During the last six to 12 months, companies couldn’t fail to hear about the global phenomenon surrounding content marketing that’s appearing daily in thousands of marketing blogs.
For several months now, the team at Essential Marketer has been closely monitoring the fast moving lava flow coming from the digital marketing volcano and rather than jumping on the content marketing bandwagon, like many SEO and digital marketing agencies are doing, they decided to take a totally different approach and ask the question – why is this happening, how do companies use it and why should they?
Essential Marketer Managing Director, Steve Feeney said: “We’ve always known about the importance and need of having high quality website content that’s both relevant and unique. It’s also nothing new to us that Google takes this into account when crawling a site – and quite rightly so.
“There’s also been a lot of talk about content replacing SEO, but we see this entirely different. We see good quality content firmly at the heart of SEO and social media cementing the joins between these two vital components of the marketing mix. In fact, we’re as bold to say that we don’t think SEO companies and social media companies operating discretely will survive much into the future; things need to change.”
Having realised what was really on the global horizon for the changing digital marketing landscape, Essential Marketer took this one step further and have built a tool to help companies produce a content plan – i.e. helping them to understand what their business needs to communicate, the audiences they need to communicate with, the mechanisms they need to use and finally enabling them to schedule in their content and publish it across their multiple channels and target sectors using the right mechanisms – i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc.
Before rolling this clever tool out, Essential Marketer has rather boldly decided to test the tool on themselves in a ‘live’ case study to show the benefits that quality, original content can have a site’s traffic, social media and ultimately increased sales in terms of new clients.
Steve adds: “We have set ourselves this challenge as we believe that the results will speak for themselves. We have used our content tool to schedule 200 articles, each one based around one of our target keywords and sector themes. The articles are being shared over the course of 50 days and progress on the challenge is being reported on the Essential Marketer site via a series of video diaries from key members of the team involved with the challenge.”
To find out more about this challenge, take a visit to the Essential Marketer challenge page and share the link you will automatically be entered into a free prize draw to win an iPad Mini.
“I’ve never seen any other company be so upfront before about using a tool on themselves in a ‘live’ test situation. Our content marketing challenge has been a lot of effort from the team so far, but the results are already starting to show through. In just under 10 days, we’ve increased the traffic to our site and all areas of our social media and we’ve still got a long way to go,” concludes Steve.
