As content marketing continues to rule the lands, more and more businesses are looking for ways to publish articles and other forms of valuable content for their website visitors. Content is important for the obvious reason of giving your visitors interesting content to read and share, but more importantly for the lead generation value it brings to the organization.
Because content generation is so time consuming, many companies fill their blog with articles and shared content that is shared among a slew of competitors. The topics may be interesting and keep your visitors informed, but the search value of the content is greatly diminished. If your company is publishing duplicate content, you will want to quickly rethink your content strategy (recommended book on this topic).
Consider this Simple Formula:
Valuable Content + Search Engine Optimized + Social Media=
More website traffic + More Leads + More Conversions
If you aren’t bought into this equation, you should stop reading this article. If you do believe in this model, then there are a few foundational pieces that make this concept come to reality. For starters, your content needs to be interesting and searchable. Matt Cutts currently heads up the search quality team at Google and stated that content sameness should not expect to rank in search results. In layman’s terms, this means that if your content is the same or very similar to others content, it will not be authoritative, nor will it rank favorably in search engine rankings. Basically, publishing duplicate content nullifies the opportunity to get found by your prospects if they decide to search on topics you are posting in your blog.
Secondly, calls to action are a large part of the content-to-lead integration strategy. To effectively convert content visitors into leads, your website needs to be mapped to perform this way. Publishing duplicate content as a key part of your strategy will likely negate this opportunity as well. Creating compelling calls to action requires a well planned content strategy with original content.
What You Should Do
Perform a quick audit on your content to see if you are achieving the results you expect. Here are 3 ways to explore your content marketing effectiveness:
- Look at your Google Analytics traffic at a glance. As a baseline, publishing regular, well optimized content on a consistent basis will increase your website traffic. The visitor traffic for a company that has followed this practice looks like this:
If your company is not publishing original content and is syndicating someone else’s material, your Google traffic over a similar time frame may look like this which is relatively flat outside of a few campaign spikes:
- The second key to understanding the value of the content you are producing is to look at the drill down traffic of organic search activity within Google Analytics. Again in this scenario, original content will produce a nice consistent increase in organic search traffic. If your content is unique and original, your chart should look like this:
If your content is the same as 50 other companies, your website organic search traffic will likely look like this:
- Finally, look at your lead generation numbers and see what lead scores and conversions have come through website traffic calls-to-action. Since there is a direct correlation between traffic to conversions, it’s likely that low website traffic will result in low lead generation activities from your content. Compare the two charts below.
Original Content Lead Generation Chart:
Shared Content Lead Generation Chart:
The moral of the story is that if your company wants to implement a sound content strategy and truly believes in the concept of driving results through search and inbound marketing, publishing shared content is going to continue to be a dead end.
If you want to explore an effective content marketing plan and strategy, reach out to us for a quick conversation about how to make it work for you.
