Merging SEO and Content Marketing

SEO:

Search Engine Optimization is about appealing to computers. Computers is a very broad term, but think search engine web crawlers, calculated quantitative analysis, and hit counters. It has basically been the head honcho, the big cheese, the social butterfly of the digital marketing party for the past few years. At least since consumers stopped memorizing website names and started just using search terms.

SEO is still a pull strategy, using what is offered and letting the customer find them. It is definitely a great basic to have, but expecting that a relatively ancient of digital media as a sole provider for an online pull strategy isn't going to work out well.

Content marketing:

Content marketing is appealing to humans, offering them some bit of information (such as the infographics talked about previously), or entertainment. A highlight of 2012 content marketing is the Red Bull space jump, which gained over 30 MILLION views. The idea is that the marketer does the original legwork, but potential consumers spread the advertisement because they felt they received something out of it. It can be a slow build, or one big event.

A company that can attribute most of their revenue to content marketing is BlendTec. AKA the 'Will it Blend' guys. They went from a relatively unknown to one of the top sellers for industrial blenders (including being in Starbucks). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofgMueCOqo

So how to appeal to both the human and the computer?

From Mashable.com:

"Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, outlines five best practices for content marketers hoping to maximize SEO value in an ethical way.

1. Create content that people will have an incentive to share.
2. Do keyword research, so you don’t waste effort writing about things people don’t care about.
3. Put all your content on the same domain/subdomain. (e.g. don't use blog.mysite.com, usemysite.com/blog)
4. Stand for something, and write about it. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

5. Don't separate your brand from your content. For instance, casino sites that make fascinating infographics about animal rights aren't going to last long."

Sounds easy, but it essentially is following the same rules as SEO, but being entertaining at the same time. After my peers and I graduate, a great deal of our time will be spent content marketing, and we should be learning more about it.