Why content is the future for search marketing
Back in February we wrote a well-received piece for The Drum called ‘The case for content marketing – Why today’s Mad Men need to embrace the art of storytelling’.
It was all about the importance of good quality, engaging content in the digital world. I say it was “well-received” because, at the time of writing, it had been shared almost 1,200 times via social media, and we received a lot of complimentary emails.
I mention this not because I want to blow our own trumpet, but because we struck a chord with The Drum readers. It’s become increasingly clear over the past year or so that quality content – written, visual and, most importantly, video – with a strong narrative thrust has moved to the very top of the marcomms agenda – and we believe it is the future of online search.
It’s easy to get hung up on delivery, process and technology, and to miss what really engages people – stories. As humans, we are hard-wired to respond to strong narratives, from the ancient oral epics of Homer, through Dickens and Shakespeare, and on to the narratives of the modern world – film, TV and now online video.
A big problem brands and their agencies face is cutting through clutter. There’s so much noise out there that getting people’s attention is difficult enough, but actually holding it is even trickier. Here’s an example of the scale of the problem: earlier this year the US-based research firm Radicata Group reported that over 108bn email messages were sent and received everyday in 2014. It’s also a well-known fact that more photos were taken and published last year (mostly on social networks) than in the rest of human history put together. It is just mind-boggling!
But what happens to all this information? It seems that a lot of it – including advertising or marketing messages – is mostly ignored. Another US researcher, Media Dynamics, estimated that in 2014 the average person in the developed world saw, heard or encountered more than 5,000 ad or brand messages every single day – but of that number, consumers only have awareness of 86; and worse still, the number of ad messages that made an impression, or was engaged with, was just 12. This means only 0.2 per cent of advertising messages seen by people every day have an impact.
It’s obvious that the bombardment isn’t working. More compelling content, such as video, or native advertising, or just an entertaining, informative or even infuriating ad could be the answer to cutting through. But things are a bit more complicated than that.
It’s widely acknowledged that the fastest-growing and most important vehicle for content marketing is online. In recent times the route to getting to eyeballs was relatively simple – you stuffed your messaging with keywords and you got up the Google’s rankings. Or you paid for your prime position.
Nowadays search engines are smarter. Google, keen to protect AdWords (its main source of revenue) has made it more difficult to ‘cheat’ the system; one upside of this is that it rewards ‘better’ content. I was recently talking to an SEO expert who told me that the most important thing was crisp, clear and relevant content.
“In a way, it’s like old-fashioned good journalism – you tell a story concisely, with the point of the story in the first sentence or paragraph,” he said. “Google’s spiders nowadays ‘read’ content in the same way we do. And like journalism, the story has to be delivered to the right people at the right time.” Simple.
The same is true of online video or pictures. Search engines can’t – yet – ‘understand’ moving images and pictures as humans can, so they rely on tags. This is why tagging has become such a hot subject. But you can’t just add lots of tags and hope that the blunderbuss approach will work. Five carefully chosen tags will have more impact than 50 ‘hit and hope’ ones. The ability to choose those five effective tags is a skill that will soon be in as great a demand as the ability to create a great copy line or to deliver a fantastic video.
And this, we think, will be the thing that will preoccupy all forward-thinking marketing professionals in the near term. Not just the creation of content, but how to ‘market’ it to blind technology (search technology in particular), so that the tech can then deliver the right content to the right people – those to whom the message will mean something, or those most likely to respond to it.
The creation of good content is relatively simple – in this country we are (and always have been) blessed with a thriving and talented creative community. The other bit is more problematic. As serving ads and content becomes more programmatic, as the sheer volume of messages increases, and consumers become more savvy and resistant to messages they deem irrelevant, the activity around the content becomes more important.
We have a number of tools to help us – good old-fashioned hunches, mediated by experience, but also big data. There is a vast amount of data out there but despite the emergence of data agencies and data marketing firms, I believe we are only just beginning to understand it, and that we are only at the first stages of making it work for us. Part of the way forward is making the big data smaller – pulling stories and meaning from the numbers, and using the macro cosmos to appeal to the micro cosmos. The other part is properly understanding people’s personal buttons – what makes them tick, what they are interested in. We need to remove the clutter and only serve relevant content to the right people. This is where the holy grail in search marketing resides and where we believe the future of search is headed.
Tony Walford, Partner, Green Square Partners
Tel: +44 (0)20 7182 4701
Email: Tony.Walford@GSquare.co.uk
Web: www.gsquare.co.uk
Twitter: @GreenSqTweets
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