As part of a marketing evaluation we delivered to a client this week, we covered Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and in particular how the volume of indexed content plays a major role in the success of any SEO effort. The situation was simple: one of this company’s biggest competitors showed hundreds of indexed content pieces, and our client showed around ten. Game, set, match to the competitor, right?

Not so fast, my content marketing friends.

First, think about the sales funnel:

While there’s no universally accepted set of steps in the sales funnel, I typically use the following:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Evaluation
• Commitment
• Referral

While volume of content is important, in the B2B world in particular, churning out content generates traffic that typically fills the top of the sales funnel—the awareness phase. So what’s a marketer to do about the middle and bottom of the sales funnel?

Create better content, not necessarily more content.

Thinking in particular about the Interest, Evaluation, and Commitment steps, here are a few tips on creating better content for the middle of the sales funnel

1. Get Sp­­­ecific

Not all buyers are created equal. They occupy different roles. They work for different types of organizations. They have different budgets. They have different needs.

You can’t necessarily create content for each individual, but what you can do is create content for groups, whether it be by buyer persona, type of organization, or size of company. Most importantly, write about specific situations that groups of your prospective customers are dealing with.

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The following is one of the best-of from students in David Toliver’s Georgetown School of Continuing Studies Interactive Marketing class. The following post is by Stephanie Spano, Marketing and Communications Manager at Engility Corporation.

Web design is one of the aspects of marketing I enjoy the most. Working closely with graphic artists to develop new banners and graphics is a creative and fun way to visually promote company capabilities. Updating and creating new content keeps a website fresh, grabs the viewer’s attention, and ensures frequent re-visits. The creative side of web design lets the imagination run wild, like a seven-year-old kid pretending to live in Oz, not Kansas.

Since my days starting out as a Newbie Marketer, I have learned that there is a whole other side to web design besides creating engaging graphics and content. Sadly, it is not the actual Wizard of Oz behind the web design curtain. It is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Read on for a basic overview of the key ways to get this hidden force to work for your business.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad discipline of Internet Marketing used to promote websites. A popular and well known strategy within this discipline is SEO. Ever wonder why the results are displayed in a particular order when you conduct a search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing? SEO is the answer. SEO will help you promote your business by increasing your website’s visibility in search engines.  There are three basic “behind the curtain” aspects of SEO to keep in mind that will help you develop more effective graphics and content for your website to improve its ranking.

1. Not So Creepy Crawlers (Think Charlotte’s Web, not Arachnophobia)

Search Engines operate by sending out millions of bots, commonly known as “spiders,” to crawl the web’s 30+ billion pages and index its content. Information gathered by the spiders is stored in gigantic datacenters all across the world. When you conduct a search query, the indexed information is pulled from these datacenters in fractions of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

When I hear “fresh” I think of Will Smith and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (I’ve probably gotten the theme song stuck in your head now). In the late 80s and early 90s, “fresh” served as a synonym for cool, unique, or just all around great. Even more importantly, the Fresh Prince has grown up–when Will Smith makes a movie it consistently hits the top of the box office list. Fast forward to 2011 and there’s no doubt that whether we’re talking music, movies, meat, or beer born on date, fresh is still the way to go.

Freshness and Search Results

Google may not be as “fresh” as Will Smith or the MC Hammer Search Engine (yes, seriously). But, last week, Google added search results to the best-when-fresh list with a major update to its algorithm. For many sites Google is a kingmaker (or Fresh Prince maker?), and this update certainly affects all SEO, social media, and content marketers. The goal of the change was to give you fresher, more recent search results. On its official blog, Google estimates the changes will impact approximately 35% of searches, or 3.9 billion searches a month (according to September 2011 data). To put that in context, that is almost 3 times larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of searches, and people are still talking about Panda’s impact. Read the rest of this entry »

Digital Capital Week, billed as a Washington tech convention, kicked off this past Friday night.  While I won’t be able to attend nearly as many sessions or gatherings as I’d like, I am encouraged by what I am hearing about the conference.  Over 5000 registered attendees, sold out sessions and interesting networking events are just a few snippets I’ve seen and heard.

In a post just last week, Mike Zirngibl of Ringio (a client of Right Source Marketing) bemoaned the typical DC technology events, which are usually marked by government-focused topics, conservative thinking, and the lack of true technology evangelists.  While Digital Capital Week cannot escape some of these elements, it seems that the folks at iStrategyLabs and Shiny Heart Ventures have made every effort to make this a diverse event, offering something for everyone.

One example of Digital Capital Week’s attempt to “break the mold” is Friday’s Digital Garage day, which features some practical sessions for commercial entities, and in particular a few startup-oriented sessions.  I will be participating in the Search for Startups session as a panelist, along with Chad Hill (your moderator and search marketer extraordinaire) of HubShout, Daavi Zain of Measured Path, and Zach Girod of Legal River.  Based on some of our pre-session prep, this promises to be a session that will be full of energy, different viewpoints and concrete takeaways for the audience.  Some of the areas we’ll likely cover include:

• Search Marketing Myths and Realities
• PPC vs. SEO for Startup and Launch
• Search Marketing Measurement and Analysis
• Prioritization of Search Marketing Initiatives
• Outsourcing vs. Insourcing Search Marketing

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Recently, I was part of a group discussion focused around content marketing, and had the opportunity to walk the group through an overview of content marketing. One of the first things to cover was simple enough – and Mike had actually blogged about this recently: What is Content Marketing and Why is it Hot?

We then went through a few research statistics around the growth of content marketing, some content marketing strategies and tactics, and ways to measure your efforts. It was a great session, I got a lot out of the other presenters and I think everyone received good feedback from the group as a whole. I’ve included a copy of my slides below for those of you that may be interested.

We’re heavily immersed in content marketing, both for ourselves and on behalf of our clients. And I’m proud to say that this blog was recently ranked in the Top 100 on Junta42′s Top Content Marketing Blogs. And yes – I’ll admit, it’s pretty cool to be just one slot behind Seth Godin.

I’m often asked why we are such big supporters of content marketing. Here’s a quick set of statistics that will put things into perspective:

According to the Custom Publishing Council and Roper Public Affairs, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement. 70% say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company, while 60% say that company content helps them make better product decisions.

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