Content marketers are planning to create more original content and optimise their blog posts, news and videos for multi-device access in order to improve campaigns, according to a new in-depth study from research enterprise Clutch. Nine out of ten respondents said that the amount of content that they create is “important.”
Clutch polled 300 expert content marketers to get a better idea of how the discipline dovetails with search engine optimisation (SEO). It found that the two practices are intrinsically linked, as 79 per cent of marketers said that they use content primarily to improve brand visibility on Google and other search engines, while 21 per cent focus their efforts on lead generation.
“As far as SEO goes, without content, there are no rankings, and there is no opportunity to appear in results,” Rand Fishkin, the founder of SEO software company Moz, noted in the report. “[Content marketing and SEO] are two practices that very much need each other.”
There has been a recent trend towards quality being more important than quantity for content strategies, and Clutch’s respondents echoed this mantra, with one claiming that the enterprise with “the highest quantity of high-quality content” will win out. The vast majority of marketers still believe that creating a large amount of content is important, so balancing the two goals is key for the year ahead.
When asked about their objectives for improving their overall output, 26 per cent said that they are aiming to optimise content for multiple channels across devices, while 24 per cent said that creating more original content is their main focus. Including more visual elements (21 per cent), appealing to emotions (14 per cent) and creating better calls to action (14 per cent) also featured in the top five.
Another interesting takeaway from the study is the fact that many content marketers appear to rely on infographics as one of their main formats, but Fishkin stated that “the age of infographics is dying” and urged brands to re-evaluate whether this format is really worthwhile for driving SEO and lead generation. Infographics topped the list of most-frequently produced formats, ahead of product reviews and original data.
The survey concluded that marketers need to put more careful consideration into how specific content formats can complete SEO efforts, and Clutch encouraged brands to take a closer look at their audiences’ preferences to determine the amount of content that needs to produced. It also said that content performance should be measured from the perspective of business goals.
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