Content Marketing and Outreach: Crafting A Recipe for Success

Search engine optimization (SEO) can cover a wide range of website elements. It helps optimize your page titles, meta descriptions, keywords on your website, and even your website’s structure. It can be overwhelming at times (no worries, we can help guide you), but it also heavily influences another type of marketing that is more easily understood: content marketing.

If you read that and instantly thought of blog posts, YouTube videos, or infographics, you’re on the right track! SEO can help ensure that the content you create is optimized to get more views and, ideally, more customers. Let’s dive into what exactly content marketing is and how you can improve your content’s reach.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing approach using strategic creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content to attract and assist your target audience with the goal of driving more business to your website.

Content marketing is a very important strategy to consider. Once you have created a piece of content, it can be used across a number of different digital marketing channels. It does require a higher initial time investment, but when done correctly, the returns can be amazing.

Types of Content Marketing

The only constraint on what’s considered content marketing is the limits of your creativity. Anything you create to help reach your target audience can be considered content marketing. Here are some content marketing examples:

• Blogging

• Infographics

• Interviews

• Checklists

• Videos

• Podcasts

• E-books

• Whitepapers

• Newsletters

• Case studies

• Memes

Yes, you read that last one correctly. Even a simple meme could technically be considered content marketing. How helpful those are to an individual is definitely up for debate, but if your goal is to build brand awareness, that could be a way to get some eyes on your brand!

A number of those examples are great pieces of content that can be created with your target audience in mind and easily distributed throughout your various digital media channels. Take an infographic, for example, and think of where you could use that. A simple infographic can be used on your website, in an email blast to your audience, and on your social media profiles. One piece of content has now opened a door to your website through three different channels!

Now imagine consistently creating, sharing your content, and having your audience reshare it. The number of people you are reaching at a lower effort increases at a much larger rate. That’s the core of content marketing.

What is Content Outreach?

Content outreach is the process of sharing, promoting, and spreading the content you created to your contacts or any outlet that you believe would find your content valuable. For example, reaching out to popular relevant blogs, news sites, or social media profiles to see if they would like to promote your content in exchange for a link back to your website is a common outreach tactic. This is also known as a backlink. A single blog post linking back to you or even an X post showing off your watermarked infographic can help increase your brand awareness and drive more users to your site.

Creating an Outreach Plan

A content outreach plan is where you note each content piece you plan to make, what the goals of those pieces are, where you will post that content, and who would or where would be the best to ask for help spreading that content.

One common tactic is to create a spreadsheet that lists relevant popular industry websites, social media accounts, and public figures and their respective contact information. Then, when you create a content piece and you reach out to those outlets, keep notes in that spreadsheet with what you said and when. Also, decide when you will follow up at least twice if you do not get a response. Consistency is key in outreach and creating a relationship with those outlets.

Knowing who or where you will reach out to, when you will contact them, when you will follow up, and what the goals of your interactions are will help provide incredible ease of mind making it easier for you to stay consistent.

How to Track Backlinks

Once you start gaining links from other websites, you want to know about it! One way to do this is by signing up for Google Alerts, which will send you a notification when a certain word (i.e. your company name) is mentioned.

To look at backlinks in bulk, we recommend using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush. These can provide a list of what domains link back to you, the page traffic, the domain rating, and more.

💡Tip: You can also look at competitor backlinks using these tools to see where they have a presence online.

How do Content Marketing and Outreach Mix?

So, how do content marketing and content outreach synergize to create results? Before creating a new piece of content, doing research to ensure that there is user interest in the content topic and finding outlets to reach out to after the content is completed will help your efforts succeed. After all, if you create a great piece of content, but people aren’t searching for it, it may not get the results you were aiming for. It’s important to know what people are looking for and how they are searching for it. Having a plan that keeps both your content marketing and outreach strategy in mind is key to creating successful content.

Bolster Your SEO Strategy With Content Marketing.

Content marketing is a great avenue for increasing your brand awareness, making your target audience trust your expertise, and providing more ways for users to spread your message in a low-effort way once the content is made. Pairing that with a sound outreach strategy will make your efforts much more efficient, and you will also get the benefit of creating more relationships with other relevant parties in your industry.

This blog post was originally published on September 3, 2020, and was updated and republished on August 5, 2024.