Brands must become publishers! It is a mantra that is heard often, but increasingly it is becoming a reality for marketers.As the search engines continue to evolve their algorithms, the technical affordable seo tactics of yesterday no longer hold. Instead web marketers must evolve into becoming sophisticated publishing operations.The story of Discover Africa, a travel agency based in South Africa, showcases just how quickly and dramatically web marketers need to change to keep pace in the changing search environment.
The Good Ol’ Days: “Easy to Game Our Way to the Top
The
company was founded to take advantage of the opportunity around search
marketing in their segment.“Ten years ago there were lots of great companies
offering safaris and offering tours” in South Africa, Van
Kets said. “But they didn’t have a clue about web marketing, SEO, or
anything like that.”
Given
that landscape, Discover Africa was able to quickly climb to the top of the
search rankings.“I taught myself best seo on the go," Van Kets said. "I
wacked out a site, got a few links. And it was pretty easy to game our way to
the top.”Without doing anything black hat, Van Kets and team followed
best practices and soon ranked high for their keywords.
“For
the first five years we had it easy getting to the top of the search engines,”
Van Kets said. The formula for the team was simple: “We were pure search engine optimization
companies. We put out fairly half-decent content. Coded it right. Got links
and we did well.”And the formula worked: Discover Africa’s SEO efforts drove
web traffic, and the traffic converted into paying vacationers.
”We had to adjust to content marketing. Us geeks needed to be more real
world and be really good to our consumers not just work Google the best we
can,” Van Kets said. “I realized that we had to do things
differently. If we just kept on putting up mediocre content trying to get to
the top of Google but it does not really impress our customers, we’re not going
to survive.”So in addition to his SEO programmers, Van Kets began to hire writers. He even brought in a managing editor with experience in the media world. Content was the new priority, and he put his company’s resources behind it.
Back to the Drawing Board: The Brand as Publisher
Discovery Africa’s new emphasis on content began paying dividends, and their properties were able to grow their traffic and revenue. Still, Van Kets felt he needed a structure to organize and optimize the best seo services and team members he put in place around content.
“We had content going, but we needed a game plan that could bring efficiency and maximize our results on it” he said.
Van Kets then came upon a blog post laying out how to build and operate a content marketing machine. His team then convened around their white board, and put together a business process around their content:
Discover
Africa had created a strategic framework to
guide their content efforts. They created a grid with Buyer Personas on one
axis and Buying Stages in the other. They targeted nine personas:
- Mr. Business
- The Weekenders
- The Holiday Makers
- The 4x4 Guy
- The Family Guy
- The Campers
- The Sports Guy
- The Travel Industry Player
- The Student/Backpacker
And
four buying stages:
- Attract
- Inform
- Engage
- Convert
Each
piece of content is targeted at addresses the concerns of one or more personas
at a particular stage. Their content marketing machine then operates to pull
prospects from where they are now down the buying path to becoming customers.
They
also recognized that just publishing content was not enough, and that they had
to put a “mini marketing campaign” around each post, where they reached out to
key influencers in their topic to earn links to the posts, driving referral
traffic and search rankings. They identified a key set of processes and metrics
to monitor to make sure that their new content marketing machine was running
well end-to-end.
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