SEO. Content marketing. Video strategy. Social campaigns. Email marketing. PR and media relations. For too long we’ve been tackling them separately, usually across several different teams. Each of these areas of content can add a lot of value to a link-building campaign, but their efforts don’t often happen in conjunction with SEO or with the input of the SEO.
Rather than having one scrawny campaign for each channel, why not take advantage of the synergies that can happen by combining them all into one meaty campaign?
The goal is to maximize the audience for each of your pieces of content, which increases the chances of it earning links, getting additional shares and mentions, and driving more relevant traffic to your site. In turn, SEO will help the other channels hit their goals, whether brand awareness, customer retention, or lead generation. It’s a win-win for all parties involved.
Plus, it’s easier than you think. You just need to make your content work harder for you. It’s a practice that was commonly followed in the days before digital marketing, so in a way we’re pulling from the basics.
Here’s how to come up with content that works hard enough to power across multiple channels.
Start With a Channel-Agnostic Concept
Often people start off by looking at the channel first. You can fall into the trap of looking at each channel individually and then deciding what to do there. You’ll think of video marketing or social media and afterward try to come up with an idea for a YouTube or a Pinterest. While this approach can certainly have its merits in that you’d want to ensure what you’re creating would work for the channel, there are flaws in this method.
Not only can it put you in a position where you’re creating multiple hungry little monsters who constantly need to be fed with fresh content (and then your teams are bogged down by creating reams of different types of content) but it can also limit the conceptualization process. If you keep focusing only on the channel or creative medium, you won’t have the full flexibility to brainstorm freely or bring in the combined expertise across multiple disciplines.
For great results, start with the concept first. For even better results, start with the audience in mind, review goals, and then come up with your concept. Who’s your audience? What do they like? How can you connect with them, engage them? What ideas would they find interesting? What moves them?
Then, think of your main goals and sub-goals for your concept. For SEO, the goals are clear. You want to improve the user experience, give them something of value that will earn links, shares, and conversions. Other goals you can hit include media relations, brand awareness, and community building.
Answering these questions will lead you to come up with concepts that have extremely high probabilities of success.
Tailor the Concept to Fit the Different Media
To get the content to work so hard, you need to create it in a few different avatars. Taking one piece of content and making it work across multiple channels will save time and resources; more importantly it also allows you to increase the reach of your content. You’ll be able to check off multiple different business key performance indicators (KPIs) while still making SEO more successful. After all, people consume content in so many different ways online. For link-building to be really successful, you have to be there right where your audience is to get higher levels of response. What different ways could you mold this same simple idea?
For best results, combine SEO, social, PPC, PR, and email into one, to create a luscious feast that yields the maximum SEO value. Plus it affords you an ever greater reach to your target demographic to help with earning more links.
Come up with your concept’s ingredients list. For every concept, you’ll need most or all of the following:
- Landing Page where your content is hosted – you’ll need a page that can earn links so you help SEO.
- Video – so you can promote this content via video marketing efforts.
- Pin-able Content and/or high-quality infographics. Not only will they make your page more attractive, they can also be used on Pinterest and easily shared.
- Press Release – The content with the compelling stats that make up your infographics can make for a compelling pitch. Plus, adding in the video and landing page will make for a more robust media pitch.
- E-Blast Content – Emails are not only a highly shareable medium, but sending out interesting content designed to provide value to your audiences will improve your email engagement metrics.
- Social Media Assets – Social is a huge driver of shares, so giving the online community something meaty and interesting to review is an excellent way to build your following, while increasing the likelihood of earning links.
- Blogger and Influencer Outreach List – Involve heavyweight bloggers and online influencers into your content as an ego-stroke to help them seed it for you and share it to their following. Not only will you get a link from them, but it also helps earn more potential links (and conversions) from their broader audiences.
- Budget for Seed Campaigns – If you can, since this content is designed to engage your target demographic, you can likely target some ad spend to bring in traffic at very low costs to your site.
Once you have one idea, turning it into different forms – video to graphic – is much simpler as the overall concept is the same. Plus, these elements on your landing page will make it even more attractive to your audience since visitors can consume the content in whichever form they most prefer.
Your SEO campaign will reap bountiful rewards and you’ll gain goodwill from other team members as you’ve each helped each other meet your goals and jointly have created a solid overall win for the business.
Have you tried to run joint campaigns before? Do share your tips on what made it successful in the comments below.