Arnie Kuenn will be speaking on the “How to Get Your Content Marketing Up & Running” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am the CEO of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company that my wife and I founded in 2006. We currently have 40 employees and focus on helping our clients get more traffic, leads and business through useful content, SEO, social media and PPC. I have been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years with three different businesses all focused on training and marketing in new technologies. In 2012, I wrote an award winning content marketing book called Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon.
2) How can social media be effectively employed in the content marketing process?
To me social media is critical to the success of content marketing. I know some content marketing people feel that “if you build it they will come” and respectfully disagree with them. Obviously there are always exceptions, but you can create an amazing piece of content, post it on your website and unless you promote it, many people will not discover it. If you have an email list large enough to promote the content through that channel – great. But most of the time, you are going to need to push your content out via your social media channels to help it get discovered. Even if you have few followers, you need to get into the habit of promoting your content. Besides, you are only helping the search engines find it via those social media links.
I also recommend you build a list of influencers so that when you really have a special piece of content, you can call upon them to help spread the word. This requires patience and active involvement with these influencers, but in the long run can really pay off.
And don’t forget that some social media channels like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Pinterest can be great places to distribute content exclusively for those channels. For example you might create images for the sole purpose of posting to Facebook or Pinterest. Clever or non-selling Facebook status updates can be great content too. And how about writing articles just for Google Plus or even Linked In with links back to the appropriate pages on your website? This can all be an effective part of your content strategy.
3) What role does business blogging play in a content marketing strategy?
I know there are many businesses that still do not have a blog, and even if they do, some of those do not have the blog on the business domain. I have been preaching to all who will listen that it is really important for all businesses that care about their online presence to make sure they have a blog located on their primary domain – and then blog! Research (especially by Hubspot) has shown the clear benefits to “blogging for business.” Besides, they are nice content management systems that help you create and post all that awesome content you are going to generate.
I will cover some of this in my presentation at Searchfest, but the benefits include:
· More links. It’s been proven that blogging on a regular basis will attract links to your site. Those of you that have been blogging see it from both sides. When you are creating your blog post, you often link to valuable resources in your content. And when you check your admin panel, you see others linking to your useful blog posts from within their content.
· More traffic. In one piece of research HubSpot conducted, they found that the average site with a blog had 55% more traffic compared to those websites without a blog. That right there should tell you have important blogging on a regular basis can be for your business.
· More leads. If you create the right type of content for your prospects and clients, the leads (and revenue) will steadily increase. Remember as you are developing this content, building authority for your business, the content will remain there until you remove it. We have seen content we created for clients 3, 4, 5 years ago, still generating conversions for our clients. That is the beauty of investing in content as opposed to renting ad space in traditional media.
· More followers. Again, sticking with the concept of blogging on a regular basis, people will start to follow your blog so that they are informed when a new post goes live. This is building your list and it is much like a snow ball effect. Keep producing and your list will grow.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.