How to get found online by the right visitors today
By now, the importance of creating your own content and publishing it online via all social channels should be pretty obvious, but in case you missed the latest metric on social-media marketing here it is: HubSpot just reported that nearly two out of every three social-media messages today is a link to published content.
In other words, people pointing out to personal friends and business associates the material published by someone else amounts to a substantial majority of the information flow in social media. The implications for marketers have never been clearer or more urgent: brands, whether B2C or B2B, are as much in the content publishing (and distribution) business today as they are in the business that generates their revenue stream. Indeed, the publishing element of their business has become central to growing this revenue because it drives the visitors to your site who generate the leads that convert to $ales.
Moreover, whether people are sharing links to your content or embedding it into social networks directly, an overwhelming 96% of the sharing that happens online is of content, not websites. The take-away: creating fresh content that encourages sharing amongst your prospects, customers, partners and market influencers, specifically the stuff that addresses issues of keenest interest and urgency to them, multiplies their interest in you. You’re in the conversation, which is the precursor to being in consideration.
Superior marketers have come to understand that pushing content drives in-bound marketing. Fresh content — the more frequently published the better — facilitates online “find-ability”. It’s not enough to update your site once a quarter and step back to await the deluge of visitors clicking through your multiple calls-to-action. Plant your content seeds in social media and get it shared among the right people on an ongoing basis.
What is your content strategy today? What are your content publishing tactics? How often do you publish the content your prospects and customers can’t resist sharing?