Integrated, Goal-Oriented Campaigns Are Key to SEO, Content Marketing Activities

Inbound Marketing Industry Report, highlighting top articles and news stories from the fourth week of October, 2012.

SEO Tricks & Treats

In any role, responsibilities will change as strategies evolve. With SEO, the main focus—driving organic traffic to a website—has remained the same over time, yet we’re beginning to incorporate more tactics—like PR, social, content, etc.—into the strategy to find success. Kieran Flanagan (@searchbrat) shares how these different skill sets come together for SEOs, and how you can use them to become a great funnel owner.

Another important role of an SEO is talking the talk (literally). To get the results you want, make sure your content and keyword targeting align; but, what if you’re talking to people all across the globe? Fernando Macia (@fernandomacia) explains that we must identify the search engines used in the countries we are targeting, as well as the terms used by those audiences, and shares his thorough advice for international search engine optimization.

Salesforce Layoffs Lead to Social Media Love

With losses following the acquisition of Radian6 and Buddy Media, Salesforce began “rebalancing its resources to support its growth,” which included significant layoffs among the two integrated companies.

Once news broke, the response within the social community was “immediate and heartfelt,” said Eric T. Tung (@EricTTung). Many industry professionals came together to show support for their peers, and those in positions to do so pointed to available positions within their own organizations, for those affected by the layoffs. Even direct competitors expressed sympathy and gave wishes of good luck, a refreshing reminder of the community spirit driven by social media.

What’s New? / In the News

• Did you experience difficulties accessing any of your go-to websites last week? If so, it was probably due to Amazon’s US East data center outage, which took down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku and many other popular websites.
• Tagging your friends on Instagram just got easier. Now, Instagram will translate a username into the corresponding Twitter username when a tweet is sent for better accuracy. But, be sure to link your accounts to activate the functionality.
• ExactTarget spent some big bucks earlier this month, picking up marketing automation company Pardot and analytics company iGoDigital for $95.5 million and $21 million, respectively. The acquisitions will help ExactTarget offer “better resources” and new applications.
• Apple fans were antsy last Tuesday for the big unveil of the highly anticipated iPad mini. The refreshed tablet is lighter, thinner, more portable and more affordable. At $329, Apple is making tablets accessible for schools, leading the charge to revolutionize the education market.
• After announcing its half a billion tweets-per-day milestone, Twitter also shared that it will be testing out a "like" button similar to Facebook's, to replace the "favorite" tool. Do you think this will ruffle any feathers in the social media realm?

Current Content Marketing & Mobile Advertising Stats

A new report from BI Intelligence examines the complexities and fractures of the mobile advertising ecosystem, most notably that while U.S. mobile ad revenue totaled $1.2 billion last year, it’s really a tiny fraction of overall U.S. ad spend. However, mobile advertising is on track to hit $3.2 billion this year.

Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs teamed up for its third annual report on B2B Content Marketing Trends. MarketingLand called out that while 91% of participants are doing content marketing, only 36% say it’s “effective” or “very effective.”

At PR 20/20, we believe that, for content to be effective, you must keep your campaign’s end goal in mind, as mentioned above with the SEO article on mastering the funnel. First, know what you want to get out of content marketing; then, you can associate KPIs with your efforts to truly measure value. Start out with questions like the following to pinpoint your objectives:

• What are the foci of our efforts?
• What content can we create to support it?
• What surrounding activity (e.g. related media pitches, social shares, guest blogging, email campaigns, etc.) can we employ to achieve these goals?

What articles made your top list last week? We'd like to hear your opinions.

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