Developing your brand’s content to reach your target market may seem like a daunting challenge, especially if you’re beginning at the beginning. Factoring in all that needs to go into effective content performance marketing can seem overwhelming - but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be. In this post, we’ll go over what is needed to achieve a successful, sustainable content creation and marketing performance strategy.

Creating a Content Engine

As the graphic above shows, there are four essential processes required to grow your brand’s content capabilities. It’s important to note that content creation, management, marketing and measurement is a cyclical process, with measurement informing topic selection from one quarter to the next:

1. Topic Selection
2. Execution
3. Promotion
4. Measurement

Let’s explore the mechanisms driving these four cylinders of a well-oiled content development engine.

Content Topic Selection

The content ideation and creation process is perhaps the most challenging of all. At this initial stage, your goals are to capture the search intent of your audience with each piece of content, such that it resonates with their needs. Eventually, the goal is to build a steady flow of qualified organic traffic. Here are the mechanics to make it happen …

Search Analysis

An informed keyword strategy is central to this quantum first step of SEO analytics, beginning with keyword research. (Sudhir Sharma recently outlined a basic guide to keyword research here on the BrightEdge blog). With access to the BrightEdge platform, you’ll be able to publish content that responds to your customers by:

• Uncovering new topics through keyword research
• Identifying opportunities for quick wins
• Capitalizing on high-volume terms with low competition
• Prioritizing coverage based on high-converting search intent

Competitive Analysis

Understanding how your search (and direct) competitors are faring with their own content marketing efforts is key to giving you the edge. Our SEO platform offers competitive intelligence that allows you to:

• See your top competitors’ strategies
• Identify “gaps” – or opportunities – in your market
• Develop a detailed action plan based on our recommendations

Social Analysis

Social signals are now an integral part of search engine algorithms, and key to your content’s SEO performance. Besides playing a significant part in SEO overall, social activity also lets you know what content is resonating with your target market (via likes, shares, etc.) versus what is falling flat. Social SEO means making smart content strategy decisions by analyzing social trends not only by your own fans and followers, but also by your target market influencers and competitors’ social networks.

Personas, Audience and Brand Development

Developing your brand means understanding its intended users. When you work to uncover who your personas are through data from search, social, surveys and more, you can deliver on Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth” directive by developing the right content, for the right person, delivered at the right time.

Execution: Content Workflow

Content Workflow

Coordinating content development and marketing tasks is a second major hurdle most organizations face when implementing an overarching, sustainable content strategy. Key to an economic process, especially with enterprise-level firms, is to build efficiency into your approach with scalable workflow. To make this piece work, you’ll need to:

• Disseminate your organic content strategy effectively across the organization
• Coordinate remote resources, and develop cross-department coordination

Content Creation: Training, Tools and Support

Clear communications with your content creation staff is a cornerstone of projecting a consistent brand message. Defining the target audience, establishing content goals and clarifying the search intent behind each keyword are all integral to effective content development. You can bring key content creators on board by creating content briefs that:

• Define your brand’s “tone” and personas
• Train and support your content creation teams on optimization

As any content editor would emphatically state, a content calendar is a must, whether you’ve only one content creator or an entire team. Content calendars with forecasting into each month or quarter serve to establish the cadence and predictable lead times for creators to do their best work, as well as prioritize content where your brand needs to make an impact and bring your top creative team in on the big picture. In this step, you’ll want to:

• Analyze your market space to both inform and build content calendars well ahead of time
• Be flexible to adjust content calendars on the fly to capture new opportunities

Promotion: Social Amplification to Influencer Outreach

As alluded to previously, social media sharing is now factored into search engine algorithms as an indicator of trust, authority and credibility. By creating brand awareness and link-building opportunities, social platforms carry SEO weight.

Of course, each social media channel courts a different audience that needs to be reached accordingly. Tapping into your social data, you can readily:

• Identify priority social platforms based on your target audience
• Identify influential figures on select platforms
• Integrate your social and SEO campaigns

Measurement: Reporting to Securing Executive Buy-In

Proving the ROI of organic content marketing may seem like a paper-chase nightmare of endless reports that may or may not be enough to achieve C-Suite buy-in. BrightEdge can help here. Our key performance indicator (KPI) reporting capabilities allow you to readily compare performance quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year so you have the data needed to refuel your content strategy cycle. To secure executive buy-in, BrightEdge also allows you to connect the dots between investment in content marketing initiatives and dollars earned. By building a customized reporting dashboard, you can access key numbers on the fly and on demand. BrightEdge provides ongoing support and training for executives, as well! I hope this overview of how to grow your content capabilities fueled some ideas you can implement in-house. Questions or comments? Let me know in the comments section below!

Your content marketing might not be doing what you think it's doing. You'd like to think that once you come up with a genius idea, it will go viral, bring traffic, convert that traffic into sales and then turn visitors into brand advocates. What it does, however, is a little bit different. Instead, content marketing, as shown in this infographic, works with smart SEO tactics to build authority and increase awareness of your brand.

Good content will build positive associations with your brand. More of this quality content will help to make your company rank higher in search results because of higher authority. As a result, someone who has a need for your product or service (and who has perhaps never even experienced your content before) will find you in a query on Google and will convert. So take a look at this infographic and read this blog post to find out how content marketing really works and how you can make your content calendar work for you.

There is a reason that content marketers and SEOs place such a high emphasis on content, but it might not be what most people think. The truth is that SEO does not favor content for the sake of content. It’s not just any content that will garner traffic and get rank. There’s a lot of noise out there when it comes to content, but deep, rich content is what drives organic traffic. It gets you links and social signals, and these factors make you look good to search engines and usually lead to favorable rankings in the Google algorithm. No one wants to read junk that is full of spam links and meaningless text.

Overall, good content is what enhances the user experience, and that’s why Google and other search engines rank good content higher. Above all, it’s important to realize that more content does not equal good content. Don’t be part of the crowd that turns what can be said in three sentences into a 2,400-word exposé or a piece that disguises what is obvious as something profound.

What is good content

A deluge of low-quality content is causing internet users to put up barriers and raise their expectations, so those seeking to be heard have to know how to get past those barriers and meet expectations—and it’s done with good content. And what used to be enough won’t be enough anymore. An e-book once every four or six months may have been enough last year, but this year you might need an e-book every month to keep up with everything else being published on the Internet. Everyone is competing for an increasingly scarce resource—people’s attention. When your content is mixed in with all the other content, it will start looking like something people have gotten really good at ignoring: advertising. That is, unless your content is really good. So become a thought leader. Be an intelligent contributor to conversations around issues that really matter. 

Optimize good content for better SEO

It’s also important that you optimize your content, because just like Google favors rich content over poor content, optimized content is favored over non-optimized content. One way to do this is by coding the open graph markup. This will optimize the content for social sharing which will, in turn, drive more traffic and get more people to discover the content. When more people find your content, it’s more likely to earn good content links from influencers down the line. Another way to optimize content is to internally link your content with your other pieces of content as well as to your landing pages. This will allow your content pieces to pass more of their authority to the rest of your site—especially to your landing pages.

Make sure, however, that this is done with the benefit of the users in mind rather than to strictly boost your SEO efforts. Google’s algorithms are becoming more and more aware of malicious internal linking, so if users don’t benefit, steer away. Content may be king, but good content is emperor. Google and other search engines care about user experience, so create content with the user in mind. If there isn’t a need, don’t produce it. With more and more bad content out there, it’s becoming clear that the biggest threat to content marketing is content marketing. Stand out from the rest by creating content worthy of users’ time.

For some, ‘content marketing‘ seems to be a buzzword more and more people are throwing around. The reason for the perhaps overuse of this term may be because of the perceived conceptions of what content marketing does. Digital marketers tend to think that when a piece of content is shared, it will go viral, bring traffic, convert that traffic into sales, and then turn visitors into brand advocates. This is a myth, however, and should be put to rest if you want to use content marketing to its potential.

The misconception of content marketing

Too often those who plan for, build and promote content have unrealistic expectations for what their content marketing will accomplish, and, as a result, are disappointed when it fails. The truth is, you can’t put out content thinking that someone will experience it, be inspired, and then go make a purchase because of it. What content marketing does accomplish is still valuable. Smart use of content marketing allows people to see the brand.

The greater exposure and the more that people see your brand and associate with it positively, the greater the likeliness that they will purchase from you down the road. It’s hardly ever the case that someone experiences a piece of content from a brand they’ve never heard about or that they don’t know anything about and then thinks, “Hmm I wonder what they sell; I should buy that.” What does happen, however, is that every time someone sees some kind of content that you produce, they begin to grow a feeling or attitude toward your brand. If the content is good, the feeling or attitude will be like a positive bank account of experiences and ideas with your brand. These could be in the form of experiences they’ve had with your content, social media, etc. Once this capital of positive associations with your brand is built up, these people, when they have the need for the product or service, are more likely to buy from you.

Content marketing is a balance of trial and error

This is a long and arduous process. Companies have to experiment with different pieces of content, find something that really resonates with the audience—this takes a great deal of trail and error. Sometimes pieces of content just flop, and there may not be a really clear reason why. For this reason, among others, many give up in the content marketing practice way too early; they decide that they don’t want to invest the amount of time or effort required. This, of course, is an advantage to those who do see the value and decide to invest the time because there will be less competing for attention. And some content marketers won’t give up, but they won’t improve either. That is why so many novice digital marketers simply don’t understand why all the pieces of content they push don’t get seen by the millions they are hoping to reach. This puts a lot of pressure on the content marketer.

There is more to content marketing than 'exposure'

Content marketing can improve other aspects digital marketing that indirectly affect your customer’s purchase cycle. When content is keyword optimized and has optimized backlinks, it will be an SEO benefit. When content gets picked up by another news source, it will see a boost in social media signals. With social media and SEO marketing channels benefiting from content marketing, it can be difficult to properly identify the attributing medium. It’s important to correctly attribute conversions and assists to know where to devote budget and people. When it comes to content performance marketing, ‘performance’ refers to quantifiable metrics that measure results such as traffic, ROI and revenue.

Measuring content performance in this way helps content marketers discover what kinds of content actually deliver ROI, because it’s about understanding the demand for content. It’s about looking at the historical performance of your content over time and pairing that with trending topics and seasonal spending habits of your potential customers. Consider competitor content and data and assess in what ways they’re doing well and how you can perhaps incorporate some of their tactics into your strategy. Use performance indicators to help you craft a content strategy. Really good content won’t drive sales immediately, but it will work to separate your brand from competitors and get people on the road to conversions. Whether it takes four touches with a brand to convert or 17, every bit of positive association helps. See some fun content that is really working: check out BrightEdge's SEO Jokes post.

A fundamental first step to optimizing your site to boost your organic search traffic and generate leads is keyword research.

By identifying the keywords that prospective visitors are most likely to use when searching for your industry’s products and services, then targeting content around those keywords and optimizing existing content for content marketing with them, your Web pages are more likely to surface in response to a query in the Google or Bing search engine results pages (SERPs), and are more likely to rank in the SERPs for those keywords.

In this post, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to do basic keyword research to create a keyword portfolio for optimizing your website.

Steps to building a keyword portfolio

The first steps of your research entail gathering as many keywords as possible – which may end up numbering in the thousands or more – so you don’t miss any optimization opportunities. Further on, we’ll discuss how to filter out those keywords that are irrelevant, duplicate or have a low search volume to keep your keyword portfolio both useful and manageable.

The first step is to create a “seed” keyword list in a spreadsheet. To build your basic seed keyword list, you need to do a manual (“eyeball”) check of your website’s products and services pages, identifying the potential keywords you can start with. You will likely also have a conversation with teammates about what this list would look like.

Using the example of a well known eye doctor's office, an initial seed keyword list might look like this (you can format it nicely when you are done):

 

The second step is to use Google search to find your competitors using the keywords you are targeting, then go through their websites pages to discover the keywords they may be optimizing for.

This best practice manual review of competitor sites may help you discover keywords you hadn’t thought of (what we refer to as keyword “gaps”). Add your competitors’ keywords to your seed list in the Excel tab. At this point, your initial seed list may be getting larger. 

Third, look at the terms in the “related searches” list at the bottom of the Google search results page to gain more ideas. Copy and paste those queries into your spreadsheet as well.

The fourth step is to go to your site’s keyword research tool, your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account, and pull the list of keywords driving impressions for your site, then paste them into your initial seed list. An important side note is to limit the keywords you select for inclusion in your keyword seed list to those that have a larger number of impressions.

Finally, if you have access to the BrightEdge Data Cube, enter the URL of your website and click “search.” This will display the keywords for which your site is ranking, and on what pages:

Copy and paste this list into your spreadsheet of seed keywords. You’ll want to make sure that you indicate in your spreadsheet which keywords you already rank for, so when you’re in the filter and sort stage, they don’t get lost.

Next, do the same step using the Data Cube for your competitors. This second review of your competitors’ keywords and rankings can give a more objective picture of the competitive landscape, and help you identify gaps or opportunities where you can optimize for keywords that you may have missed.

Building out your keyword list - more research

Once you’ve completed the steps we just covered, you should have a great starting point for more research. Next, you’ll want to add columns to the right of your keywords in your spreadsheet for monthly searches (search volume) and current keyword rankings.

Now you’re ready to further develop your keyword seed list. You can consult an SEO keyword tool like Google’s Keyword Planner tool within Google Ads for keyword ideas. You can then use the keyword planner to discover keyword variations for your site.

A recommended method for researching is to select five to ten keywords from your seed list at a time, plugging them in to the first field of the keyword planner (under “your product or service”), then selecting “get ideas” to generate a list of keywords that you can then download into your spreadsheet.

Here’s what a list of suggested keywords can look like:

Pro Tip: Once you’ve generated variations for all of your keyword “batches” of five to ten seed keywords, you may end up with thousands (or more) keywords in the Keyword Planner. To attach all of these keywords for exporting into a single CSV Excel master spreadsheet, you can use the Microsoft Excel add-on, RDB Merge.

When using this, be sure that the segmented time frame (e.g., by month) and columns (e.g., keyword, average monthly searches, search volume, etc.) line up with those from the original Excel document for data integrity.

Prioritizing keyword optimization

Now, let’s look at a few steps to refine the keywords you have in your spreadsheet (which should be a healthy list by now), so you know how to prioritize them in your SEO plan.

You will have downloaded the search volume of your keywords when you used Google’s Keyword Planner. Search volume is indicative of the relative demand of keywords – and in most cases, the higher the search volume, the more you’ll want to target those in your site optimization strategy.

Next, filter out unwanted keywords. For the most part, this can easily be accomplished within Excel using its “sort & filter” function. (Note: those keywords that are filtered out should be saved to another spreadsheet location, so you still have the entire list).

In general, the keywords you’ll want to delete are:

• Brand keywords, or those mentioning your brand that you are likely already ranking for. (Again, for those brand keywords for which you’re ranking well, be sure to save and paste them into another spreadsheet for benchmarking and future reference).
• Irrelevant keywords, or those that simply serve no purpose (such as locational keywords having nothing to do with your location). This is something you can accomplish with a manual check.
• Keywords with low average monthly search volume for your site, relative to your top-ranking keyword. (For instance, if your top keyword generates 100 average monthly searches, than you would want to consider excluding those of less than 10).

Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner offers three grades of keywords in terms of competition: high, medium and low. This gross categorization of keywords is not generally helpful when assessing which keywords you want to select for organic search optimization as search volumes already indicate how competitive a keyword is (remember, Keyword Planner is typically for PPC marketing).

A final step in sorting and prioritizing your keywords is creating and assigning categories within your Excel spreadsheet for your keyword terms. This will allow you to categorize your keywords according to that value, such as a common thread like “news” or “X product.” This step can also help define a new site structure, which will be the subject of another post.

Use this basic guide to keyword research to start building the content calendar your audience is hungry for.

We’re excited to announce that the Data Cube Time Machine and the Data Cube Score are now generally available. These innovations first previewed at Share14, and leverage the power of the BrightEdge Data Cube.

The BrightEdge Data Cube is a massive content repository - the industry’s largest data set made up of billions of pieces of information which include: keywords, search terms, rich media and content, along with their performance on the Web. Backed by a robust data set, both the Data Cube Time Machine and Data Cube Score allow marketers to seamlessly access historical and real-time competitive analysis and performance insights of their content.

Data Cube time machine: explore trends and travel in time

With the Data Cube time machine, marketers can easily understand and analyze content performance historically and over time to identify which content is successful – including rich media (images and video). Marketers can access month-over-month performance comparisons to help them set benchmarks and achieve outstanding content.

Armed with insights on performance and their Data Cube Score over time, marketers can identify the impact of algorithm updates, track branded versus non-branded keywords, stay-ahead of seasonal trends, and improve performance over time.

Data Cube score: quantify and analyze content performance

The Data Cube Score is a key performance indicator (KPI) of how well content is performing. Dynamically calculated based on billions of data points, the score lets marketers see how their content is performing, either site-wide or for a specific section of their site. The score also allows marketers to easily identify the state of their content performance and gauge how their content compares to their competitors in real-time.

Together, the Data Cube Score and Data Cube Time Machine give marketers the insights they need to target demand, optimize content and measure results.

Powered by the massive BrightEdge Data Cube data repository, these insights are delivered as comprehensive, lightning fast, actionable intelligence, that help marketers set budgetary priorities for content development and marketing. 

New research

We leveraged the Data Cube to power our latest research report, Consumer Demand For Autumn Travel Report, which details consumer demand for online travel and accommodation sites during this busy holiday season. Learn how leading companies are leveraging content to engage consumers, and which strategies perform best.

Learn more about how to make the leap into content performance marketing here.  

There’s been much discussion about how social media influences SEO, including references to “social SEO.” So what does it all mean, and just how do social media and SEO work together? In this article, we’ll explore some high-level concepts around the social signals used in SEO.

Some background: big data and social media

Over the past few years, there has been an overwhelming amount of data generated online. The sheer volume of global data (referred to as “big data”) produced within this relatively short time span can be largely attributed to social media – 90 percent, in fact.

How do social, content and organic search fit together? As the graphic above indicates, organic rank in search engines is predominantly determined by content quality, and search engine algorithms use content sharing as a primary quality signal. The explosion of social data is reflected by statistics for social media usage and content sharing, which show that as of 2013, there were 1 billion Facebook users accounting for 3.3 billion pieces of content shared each month, while Google Plus accounted for 5 billion Google +1’s per day.

How search enginges are adapting to create content for social

Bing

Bing began its foray into social with its incorporation of Facebook “likes” in its search engine results pages (SERPs) in February 2011. It then expanded its integration of social in its search results in May 2012, when it announced a dedicated social side bar on its SERPs, allowing users to readily view their Facebook friends’ activity as it related to their search query. More recently, Facebook has given way to Twitter in Bing’s search results, as Twitter entered into an “exclusive social partnership” with Bing in November 2013). In June of this year, Bing announced that users could “discover tweets directly in [their] search results.” Bing’s commitment to integrating social signals in its search results is evident in its webmaster guidelines, where it states:

Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence. If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Google

Google first ventured into social with its introduction of “Social Search” in 2009, which it described as an expansion of its personalized search results (instituted in 2007). Social Search highlighted “relevant public content” from the users’ friends and social contacts at the bottom of Google’s SERPs. It wasn’t until June 2011 that Google launched Google+, its own social media platform, which integrates Google+ content into personalized search results. Several months later, in November 2011, the search giant announced it would start adding brands and businesses to Google+ with Google+ Pages. Then in January 2012, it unveiled “Search, plus Your World,” which incorporated G+ profiles and “relevant web results” related to search queries in their SERPs. Marketers have also adapted to social in their SEO strategy. A survey by BrightEdge found 80 percent of marketers indicated that social sharing of their content as a means to improve rank would be “much more important” (31 percent) or “more important” (49 percent) in 2013 than in 2012.

Why brands need to pay attention to social

Clearly, social sharing of content represents an opportunity – if not an SEO imperative – for brands to increase their visibility in organic search, including their products, services and solutions. Embracing social also allows brands to “own” and manage their reputation, as well as engage with their followers and fans. Finally, a social presence can drive Web traffic, which in turn can result in increased conversions and revenue: 

Case study: SEO and social 'synergy'

An example of how SEO and social work together to improve search ranking and customer engagement is the case of Tiny Prints, an online boutique specializing in unique designs and stylized cards for occasions. As a brand that relies on organic search to drive Web traffic and revenue, Tiny Prints sought to increase its conversion rate and boost search engine rankings using Twitter and organic search together.

As the graph shows, the results proved that the strategy worked. By aligning its Twitter strategy with its organic search strategy, Tiny Prints realized a 300 percent increase in customer engagement on its Web pages and “long-tail” keywords, as well as a 47 percent increase in search rankings on those keywords and the individual Web page URLs that were trending on Twitter – all within one month! Stay tuned for our follow-up post on how you can leverage the suite of BrightEdge tools to rock your social SEO!  

A little over a year ago in September 2013, Google eclipsed all search query data globally, representing one of the most dramatic changes ever to the SEO landscape. SEO practitioners were forced to adapt to the loss of their keyword data, and with it, a good portion of their traditional keyword-driven strategy. As BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu observed in his Search Engine Land article of December 2013, it was no coincidence that Google’s switch to 100 percent secure search occurred with the announcement of its new infrastructure, Hummingbird. “Hummingbird asks marketers to think about the meaning of words on the page, and to create content around topics rather than keywords,” he wrote. Secure search created a new need – the need for page-centric, content-centric analytics (p.s. BrightEdge offered that before 100 percent secure search!). The new norm would be page-level performance, and SEOs would quickly pick up the pieces and move forward.

Secure search insights from the Share14 event

Secure search was discussed by several speakers presenting at BrightEdge’s Share 14 event (in August), including Jordan Kasteler, senior SEO manager of Red Door Interactive and Ken Shults, managing director - global consulting of Global Strategies. Let's briefly go over how these two professionals said they were handling SEO in a post-secure search world. Jordan Kasteler said he believes Google’s motivation for encrypting all search data was to get the SEO industry to think about keywords less and searcher needs and intent more (we agree). He listed several ways SEOs have adjusted to secure search, including:

• Persona development
• Site search data
• Landing page traffic and engagement analysis
• Conversion optimization and analysis
• Grouping keyword buckets and ranking monitoring by keyword size (single or two-word keywords vs. longtail key phrases), topic, buying stage and intent (transactional, informational, commercial investigation and navigational)

Jordan presented a search query classification funnel, showing the breakdown of search intent as it relates to search volume:

Keyword-based optimization was now intent-based optimization, he said, which identifies the primary topics and questions users are looking to answer when searching for “xyz,” and creating content to address the user’s needs on the target landing page. Jordan then shared keyword research tools that are still useful today, including:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• AdWords’ paid and organic report
• Site search (which you can set up in GWT)
• The BrightEdge Data Cube (for competitive ranking intel)

Ken Shults said the biggest impact secure search has had on Global Strategies is in the areas of insights and measurement. Global Strategies has now employed a page-level data performance model that tracks metrics such as engagement, direct and trending views when assessing page performance. Adding engagement data at the page level helped them refine content in alignment with the interests of searchers, he said.

A new twist to secure search in August

In August, Google announced a new twist to the secure search saga that went beyond the keyword (“not provided”) situation; now, sites that were HTTPs would see a boost in ranking. Google said that for now, it would be a “lightweight signal” in its ranking algorithm that could carry more weight in the future. At the SMX East event, a Google rep said it affected less than 1 percent of queries. But for those who want to prepare and stay on the leading edge, it’s still important to be acquainted with the signal and what it could mean for the future of organic search ranking.

5 resources on secure search

We'll continue to keep our eye out on this issue, and present any unique research we might forge in the future. Until then, you can read up on the history and many facets of secure search with these five resources:

1. Google Hummingbird & The Keyword: What You Need To Know To Stay Ahead by Jim Yu, Search Engine Land
2. A New Direction for SEO in 2014: The Secure Search Manifesto by Jim Yu, Search Engine Watch
3. The 3Ps of Content Measurement: Page Rank, Traffic & Engagement by Jim Yu, Search Engine Watch
4. Securing the Future of SEO: Global Brands & 5 ‘(Not Provided)’ Solutions by me, Andy Betts, Search Engine Watch
5. Secure Search and HTTPS collated content on Search Engine Land

The attention span of the average consumer is eight seconds—one second less than that of a goldfish. In 2000, this figure was at 12 seconds. With short attention spans becoming increasingly shorter, there really is no debate between inbound and outbound marketing. Today, marketing isn't about hunting for customers. Rather, it's about making the customers come to you. People don't like the older, in-your-face methods of marketing—and it just doesn't work anymore. Even television commercials, entertaining though they can sometimes be, are skipped by 80-90% of viewers.

We now live in a world where blogs, social media and SEO marketing have taken the place of annoying and interruptive ads and are the norm when it comes to marketing. But the question remains: are people always responding to these methods as we would like them to? Marketers understand that blogs are important; most company websites have blogs. But are they working?

Let's take a look again at what made traditional advertising and marketing so ineffective. These methods were based on interrupting people while doing something that they otherwise enjoy. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, commercials while watching television, ads in a magazine or on a website, and phone calls from telemarketers when eating dinner. All intrusive, unwanted interruptions that annoy rather than capture a potential customer's attention or interest. Today, by contrast, digital marketing is about creating an experience that people actually enjoy.

People like reading blogs that legitimately answer their questions and needs. People enjoy social media that draws communities of like-minded people together in an online platform where they can discuss their shared interests. SEO brings the most helpful webpages up first in a Google search, so people don't have to search long when looking for something online. In fact, nearly half of a company's website traffic comes from search engines. These digital marketing tactics are proving to be much more effective than "old-school" interruptive techniques. Research shows that 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content; that translates to more sales. And since people spend over 50% of their time online looking at content, a company that doesn't use this kind of digital marketing tactic to win customers is missing out on a large chunk of the pie.

What if your company has a blog, twitter handle and great SEO strategy? The average company might think this is enough, but it really isn't—unless an average company wants to remain average.

At their core, these activities are not, in and of themselves, appealing. People won't read a blog unless they get something from it, something they can act upon. An advertisement written as copy and disguised as a blog will certainly not attract consumers. People won't engage with social media profiles that post boring content. In fact, interesting content is a top three reason that people follow brands on social media. Boring content translates to fewer followers and less engagement. And no one likes manipulative or spammy SEO with an unrelated backlink that sends users to a webpage that has nothing to do with the user's search query.

So if your digital marketing tactics seem like they are not bringing results, it's likely you might be holding on to traditional marketing techniques—the type of marketing that most consumers avoid at all costs. Rethink your digital marketing tactics, especially if you aren't seeing traffic, engagement, or conversions. Remember the following:

• communication should be interactive and two-way
• customers should be coming to you
• marketers should provide value
• marketers should seek to entertain, educate, and gain trust
• the consumer is in control

That last one especially is important to remember. Don't forget that ultimately the consumer is in control, and if your marketing effort is one that annoys or bores, the consumer will move on to something else, and you will have lost their business in the process. Take our digital marketing quiz to test your knowledge.