Content marketing fundamentals for websites and socials.
*This post is in-progress and will be finished in the coming days. 😉
Earlier this month, I declared SEO as we know it to be dead. I then embraced being a holistic marketer instead.
One of the first elements of digital marketing that I put on my main services page was content marketing. 👈
I’ve written extensively about content marketing over the years, but my approach has changed. Sadly, a lot of agencies still do it the old way.
Let’s chat about a fresher though process on the topic.
First, here’s a definition of content marketing:
Content marketing is the process of creating engaging content along the buyer’s journey for a target audience using a brand’s website (SEO) and socials (Instagram, X, LinkedIn, etc.), including video (YouTube).
What’s unique here?
Well, I combine website and socials content in one holistic strategy.
I recently saw a study, for example, that mentioned how LinkedIn and YouTube were two of the main three sources behind citations in Google’s AI Overviews.
That’s why I consider social content to be potential “SEO content.” Social content can also turn up in normal search results or AI chatbot responses and citations.
The flip-side is also true: the fundamentals of SEO apply within social platforms, albeit with a few different fundamentals.
Although web and social content — including video — are often treated as separate channels in digital marketing agencies, they are still interconnected in my view.
That’s why I call myself a holistic marketer.
This post is based on an answer Perplexity gave me about content marketing, but with my own unique insights added from spending 9+ years as a digital marketer.
In other words, it’s AI-assisted content. The words are mine. The insights are a combination of my personal experience with generative AI’s help.
If you’re not using generative AI for brainstorming, it’s time to catch up.
Again, one reason why I think SEO as we know it is dead.
Let’s start by taking a look at the fundamentals of content marketing for websites and socials, including video.
These are the steps I recommend following, with generalized insights.
1️⃣ Define your objectives.
Content should always have a purpose.
I’ve worked with plenty of brands who’ve just created blog or social posts for the sake of it, accumulating a mass of content over the years.
One issue with that approach is if your content doesn’t have a purpose initially, it may not provide any sort of pay back, making it a wasted effort at best, or have a detrimental impact, at worst.
Luckily, if you have a lot of content, you can audit it for posts to merge, delete, or enhance, a process SEOs call “pruning.” This came into favor especially in Google’s post-helpful content update era after 2022.
What are some of the objectives or goals your content could have?
📢 Brand awareness:
Your content is there to help people learn about your brand or its story, or to just help keep your already popular brand top of mind. This could be measured through impressions, followers, or engagement (like time on page or post) with a target audience. (More on that last part to come.)
🎯 Lead generation:
Your content actively encourages conversions or otherwise helps convert potential customers into new or repeat buyers. This could be measured through sales or other conversions — like email signups, website visits, content downloads, or contact form submissions — in GA4, depending on where a buyer is in the sales funnel.
📚 Educating your audience:
If you have a new or unique product, you can use content marketing not only to educate potential buyers about it, but also speak to their specific problems or pain points and how your solution can solve them. This can be measured through clicks, engagement metrics (like pages per session), or assisted conversions.
You can also measure engagement metrics or conversions across different types of posts, like different formats of blog posts for a website or video vs. photo posts for socials. Sentiment analysis of brand mentions can also be an effective measure for social posts, while relevant backlinks or unlinked mentions can help inform the credibility and reach of your website’s content (for SEO purposes).
2️⃣ Know your audience.
Your content should always speak to a particular audience.
Maybe that means all of your potential buyers (like through brand awareness), or maybe it speaks to particular subsets (like lead generation or educational content for particular pathways along the buyer’s journey).
A good example might be a jewelry retailer that sells men’s and women’s products for different occasions. The motivation overall is to look good. But within that buyer’s journey will be several niche desires that can be fodder for content topics.
How can you get to know your audience, though?
One opportunity is to look at your marketing data. 👈
While these content marketing tips are focused on organic content for websites and socials, another place you can find data about your audience is paid ads for search or social. This data can reveal demographic information or provide insight into which types of content your audience engages with.
I’ve worked with brands who think they know their audience at first, only to discover through paid data that who they thought were their top customers didn’t match their actual buyers.
How can you organize that paid data, though?
One solution is to build personas for your different types of audiences and focus your content around them. This ensures the content will be relevant and helpful to your actual buyer’s along their user journey.
Having said that, it’s easy to use generative AI to come up with generic personas that are based more on stereotypes, so make sure to leverage all available first-party data to generate unique, data-driven personas.
The best content marketing leaves the guessing games behind, leveraging data for insights.
With that settled, it’s time to create the content.
3️⃣ Create a content plan.
Content should always follow some type of production and distribution plan.
A content plan includes the types of content you’ll produce as well as the topics or themes, publishing schedule, and distribution channels.
Website content doesn’t necessarily need a publishing schedule, especially when created for SEO purposes. There’s no downside to publishing web content regularly and at will, as it will often be found through organic search or when distributed on your socials.
👉 Topics for website content, on the other hand, require a different strategy than you’re probably used to, especially if you’ve done SEO before.
I spent 8+ years in digital agencies and watch tired content get created over and over with little impact.
Here’s a breakdown of what these agencies often got wrong.
The traditional approach for SEO content was to look at keyword research, typically based on competitors, figure out which queries have informational intent, and then create blog posts to answer those questions based on top-ranking results.
The problem is that everyone else is using the same keyword research and approach, so what gets created is copy-cat content with little unique insight.
On top of that, we now have generative AI to satisfy informational searches — and adoption is skyrocketing — not to mention Google’s AI Overviews or AI answer engines like Perplexity.
Generative AI takes the on-page SEO advantage you used to have and turns it on its head, giving rewards to those results with unique insights. By the way, users like unique insights, so Google’s ranking systems reward that content likewise.
Listen closely:
Instead of focusing on keywords for SEO content, identify your brand’s areas of expertise and your audience’s buyer’s journey and create authentic and engaging content around that journey.
How about for social and video content?
Relatedly, your socials should follow suit with your website.
In some instances, brands will be driven by their socials first — this was the case for SKIMS, based on an audit I did — but often brands will use their website as the central hub of their digital presence and build out social and video content that aligns with that web content.
A socials publishing schedule can be useful if you’re publishing social and video content based on a theme or series.
However, I believe it’s just a generally good practice to publish regularly and often, across platforms your audience might use — from X to TikTok, from LinkedIn to Instagram — paying less attention to a schedule and more to diversifying the types of content until you understand from data what resonates best with your target audience.
Here’s a related video from Camille Moore, a social marketer, whose opinions I trust:
Final thoughts.
Content marketing in 2024/2025 doesn’t have to be difficult.
In my experience, the hardest part isn’t the planning — that’s fun — it’s the actual production.
It takes expertise and experience to deliver content worth a user’s time.
If you’re not offering something unique, why would someone come to your website or social page over another brand’s?
This is the problem I have with old-school SEO content. It focuses on keywords that other competitors are also targeting. Then those competitors are all analyzing top-ranking results for inspiration. It’s a tired cycle.
Dare to be different.
Focus on your audience and their buyer’s journey first, leverage data to create audience personas, and diversify your content types across platforms, always testing to find what works the best.
In that content diversification is where you’ll find the magic data to support your future direction.
And, oh yeah, always create content with goals in mind, from brand awareness to lead generation and conversions. Otherwise, it’s just a potentially wasted effort.
I hope you enjoyed this!
Until next time, enjoy the vibes:
Thanks for reading. Happy marketing! 🤗
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