Ian Harris is the founder and CEO of global search engine marketing agency Search Laboratory.

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Content Confusion
What is the point of your content marketing?
Ian Harris

3. Some clients

4. Content marketing is a strategic marketing
approach focused on creating and
distributing valuable, relevant, and
consistent content to attract and retain a
clearly-defined audience — and,
ultimately, to drive profitable customer
action.

5. 73% per cent of marketers were
doing more content than ever
46% per cent say it’s ineffective or
distinctly average in performance.
We want to be
a content hub
We want to be
an authority
The go-to site
for our industry

6. Produce
high-quality
content!

7. How to do (and measure)
Effective Content Marketing

8. Types of Content
Ranking Customer Engagement Viral

9. Ranking

10. Customer Engagement
What is it?
• Content that engages with
potential customers at
various stages of buying
Aims
• Relevant traffic
• Sign ups (email, social)
• Brand recall
• Cookie drop
• Links

11. Blogger Tea Party
Promote ‘Delivery outside of
Yorkshire’
Food, fashion & lifestyle
bloggers
Exclusive “Secret” Event
VIP location in Islington

12. Blogger Tea Party
Invited 24 influencers
Shareability – high social metrics

13. Blogger Tea Party
Tutorial – how to create the
perfect Afternoon Tea
Used Bettys by Post products
Networking with bloggers
Blogger challenges
Live tweeting of event
#BettysTeaParty

14. Blogger Tea Party
Media packs
Instructions

15. Blogger Tea Party - Result
Lots of mentions/links: 21 linking articles, 3x YouTube videos
Lots of shares: hashtag reached 136,491
Social: 92 Instagram posts, 325 comments, 12,766 likes
Brand exposure to key audience
Visitors à Cookie à Retargeting

16. Customer Engagement
Best practice
• Create something that interests your target
customer, or try to answer an industry
question.
• Follow up with cookies/social follows/emails
for remarketing
Measurement
• Traffic
• Social shares
• Sign ups (Email, Social follows)
• Conversions
• Links

17. Viral
What is it?
• Content that aims to
engage with a large
audience
• ‘Viral’?
Aims
• Diverse back links
• Likes/shares

18. Star Wars Post-its
Ride search trend - Star Wars
Easily sharable content
Supported by video, blog post & social
updates
Target: marketing, design and technology
publications

19. Star Wars Post-its

20. Star Wars Post-its
Long form page on site
Organically seeded on
Reddit
3 initial articles then…
…Mashable (catalyst)
Hundreds of organic
links

21. Star Wars Post-its
235 total coverage
212 live links
Average DA 42.5
Shared via social over
75,000 times
50,829 YouTube views

22. Post it notes
Star Wars Post-its
Uplift onto page 1 across multiple country sites
No on-site optimisation!

23. Viral Content
Best practice
• Identify trends, hypes and topics that
engage a mass audience
• What will hit the nerve of the general
public, rather than a niche (think Zombies,
Cats, Star Wars)
Measurement
• Links
• Social shares
SEO Value = High

24. Content Compared
Customer Engagement
• Relevant users
Measure with:
• Traffic
• Branding
• Engagement
• Links
• Conversions
Viral
• Mass market
Measure with:
• Links
• Search rankings

25. Important
Don’t mix customer engagement with viral

26. A Dose of Reality
Conversions from content are scarce
Conversions from search are plenty
So … links are very valuable
67 (0.55% of total) conversions via content
during 2015
Compared to –
– Search – 71.93% (8,789)
– Direct – 17.33% (2,118)
– Organic Brand – 8.51% (996)
– Display – 1.31% (160)

27. Visitors
Initially, site had negligible traffic, from all sources
Big spike in referral

28. Questions?
Ian.Harris@searchlaboratory.com