Melissa Lui

In his recent blog post, Creative Content Marketing in the UK – Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets, Lee Oden talks about the trend of online and content marketing. Oden talks about the difficulties to sustain content marketing, especially on creating contents for your business or company on a continuous basis. However, if one does manage to do so, his or her company will then be differentiated from to the others.

Before going on to my response, many may be wondering “What is Content Marketing?“
Content marketing is another form of marketing where media or publishing content are used to attract and engage with customers.  It does not advertise specific product or service that one’s company is providing, but instead it delivers information that is valuable and engaging to the audience.

I agree with Oden that online and content marketings have been a trend in recent years.  With the increasing amount of Internet users, many people (especially the younger generation) now turn to their computer or laptop for information and advertisements.  And therefore, more and more companies invest their time to establish their presences through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and etc. To connect and build a relationship with Internet users, content marketing has became the main stream.  Besides on telling the audiences how great their products and services are, companies begin to attract customers by sharing entertaining, inspiring, and useful information.

However, one of the most important things for these companies is to maintain the quality of contents that they are updating.  I know how difficult it is to have meaningful contents because I work for a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company where I need to update its blog on a daily basis. And here are some ways I use to improve and ensure that the published contents are engaging. Every month, I read and analyze the statistics of how many people visited the website and how many responses there were.  Through that, I know what kind of contents (video, more photos, or more words) is most effective and I am able to grasp on which area or certain topics my audience are enjoying and interested in.  Moreover, I also emphasize on the use of ‘keywords’ on each blog posts.  What keywords do are like hash-tag for Tumblr and Instagram, it allows users to search a specific word and all tagged materials will be in the search results. By integrating keywords into the contents, as Internet users search that word in the google search bar, your content will be showing up the result pages.