Page for better ranking and more ownership of the search engine results page for keywords. Viewers are taken through step-by-step guides for a number of processes in building optimised Facebook Pages, followed by how to get links and likes. 

The realm of online copywriting has upped its game, gone are the days of dumping regurgitated written copy onto web pages to fill in the gaps.

Nowadays it’s all about content in a much broader sense of the word and the candidates are certainly proving this to be true with up to 73% of our traditional copywriters, registered in the last year possessing additional digital content focused skills.

So what does this mean for the traditional copywriter?