It takes time to for online content marketing to yield results. Despite what those marketing snake oil salesmen might tell you.

In the old days before the internet you could grab an audience’s attention by the throat with a 30 second ad on TV that literally burst onto the screens, propelling them to your store.

Nowadays, whilst old school interruptive marketing still gets attention – I’m specifically thinking about the now infamous Old Spice video that originally ran back in February on TV before being superseded by the short-n-snappy vox pops that ran on YouTube in the summer – one of the best ways for a business to get noticed is to publish great content online. After all, there are over 12 billion searches on Google in the US per month alone – and many of these are for services, products or information.

Trouble is that intrinsically valuable content that connects with your target audience, showing your key value proposition, takes time to bubble to the surface of Google’s search engine results. It’s not found easily if you haven’t already built plenty of online equity. That’s why there are so many search engine optimization (SEO) experts out there, peddling their wares of “Get to the Top of Google Search”.

So beware. Agencies that promise an all-bells-and-whistles blog marketing campaign will yield quick results are either world leaders in online marketing and communications or planning to move country the minute your organization has handed over the cash for the work they’ve done.

For example, an online content marketing campaign aimed at generating more traffic to your site is not something to bash out in a week. Sure, unique visitors sent to your site via Google when searching for your keyword phrases have a good chance of converting to sales. Trouble is, the new blog you’ve just started writing as part of your latest marketing campaign, in all likelihood, isn’t going to help you capture the kind of search traffic you need to keep you in business if you’re struggling to take care of payroll. Blogs can take 3 – 6 months of careful business blogging with a WordPress theme optimised for SEO and cleverly worked-out keywords to really start converting visitors – and that’s assuming you’ve invested in great landing pages and call-to-actions across your site. [Read more...]