Thoughts from day three at INBOUND 2016
I centered my sessions today around content optimization, listening in to your customers, brand voice, and SEO. I noticed some contrasting opinions on content creation, ROI, and overall strategy. The bottom line is, to win at content, you have to listen in to what your customers have to say.
We need to shift away from keyword laden landing pages and heavy promotional content, and towards helpful content that meets people where they are.
One speaker’s magic bullet to increasing content ROI was simply to drop in a behemoth of a call to action banner in the middle of your blog content. The fundamental problem with this is that the content itself is not good. Not only are you giving them crappy content, you are interrupting them while they try to read it. To win at content strategy, SEO, really anything else, you have to write good stuff.
My afternoon session, “How to Suck at SEO and Drive Your Business Into the Ground”, pointed out that there is a common misconception that good web content has to be written for search engines. Google is smart – it looks for content that meets people’s needs and answers questions. It doesn’t matter how many keywords you cram into the copy if you aren’t writing with the user in mind.
You have to keep in touch with what your audience values and what they are saying. Your blogs, videos, and social posts shouldn’t interrupt them – they should be welcome. We need to shift away from keyword laden landing pages and heavy promotional content, and towards helpful content that meets people where they are.
Listening is crucial in this process. We need to be actively pursuing conversational insights with our customers. One session, “Hacking the Conversation”, highlighted that marketers that plan based off an assumption fail. Marketers that make informed decisions on conversational insights win.
We need to know what our customers value, why they value it, where they interact, and get a dialed in picture of who the are. As marketers, we can find immense opportunity in answering questions with quality, share-worthy content.
At Red Clay, we have seen first hand the goldmine of insights you can extract from a conversation. Consumers are a passionate crew, and they communicate and search for answers in thousands of different places. As marketers, finding where to look, what to create, and who to get it in front of is the challenge. It’s a lot of work, but listening in and giving your customers quality stuff is the way to pursue SEO and content strategy.
