Many brands, business and publishers have, for many years understood the importance of creating content online – to develop the brand, build a community, help SEO and engage with relevant users. An emerging blurring of the line between content and commerce now means more brands and e-commerce sites are now moving into the realms of publishing, creating high-quality editorial content online to engage consumers, develop their brands and ultimately lead to sales.
However, the sheer volume of content out there is bringing new issues and considerations into play. There are an estimated 152 million blogs online, and 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010, many of them in turn linking to more content, and research by the University of Southern California, has suggested that each person is bombarded with the equivalent of 174 newspaper’s worth of data every day. Consumers can experience content overload, and it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find interesting content online.
SEO has also had a key role in this development of content - for a long time there has been a focus on creating content for search engine crawlers to help page ranking, rather than developing high-quality content for users. However as social sharing has boomed over the last few years, a new focus is now developing where brands are looking to create content that is genuinely useful and interesting to real people.
As we’ve moved away from the notion that search is the only way to find content online, brands need to adapt their content strategies, and the key change is that content must now be created with people in mind and not just search engine crawlers.
Creating good, interesting content will not only appeal to readers when they reach it, it still has a vital role to play in SEO – if editors, bloggers and users like content they will link to it and share with their friends – building links and increasing traffic – both of which help page ranking. Once users are on the site keeping them there and engaged with other good content will also help as lower bounce rates are also good for helping pages continue to rank highly on search engines.
With so much competition, and given the resources it takes to continually create massive amounts of high quality content, many publishers are now realising that simply creating it is not enough. The challenge for many has shifted from creation, to getting this content read and discovered by relevant people online. Content discovery is emerging as new way to help the right people find the right content for them, while allowing brands and publishers to amplify and build relevant communities around their own content or earned media.
New discovery platforms have emerged to help publishers and marketers find the right audience at a time when they are already actively engaging with content. These platforms can be used internally within content sites to drive traffic to interesting internal content, and marketers can also use them to distribute their content across other third-party sites. This alternative method for traffic acquisition is used effectively by publishers who are looking to drive new people to specific content. For the new breed of brand publishers, working with a content discovery platform is proving to be an effective wayto find,and engage with their target audience.
This emerging category of content discovery is enabling an audience to uncover interesting content.For brands, utilising content discovery tools can be a way to target a specific audience to help them find their high quality and relevant content online. Having invested so much in creating the content, content discovery allows marketers to amplify this effort and reach their target audience in a cost efficient way.
Marketers can also utilise content discovery to amplify their earned media efforts. As anyone in PR will tell you, a recommendation from others means so much more that saying it yourself and alongside targeting the right audiences with created content, content discovery can be used to amplify the impact of a positive review on a newspapers website, or third-party recommendation on social media channels for example.
As the media landscape changes, one key trend – that of the real importance of content – is set to be here to stay. Through developing thoughtful and high-quality content for real people, not for search engine optimisation, and embracing third party recommendations brands have an opportunity to reach relevant users online at scale, and content discovery provides an opportunity to amplify this effort, reaching a more targeted, engaged audience online.
Simon Edelstyn
VP Business Development, Europe at Outbrain