I met a consultant who was helping a company build out and reinvigorate one of the sites they used for lead generation. Among his goals was this: Add 1,000 new pages of content to the site within a year.
To get to a thousand pages in one year you need around 80 posts a month, so he picked 5 appropriate topic categories, hired 5 writers, and charged each with producing 4 posts a week (reportedly at a cost of $50 a post).
5 x 4 = 20; 20 x 4 = 80; 80 x 12 = 1000(ish). Boo-yah!
He then designated a site manager whose job it was, in part, to ensure that the writers were meeting their weekly/monthly quota and that each post was optimized for search.
Finally, to help drive traffic, he was having links to each post placed on relevant (and reasonably trafficked) Facebook and Yahoo! group pages as well as sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit.
With regard to the actual content of the pages he told me, half-jokingly, “As long as the posts are optimized, I don’t care what’s in them.”
That really caught me up.
While I’ve been blogging for a long-time, both personally and professionally, I had never thought about this activity in such black-and-white, bluntly numeric terms. Being old-fashioned (I’m a digital immigrant, not a digital native, alas), I fear I have too frequently agonized over the quality, novelty, and readability of my posts and almost willfully refused to play the numbers game. Naturally, having the above approach laid out for me, I felt somewhat the fool.
After the bruises to my tender ego had faded (somewhat), I had to admit that, given the nature of the business in question, this “by-the-numbers” method made sense.
Here’s the thing. The company’s success was built on relentless and ubiquitous television ad campaigns in which the main message was essentially, “Call 1-800-…. to see if you qualify for $$$.” The reason this has worked is almost purely statistical. The people they are looking for constitute a tiny fraction of the population (for argument’s sake, let’s say .1%, though the actual number is far smaller). Assuming that these folks are fairly evenly distributed but otherwise difficult to locate, odds are that if you expose one million people to your message, then you will reach 1000 of them (at least statistically).
You can essentially do the same thing online (or can you?) by churning out pages of optimized content and aggressively cultivating off-page links. The beauty is that via judicious selection of the sites where your links appear, you can more effectively target your efforts and, ideally, shift your odds from 1 in 1000, say, to 1 in 100, for example, and at a cost far below that of broadcast media.
Does this mean that the quality of content, its relevance to the needs and interests of prospective consumers, its “intrinsic value” in other words, doesn’t matter? Yes and no.
If your message is simple (“Do you have problem X? If so, call this number to get $$$”) and customer acquisition is mainly a question of getting that message in front of as many people as possible, then what’s actually on the page, content-wise, as long as it is generating page-views and, more importantly, leads, only matters functionally.
If, on the other hand, content is what you are selling (rather than whatever it is your content has led the viewer to see), then “content matters” and needs to be either informative, instructive, useful, or entertaining. It can’t just be the stuff that got you there.
Now, I do believe that given the importance of link-building to this strategy quality will influence and even determine whether or not your posts get Dugg by other Diggers or picked up by a site that has tons of traffic or actively shared by interested humans. This will also especially be the case if you are competing for links on a particular site.
Nevertheless, if you can propagate links cheaply or for free and you just need to attract clicking eye-balls, then that is what your content needs to be good at.
Matthew,
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Having experience with both SEO and social media I have a HUGE issue with this post.
My first, and probably major, issue is that marketers who don’t understand social media (the concept) will think “Ah, ha! This is all I need to do to get traffic AND sales! Hire cheap labor, produce crap content, link bait on social media sites and we’re off to the races! Weee!”
My second issue is that this is an SEO mentality on how to use social media (the tools). It’s not social media (the concept). [As you can probably tell, I am not a huge fan of this SEO position.
You’ve stated that this is a “1-800″ company and they probably don’t care about engaging in relationships with customers NOR do their customers probably care about engaging with them. It’s all about turning a quick buck and this type of SEO (I won’t even call it social media!) can indeed work.
But how many companies are in this position? And what happens when marketers are trained by consultants, like the one you describe, to think that this is social media? What happens when there’s a crisis? Does the consultant come back and show them how to bury the crisis with more crap content and link baiting?
My advice for brands who want to have an authentic and transparent relationship with customers: Do not do this. Learn about social media and how it truly works. There are SO many aspects. Take the time to engage, produce quality content that helps your customers (prospects, etc.) and let them help you to produce better, quality products and services.
Okay, tucking the soapbox back under the desk.
Beth – I appreciate you taking the time to get out the soap box, climb up on it, and start railing against the Man!
This is indeed an SEO->Lead Gen approach to social media that is pretty foreign to my own “get in there and engage with people” approach, which is partly why I wanted to lay it out for the folks here. My gut feeling is that the engagement approach is “better,” but what is actually better for a particular company ultimately depends on their business and should be defined by what “works” (that is, “gets results.”)
When one is selling services to clients involving social media, SEO and lead gen are two hooks that you can use to quantify the results. This means, of course, that one is competing against the approach described above.
As I was trying to suggest here, if your business model can benefit from a “mass exposure” approach, you might not need an “engagement” approach.
As I was also trying to suggest, even if you are taking the “mass exposure” approach, your efforts will require engagement to succeed.
Thanks for the valuable contribution, commentbot!
Matthew, yep, totally agree. It’s not that I am against SEO, not at all!, it’s just that I really have a hard time swallowing the “social media is only tools” pill.
They are both viable options, when used responsibly.
And look, I didn’t even need to soapbox this time!
Thanks!
Beth
Community Manager, MarketingProfs
@bethharte
Thanks for the article and the use of social media per Beth can be abused. We launched a free online marketing course for beginners to explain why this is not a dependable long term strategy and would appreciate any comments or suggestions. Our YouTube channel is linked above.
Thanks for checking back in, Beth, albeit sans soap box.
I think that SEO is something people “get,” and so it can be a useful reference point for defining the benefits of social media engagement.
However, as Nathan points out, and as I think you and I agree, making SEO the point of social media is missing the point.
It’s not clear to me if the company should be put into the crap content bin. You did say possibly $50 per post.
I don’t have problem with anyone creating content by finding out what people are searching for and creating GREAT optimized content for it.
Create Good Content – Get a link or a lead. Seems like a fair trade.