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How do startups get their content marketing to work?

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Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#61

Post by libertine »

puranjay wrote: post #52
endorphone wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great success This is a confirmation bias, however. There are a lot of orgs trying the same strategy to absolutely no success, great content that doesn't have the social proof rotting away in obscurity. Even among the ones who yield success, that tends to come and go. It's a very short path between "wow great content" and content that is cynically…

I run a content marketing agency. The problem you're talking about is, indeed, a massive one. But that usually happens when companies create content without thinking about its distribution. While you certainly must create content that your audience wants to read, it is even more important that you have a clear plan for distributing it. If your content isn't supported by a strong SEO plan, and if you don't have a clea…

Ah this takes me back to the ol'days: content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#63

Post by C1sc0cat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #24
ollerac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a blind spot for Google because the longer you stay on any given webpage, the better it is for them, since 50% of all webpages have ads served by Google or one of their subsidiaries. I wonder if this will be Google’s downfall one day. Some AI enabled competitor will come up with a search engine that delivers exactly what you’re looking for instead of the most engaging content.

> I wonder if this will be Google’s downfall one day. Some AI enabled competitor will come up with a search engine that delivers exactly what you’re looking for instead of the most engaging content. A search engine that consistently delivers English language Wikipedia as the first link for any query that has a related term on it is a search engine I'd switch to today. Google used to be like that, with a Wiki link in…

That is assuming

1 That Wikipedia does have the best answer (problematic for YMYL searches)

2 The searchers intent is informational queries - not much point in showing Wikipedia for a "buy" query

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#64

Post by dalbasal »

The undercurrent here is online ad markets, how big they've gotten, and how little value is left for seo/content to target. Basically, advertising ate the world.

15 Years ago seo/content marketing was the biggest customer recruitment method. The whole online ad industry was probably $5bn-$10bn. Today, the online ad industry is $300bn-$500bn.

Google: "snack subscription," "divorce lawyer" or "cloud database." These are valuable "high intent" ads. Most/all of the screen space is dedicated to ads (I need to scroll on both laptop and phone to see organic results). They get most of the clicks and (you'll need to take my word on this) their conversion rates are much higher. This is because the advertiser can control/optimize the UX: what the ad says, what the landing page says, etc.

Most of the customers have been harvested by the ads. Not much is left for oorganic. Organic is less visible, less clickbait-ey and coverts worse.

For highly valuable queries like the one above, whatever is left after ads have taken a lions share is often scooped up by aggregators (who may also bid for ads) This leaves very little for content/seo.

Getting to the point:

1. Write articles for queries that actually prioritize articles.

With a lot of exceptions, this also means "write articles for "low intent" queries. IE, queries with far lower commercial value. You could also pay to appear on these queries. It'd be much cheaper than "high intent" queries, but either way, these are unlikely to be directly en route to acquiring customers. There is a massive difference between users who arrived looking for "flatshare in London Docklands" and those interested in "average rent per sq ft." Leading into the pitch is great, but the conversion rate will still be 10X lower or worse. Advertisers also like to convert cheap traffic, and it is much harder for content marketers.

My overall point is that the 50X-100X growth of the online ad market over the last 15 years is directly proportional to the number of customers acquired via online advertising. The competing channels have gotten proportonally smaller.

This is not just searh. Social media & "content" advertising have grown even faster, also cannibalizing organic.

Anyway.... Content markerting is now a niche strategy. If you are building the next wikipedia, quora or stack overflow, seo/content would be a great. If you are building a snack subscription, accounting software, or online babysitting service... the deck is stacked against you.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#65

Post by pkalinowski »

I think it was Intercom CEO who said something along the lines “Everyone wants to do content marketing until they discover how expensive it is.”

You can decide you want to start content marketing, take one guy from marketing team and tell him to start pumping out “relevant” content.

Or, you can acknowledge that content marketing is like a product: it needs target audience, needs to solve problem for this audience, have a distribution and promotion process, PR backing, have a goal for your company and, the most important, it needs to be good stuff by default.

So many people treat content as “build it and they will come”, which is exactly how to achieve nothing remarkable.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#66

Post by petercooper »

I run a family of newsletters that go out to over 450,000 developers and to be honest I'm surprised how few companies I see get it right. We are always looking for content that would be interesting to our readers, and the number of companies that can consistently produce such content is quite small.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#68

Post by rcarrigan87 »

revvx wrote: post #7

Some super-basic things I learned at a past job that might help newbies: 1. Use a subdirectory instead of a subdomain for your blog. That alone helped half of our customers get better ranking. 2. Keep editing older posts so they always stay up to date. Somehow Google picks this up, and people also bounce when they see outdated information. That was a quantum leap for certain blogs where we tested this approach. 3. Pi…

When outsourcing content have you always just hired freelance writers or hired agencies?

I didn't want to manage a bunch of freelance writers so I went out looking for an agency to help execute our content strategy but it seemed almost all agencies were pitching way more on helping with strategy and less on their ability to create content.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#69

Post by thirdsun »

pascalxus wrote: post #13

I hope google catches onto the fact that, as a user, I don't want a bunch a dwell time when I'm looking for a recipe. Right now the winning strategy seems to be to write really long stories, forcing the user to search in the article endlessly before giving the recipes

The article addresses this issue and suggests the opposite is true:

> In 2019, what do most of the top-ranked blogs have in common? They skip filler introductions, keep their paragraphs short, and get to the point.

Maybe those approaches of needlessly long text with irrelevatn backstories are simply outdated?

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #63
TeMPOraL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if this will be Google’s downfall one day. Some AI enabled competitor will come up with a search engine that delivers exactly what you’re looking for instead of the most engaging content. A search engine that consistently delivers English language Wikipedia as the first link for any query that has a related term on it is a search engine I'd switch to today. Google used to be like that, with a Wiki link in…

That is assuming 1 That Wikipedia does have the best answer (problematic for YMYL searches) 2 The searchers intent is informational queries - not much point in showing Wikipedia for a "buy" query

RE 1. I can't imagine any YMYL search for which Wikipedia isn't an order of magnitude better result than content marketing garbage that currently occupies the top spots. Sure, the official website of the relevant government or organization would be best, but Wikipedia is almost always second best, and currently neither of those are the most likely results to get.

I know in theory Wikipedia isn't trustworthy, but in practice, it is good enough, and its form does a lot of work here. Most entries are structured to be information-dense and fluff-free (unlike the content marketing crap), and they cite their sources (unlike both content marketing crap and many official government sources). This overall makes it one of the most useful resources for generic health queries.

RE 2. I wouldn't complain if I was doing "buy" queries. I don't do those often anyway (for similar reasons I don't use shops for product discovery[0]).

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19643059

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