What Do We Have Without A Great Content Strategy? (Hint: Not Much!)
While content strategy might not be the first thing that you think of when it comes to your marketing, it is a powerful (and perhaps central) element to building visibility, credibility, and engagement with new and returning users on your website.
Sure, it might be a little harder to measure your content vs. other marketing activities, but more often than not, your content is the first interaction someone has with your brand, so it’s important to give them a reason to come back to you.
Your content, whether it’s your website’s verbiage, paid ad copy, social media posts, or your monthly blog or newsletter, should all contain one central element: Your brand’s voice, strategically applied to whatever medium it’s being used.
It’s like your fingerprint. It’s your signature. You want your audience to feel your brand in your copy. This requires a few things to achieve.
Great Content Requires Great Responsibility
One, you need to have a very clear vision of what your brand is. This isn’t as simple as it sounds! There’s a reason why brands like Patagonia, Doritos, and Salesforce conjure up very distinct characters in our minds, and it’s not just because they sell different products.
It’s because they know what they represent, they empathize with their core audience, and they never deviate from that persona. And if they do deviate? It’s typically because there’s a strategic brand transition taking place. This takes an incredible amount of discipline.
Second, they’ve laid the groundwork of brand recognition day after day, year after year, by publishing content that has further developed their brand. Again, this takes an incredible amount of discipline, as well as patience and consistency.
At Formada, we’re helping brands build their brand equity by creating and publishing content that is user-focused vs. solely search-engine-focused.
Content Strategy Is The Cornerstone of Our Approach To Holistic SEO
We see content as a critical, foundational element to a more holistic approach to SEO, where we build secure, user-friendly sites with content that is well-structured, useful, and conversion-focused, supplementing the site with other activities like blogging that can go into greater detail on niche topics and give readers even more value and brands a reputation for being incredibly useful resources to their audience.
Simply publishing a lot of content with no other tactics won’t magically make you rank on page one of Google, but giving your audience a consistent, value-rich experience will help you build authority with both searchers and search engines.
I think it’s easy to get lost in ranking data when measuring content. Being the first and most prominent on page one of Google search is nice, but the variables related to search seem to change nearly every single day. In my estimation, impressions, clicks, and engagement metrics are equally as important for a holistic content strategy that actually moves the needle.
Building Visibility, Credibility, and Engagement
Organic visibility and engagement is always a challenge for companies, especially those that don’t have the budget for advertising or other outbound marketing channels. But that doesn’t mean that you have no chance to compete with bigger brands with bigger budgets.
That’s the beauty of having a value-driven brand. By publishing good content consistently, any company can build credibility with Google, which will improve their ranking and tell Google to come back and crawl/index their content more regularly, in turn improving the visibility of new pages.
This is precisely how we support our clients’ brands — by building visibility, credibility, and engagement through frequent publishing for our clients’ brands. In a nutshell, this is what that process looks like:
- By publishing a variety of useful, helpful content pieces frequently (several times per week), Google starts to recognize that the site is updating consistently and will come back to crawl and index new content more frequently than it would any other site. This leads to improved visibility and higher rankings as you build authority.
- 2. A high volume of content is a great way to bring new users to your site, especially those that are still in the early stages of the funnel. Good, consistent content builds authority and credibility with users and supports brand awareness.
- 3. Having more original content on the site provides more opportunities for interlinking and can more effectively nurture a user no matter where they are in the funnel or their buying journey. External links are important for SEO, as well, but internal linking is a great way to build authority and further engage users.
This Holistic Approach Drives Real Results For Our Clients
This is where our work can really impact our clients. For years, we’ve specialized in healthcare, legal, and financial services brands to increase their visibility and authority online.
For example, one of our wellness-focused clients has seen incredible results from this strategy of frequent posting of relevant, value-driven content:
- 332% increase in Clicks (last 6 months over previous 6 months)
- 576% increase in Impressions (last 6 months over previous 6 months)
Pretty incredible, right? As is the case with content and brand work, we tend to recommend that our clients take a long-term approach to their marketing over quick hit, short-term success that is difficult to replicate.
With an economic recession looming, companies are slashing their marketing budgets and are trying to do more with less.
Don’t Overlook the Power of Well-Structured Content!
Content is often deprioritized because it is harder to track and measure vs. metrics related to paid campaigns, website rankings, and email open and click rates, but we’ve proven in our own client work that publishing a large quantity of content consistently can quickly increase average rank, sessions, and engagement. Seems like a pretty good case to invest in content to me!
The good news is, content — blogs, new pages on your site, conversion-driven landing pages — is a fairly low-risk investment way in terms of time and money to promote inbound leads and business, and the long-term benefits of content are significant, especially when you compare it to something like paid search advertising, which doesn’t show unless there’s money being spent to show it.
At Formada, we are definitely seeing a shift in people’s attitudes toward Content, and more people are prioritizing it in their marketing budgets because they see the value in how it can help them cultivate their brands and reach new audiences.
Let Us Help Your Brand Achieve Its Goals Through A Winning Content Strategy
If you’re building a new brand, looking to refresh an established brand, or want support in pushing your brand to the next level, Formada’s Content team is here to help you achieve your goals. Get in touch with us to learn more!