Content marketing is trendy and growing more so by the day—but does it offer anything valuable to those who work in online reputation management? You better believe it does. Creating engaging, high-quality content is essential for Google search rankings for social media success, and overall reputation enhancement. For online reputation management pros, the concepts innate to content marketing are utterly essential.
Understanding content marketing can prove overwhelming, though—but the following breakdown should offer you a solid foundation.
Part I: Content Marketing Myths, Exposed
Perhaps a good starting point for online reputation management pros who want to adopt the best practices of content marketing is to debunk a few of the common myths about what content marketing is and what it is not.
The first myth: Content marketing means creating more and more content. Not so; while online reputation management pros will need to develop hefty volumes of content, quality is always more important than quantity!
Myth #2: It is impossible to sustain quality content. This is untrue, as well, and online reputation management pros can learn to create what’s called evergreen content—more on that below.
Myth #3: Content marketing is inefficient because a piece of content can only be used once! Also not true; see below for more information on repurposing content.
Part II: 4 Types of Online Content
The next phase in your content marketing education is to consider four different types of content that you can produce—all of which can prove useful in online reputation management campaigns.
First, there is evergreen content. This is the original content that you produce, and that cannot be found published anywhere else. Evergreen content is always relevant—so general information, tips, guides, and how-tos qualify, where a one-off press release probably does not.
Next is repurposed content. One of the excellent skills of content marketing is knowing how to re-use your evergreen content so that it remains fresh and relevant. If your original piece of content is a video, uploaded to YouTube, you might put screenshots on our blog; you might publish the transcript of the video on a website; and so on.
Next is curated content—content that you’ve taken from somewhere else, and commented on. Most blog entries and articles shared on Facebook qualify here.
Finally, and perhaps the least valuable to online reputation management pros, but worth knowing about, is co-created content. When you’re building content alongside your Facebook followers, asking for their input and compiling their feedback, that’s co-created content.
Part III: Unique Sources for Online Content
Finally, many online reputation management pros will find themselves struggling with the creative aspect of content development—but here are some useful sources for content ideas:
Use Google’s Keywords tool to get some ideas for related and relevant content, and visualize these topics with tools like Wordle.
Look to search queries from your on-site search tools to see what related concepts users are looking for.
Create pieces of content that correspond to the customer’s journey; if you are doing online reputation management for a plumbing company, then, include content aimed at those installing a new water heater; at those looking to troubleshoot and maintain a hot water heater; and at those wondering if it is time to replace their hot water heater.
