It’s time once again for the Content Marketing Weekly, your go-to source for every bit of digital, content and just regular old-fashioned marketing news under the sun. This week, we cover artificial intelligence, content marketing frequency, keyword relevance and – dun, dun, dun – the end of social media as we know it.
AI in Content Marketing: 3 Frequently Asked Questions
People are going crazy about artificial intelligence. For good reason too: AI has incredible applications across a broad spectrum of industries and walks of life. And the technology’s only getting more sophisticated.
How does AI fit into the content marketing world? Over at Search Engine Journal, Heidi Besik has your answer, discussing the customer experience benefits AI can offer, as well as its potential to optimize content creation and delivery. Indeed these content marketing applications are the hottest things to hit the AI scene since the Urkelbot.
Besik also answers some nagging questions surrounding the future of AI: Will it replace traditional marketers? How can you incorporate it into your digital marketing strategy?
Now’s the time to start thinking about AI applications and where they might fit into your content marketing approach.
Check out the full story.
Are Consumers Burning Out on Social Media?
What if I told you the days of social media being the go-to source for brand engagement were coming to an end? Hyperbole? Yeah, probably a little bit, but Dayle Hall, Lithium Technologies’ Senior Vice President of Marketing, noted that traditional social media marketing efforts are starting to lose their effectiveness.
Why?
Because people are getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information coursing through social media feeds every day and starting to feel burnt out.
You can’t just bombard social users with tweets or posts on a regular basis; you run the real risk of alienating your audience. In particular, Hall noted that digital natives are more likely to chafe at heavy-handed promotional outreach tactics.
Does this mean that social is dead? No way, of course not. But it does mean that brands need to be smarter and more strategic with their social media efforts.
Read up on Hall’s whole spiel here.
An Easy Way to See If Google Thinks Your Webpages Are Keyword Relevant
If all of that social media naysaying sounds familiar, it’s because people have been saying that same thing about keywords for years. We’ve all heard about the supposedly dwindling returns that an SEO keyword strategy offers, but the truth is you just need to be more targeted in your selections.
One of the most important pieces of criteria when creating content for a particular keyword is relevancy. If Google doesn’t think your landing page, blog or even entire website accurately ties into your targeted query, you’re not going to rank well.
As Eric Enge discussed in a recent Search Engine Land article, this can be a profoundly frustrating experience – especially if you don’t even know how Google is assessing your site’s relevancy.
Enge offers some guidance on how to check for keyword relevance and see how your own webpages stack up:
- Do some ranking analysis to see what kinds of phrases your site already ranks for.
- Assuming you have a solid starting point with your site ranking for a few related phrases, build around those themes to discover additional keywords.
- If your ranking analysis came up with bupkis, you may be looking at a total keyword strategy redo. Save yourself some grief by working with an SEO expert to get you on the right path.
You may be looking at a lot of work to get the right keyword strategy in place, but it’s worth it. Otherwise, you’ll waste your time on targeted queries that are about as relevant as a Beach Boys guest spot on a ‘90s sitcom.
Slow Your Content Marketing Down
Sometimes, we all feel the pressure to kick our content marketing efforts into high gear and crank out blogs, videos, infographics and social media at a breakneck pace.
You need to give your audience time to breathe, though.
Google’s algorithms have been prioritizing quality over quantity for awhile now, and this trend has finally reached its natural destination: the slow content marketing movement. Writing for the Content Marketing Institute, Sarah Greesonbach details some of the main tenets of this approach:
- Make the most of existing content before spending a ton of time and money on rapid content refreshes.
- Improve the writing quality on your site, and make sure every piece of content speaks your audience’s language. This is especially important for niche market areas.
- Find the right balance between accuracy and engagement with your content titles. The first thing people see are your headlines – make sure they draw in the audience while also giving a sneak peak at the content itself.
That doesn’t mean you should slam the breaks on your content marketing output, but don’t get too hung up on uploading a new blog every day or every other day.
Like we always say around here: Quality is king. Stick with that mindset, and you’ll be amazed with the results.
And with that, we close the book on another round of the CM Weekly. Check back again soon for even more content marketing news, updates and tips.
