Reading different tweets and talking with the marketers around the world, we’ve noticed a general discontent among SEOs and Marketers for the tendency of misunderstanding SEO, SMM, and Content Marketing. How do they work and what they are about? Nobody knows, right?
Everyone wants successful websites that generate leads and conversions. You know, those websites that make money and bring profit… But what makes a website to be successful?
WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE?
In general, it’s a modern website with a few to none coding errors, great usability, and lots traffic. Are you following so far?
The first two parts depend on the UX designers and the development team. The traffic part relies on a special team, that is for a website like fuel to a car. We are talking about the insidious and well-known marketing team.
Like the musketeers, they are one for all and all for one. Still, you should have great care when it comes to the names used for the members of this digital family.
“Some of our clients think it’s all the same and that it can be done by a single person. It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard to have an SEO expert that also makes targeted content and social campaigns. I personally pity the poor fellow…that’s more of a teamwork.” said Mircea, one of the freelance SEOs we’ve met at a recent Social Media event.
As Mircea said, it is not impossible but it’s somehow hard for a person to do a teamwork.
For those of you who know nothing about this field, it’s a bit like having a person doing the backend, the frontend, and the maintenance work for one or more websites. Or like a gardener that looks for seeds, plants, takes great care of the plantation, sells and then delivers products made from the garden’s products, all at the same time.
If for a small “garden” (website or business) this may work (in the limit of the client’s requirements) for a bigger business, that’s not the best prospect.
To make things clearer for everyone, we’ve decided to make a set of articles that would show the differences between SEO, SMM, and Content marketing.
As a true Drupal Digital Agency, this article was built with modules (Drupal devs will get it :) ). This was the introduction, and now here comes the actual article :D
NOTIONS OF SEO — SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
WHAT IS SEO
Before going inside, you need to understand that SEO is actually the base of digital marketing.
I would go a bit further and say that SEO is at the bottom of the online marketing, and hopefully you won’t contradict me. SEO should be present when a website is built. SEO it’s what makes sure that the search engines will be able to understand your website.
It’s a bit like the classic paternal image. SEO is the father of your website.
Start by thinking that SEO is what makes your website visible to the Google’s crawler, and what makes you appear in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
From outside, everything looks very simple:
Query (what you search in Google) → SERP (or the results of the search) → Selection (what you decide to click on) → Traffic to that selection (article, page, etc).
Search engines use crawlers to show the most relevant pages for a specific query. They use algorithms known only by the heads of Google to make a fine selection of content.
That’s what search engines do: they crawl and, if good, index
So, in order to get indexed, you need SEO. SEO is the way to make search engines index your content.
Years ago, SEOs could manipulate crawlers to index web pages for certain queries by simply adding lots of irrelevant keywords to their pages.
It was like the moment when you go to a restaurant, order a juicy hamburger, but you receive a salad with hamburger meat or something totally different. To avoid all the frustration associated with wrong results, Google introduced a sum of ranking factors, as well as penalties for bad and black-hat SEO, making Content the king and SEO the queen.
For simplicity, from now on, we’ll be referring strictly to Google as the search engine. The rest of the search engines work similarly and it would be hard to mention all of them.
BAD SEO MEANS LITTLE TO NO TRAFFIC
Usually, SEO refers to the unpaid results, meaning the results and the leads offered by the quality of the page and of your content. This traffic is organic, and, as everything organic, even the organic traffic comes after a lot of work. Despite the amount of work, it’s the way to go if your want your traffic to last.
An SEO will also plan (together with the marketing team) the paid campaigns on services such as AdWords or AdSense. The work of an SEO is a work of research, identification, planning and action.
If you want, an SEO is somehow like a detective/sheriff of a website. S/he has to identify the target audience of a website, eventual HTML or programming flaws that may cause drops in the rankings, as well as possible malicious content and backlinks that could affect the website’s position.
Besides the actual identification of flaws and errors, an SEO will also adjust the Meta information the identified target keywords to fit the audience’s expectancy.
KEYWORD IDENTIFICATION — HOW TO SEE WHICH WORD IS BETTER
Long gone the moment when words were found in dictionaries. While SEO experts may not know tons of weird words and spellings, they will have all the necessary knowledge to determine what words your customers are using and looking for.
The identification of the keywords that would be relevant to you or your business is part of an SEO’s work. Be careful, as the identification is one thing, but the actual content writing is a different thing.
The SEOs use specialized tools, such as the Google Analytics keywords research tool, to see what word can become relevant keywords a specific business. They will also analyze your website and select those relevant keywords that could make your business appear in the SERP.
In the field of words, an SEO’s job is just to identify the keywords that should be used on a page’s content, links, and meta, and not the actual content creation. It’s true that some SEOs may do a bit of content writing.
Yet, the actual Copywriting and Content creation part should be left to the specialists, be that copywriters, or content creators.
SEO VS CONTENT MARKETING
“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field.” — moz.com
SEOs together with marketers are the ones that can establish the value of targeted keywords for your website. They can also decide which words could or should be part of a campaign and at what cost.
The first websites to hit the SERP are the ones with a long verified history and a lot of valuable content.
If for example, you want to rank for “Beginner’s guide to SEO”, sorry but Moz and kissmetrics will most probably be on the first page (in the organic search at least).
Why? Because both users and crawlers see it as a valuable resource of rich content that already has a good traffic and great Meta.
Don’t feel discouraged!
If your website starts adding valuable pieces of content, then, in a couple of years, if not months, you could stand a chance to get on the first page for this query.
Lots of people make the confusion between content marketing and SEO.
The two digital marketing fields are not the same. Instead, they are complementary. One completes another, and if SEO could exist without a content marketing strategy, it’s very hard for a content marketing strategy to stand out without a great SEO (exceptions may exist).
NOTIONS OF CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing exists since forever. Ever since Gutenberg has invented the press and P&G began the “soap opera” era, content and content marketing are rocking the world.
The “proper content marketing” has continued to exist for more than 200 years. Now we’ve just move it to the digital era, making it more focused on the needs of the internet user.
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
The law of compensation says that in order to receive something valuable, you need to give something of the same if not higher value.
Same goes with content, online sales, or traffic. Make your business talk to your customers, give them the piece of advice they were looking for, make a story, tell the user what lies behind your products.
Give your customers or users something useful that they can use in their everyday life, and they will come for more (returning visitors), or they will give it to somebody else in need (lead creation, sharing or link building).
Content marketing is the marketing that focuses on the content creation.
The general practice is to combine the target’s audience persona or the need of your customers, with the keywords and the savoir-faire of the copywriter or of the content creator.
For good content, most of the marketers create a content marketing strategy.
WHAT IS A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY?
Usually the term “content marketing” refers to the cumulus of personas (target audiences), platforms (where the content will be published) and actual themes and subjects to be referred when creating a specific content for a marketing campaign.
In order to receive something valuable, you need to give something of the same if not higher value.
Seems a bit hard to grasp, but it’s really not that complicated. Maybe it would be easier to take an example and see what a content marketing really is.
Let’s say you are working for a company specialized in selling stilettos (long, thin, high heels) like the ones in the picture.
Most probably, part of your target audience will consist of 18+, middle-class females (women) that go quite often to social events or work for a company that has a certain dress code.
Let’s say that Michaela belongs to this audience
Michaela wears stilettos often. She would like to know the fashion trends. Also, she would like to know what other important women are wearing some types of stilettos.
For Michaela money is not a problem, so she won’t look at the price of the pair of shoes she wants.
For Michaela, your content marketing should include articles like “5 new stilettos from famous designers” or “Designer-like stilettos-how to spot the fakes” or even “10 secrets to make stilettos more comfortable”.
As a good content creator you should do the research to come up with valuable and fresh information, then get the actual keywords that Michaela would Google for. Finally, you proceed on creating the actual content.
Mike is another type of customer
Mike is short for Miriam, but nobody calls her like that, as she is “one of the boys”.
Mike was always a tomboy, but now she needs to buy a pair of stilettos for a social event (maybe a graduation prom). She won’t spend that much money on a pair of stilettos as she is still a student.
She knows nothing about stilettos, but she needs a pair, and due to the little time she has, she goes online to find out what and how she could handle a pair of stilettos, what are the prices for a good pair, and so on.
She would read something like “how to choose stilettos”, “Affordable good-looking stilettos” or “how to walk on stilettos”, but also for “10 secrets to make stilettos more comfortable”.
To make a good content strategy, you should decide which of the two examples is more relevant in terms of traffic and conversions. Then just lay emphasis on that one, without neglecting the other personas.
And everyone said content marketing is hard! A piece of cake, right?
In our case, the content creator has to create content to satisfy the needs of both Miriam and Michaela people. Probably s/he will emphasize on Michaela, as she may come back more often to your shop and would tell her friends about her secret “Stiletto place”. Don’t neglect the importance of Mike, who may become part of your tribe, offer great testimonials, bring some of her friends, etc.
As Seth Godin states in his book Tribes,
“It is more important to have a thousand real users, than dozens of thousands of those who are not really interested in you”.
It means that a small group (your tribe) of targeted, constant and faithful people, is more important than a large crowd. Don’t run for too many rabbits as you may get none and this is not what you want.
The “10 secrets to make stilettos more comfortable” article, that’s your juicy spot, as it addresses both personas, and could be the launcher of leads, mentions and so on.
Be careful, as this type of article may gather a crowd, but not a tribe. Crowds are good for traffic, tribes are good for purchases and conversions.
For example, in our stiletto case, the crowd will click to see your brand new stiletto collection, but the tribe will actually make a purchase from the very first day of the collection launch.
Again, our content should go hand in hand with the Social Media campaign.
NOTIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Everyone is talking about the social aspect of marketing and all companies now try to create an Social Media Marketing (SMM for short) division. While it is a good thing that companies finally understand the importance of social media, there is a tendency of misunderstanding the role of a Social Media Marketing team.
We’ve seen marketers that were forced to wash cars for display, bookkeep everything, or to deliver components to retailers, and while it is not the end of the world to do such activities, it is not the best practice for a marketer.
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?
As a marketer, you never understand how hard it is to define the social media marketing, until being put in the situation of defining it.
By definition,
“Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service”.
When searching for the definition of the SMM, you will generally find the “laws of being a good marketer”, but not some practical aspects. I remember when I’ve started learning more about SMM, everywhere you could find these weird articles with laws and strategies, but nothing about the actual SMM world. Again, a “learn by doing” approach is not bad, but it’s not working for everyone.
Social media marketing really started a couple of years ago, with the emergence of social media. The need to get to the people in the place they spend the most time in, and to understand their needs, really boosted this new branch of marketing.
To make a long story short, the SMM is the use of social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter to promote a business, a brand, an event, a new platform, and the list could go on for ages.
You could promote literally everything on social media. If conceived and implemented right, a good SMM strategy can lead to increased traffic and multiple conversions, thus an actual increase in revenue.
IF I HAVE SEO, WHY DO I NEED SMM?
The best approach is to use both SEO and SMM, as the two should work hand in hand.
SEO makes your website findable on SERP vs SMM makes your business visible on Social Media.
SEO makes your website valuable for the search engines VS SMM makes your business recognizable to the general public.
Let’s say that your business sells doughnuts
Your SEO will make your website appear whenever someone near your town googles “Krispy Kreme donuts”, or “donuts shop in X location”, or “yum yum donuts”.
Your SMM will make online contests, social media posts, hashtags, and so on. S/he will make those really enticing social media posts, that can transform your shop in the Starbucks of the donuts….the best place to add a checkin, leading to that famous brand awareness.
The brand awareness means that people will know your brand (even if, for example they don’t eat donuts) and will be more likely to remember it when in need (when the niece visits and wants a good doughnut for example).
Studies have shown that we are more attracted to products that are suggested to us by friends, neighbors or by the “herd”.
The herd behavior states that we are more attracted to the places where everyone is going….it’s natural and there’s no reason to deny it.
This happens mostly because we think that if so many people are going there, then that place is safe and good for us. Social media can help your brand become the safest and the best place to be.
The main difference is that while SEO makes your traffic last in time, the SM makes you a more punctual presence. This means that on social media, your posts will be visible, as long as they are fresh in the feeds.
Yet, a lot of traffic for an article can make the difference and move your article from the 4th to the 1st page of the SERP in a shorter period of time, showing just how well SEO works with SMM and vice-versa.
It is true that for some types of business, SEO may be more important than SMM, but even in this case, it is better to use both of them.
SMM’S ULTIMATE GOAL: BECOME SHAREABLE
Sharing is caring.
When someone cares about us, they share things, such as articles, podts and pieces of information to us. This “social sharing” gives anything an added value.
That’s the place where your marketers want to be.
SMM is all about becoming shareable. Some of the marketers are complaining that generally, a post will attract somewhere below 10% clicks and 1% leads and conversion.
As the human attention span decreased below 8 sec (some say 4s), it is true that a post may not attract as many clicks and conversions as expected. A good marketer should know this aspect and not be afraid.
It all depends on the campaign and on the campaign goals your marketing team has set prior to the creation of the SMM strategy.
Some will want clicks, others likes, others conversions.
As a good marketer you will have to define what your intentions are, and try to respect them during the campaign, while remaining flexible to possible required changes.
Again, in order to become shareable, you need to adjust your message and your platform for your target audience.
Let’s take an example: You are a digital agency that wants to create brand awareness and to increase the number of contracts. Probably you will not create a marketing campaign on Instagram or on Pinterest with instagrammable pictures of random flowers and butterflies.
It’s not a bad idea, to make it as you may attract some bloggers that need a website upgrade. There are 1 to 1000 chances for such a campaign to lead to a minimum number of clicks and limited to none brand awareness.
ALL SOCIAL PLATFORMS HAVE POTENTIAL
At a recent SMM meeting, we’ve been debating that some of the platforms are more useful to certain business than others. I may be wrong, but there is no such thing as bad social media platform. Yet, bad social media campaign, we’ve seen a few.
The platform’s not the real problem, but the way in which we use it.
As mentioned before, in the case of a digital agency, it is a good thing to be present on as many SM platforms as possible. It’s also true that your will invest more on promoting on a few platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook for Professional Networking, Twitter, AngelList, and so on.
Just remember to adapt your message to the platform and to your target audience. Foe example, emojis work great on twitter, but I’m not that sure a message full of emojis will impress your future collaborator.
The key for a good social marketing campaign is to have a well-built tribe that would understand and appreciate your content. Again, 100 targeted interested followers are more important that thousands of uninterested people.
Then all it’s just a matter of moderation. You, as a good marketer need to moderate, meaning that you need to reply to questions and messages, deal with spammy content or hate speech.
TIP: Help a customer in need, and s/he will continue to follow and to share you, as s/he sees your profile as a useful one.
GOOD SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE HELPS SEO
Have you ever searched for something and instead, you found an article posted on social media…in the SERP?
We had this one client who came with a very well-built Facebook page, but with a non-optimized website. The traffic on the website and the results in the SERP for several queries were leading to the Facebook page, and from there to the actual website.
While we don’t advise this type of behavior, sometimes, the SM can compensate for a bad SEO and vice-versa, but that’s not the best thing for your business.
To get the best of all the worlds:
1. Work with professional developers and SEOs, to make your website as optimized as possible.
2. Get some efficient content marketers and copywriters to help you make your content as enticing and shareable as possible.
3. Hire skillful Social Media marketers to make your as visible as possible on the places where your possible customers are spending the majority of their time.
4. Define goals, create, optimize, be present and make your business the next success story!
P.S. If you are having questions or valuable information to be added to this article, just drop us a line in the comment section below! ‘till then, hope you found some good info here!
