The lifespan of a mayfly is anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours.
Most online content suffers a similar fate.
But, content marketing online, when done properly, will have a lasting impact. It will continue to reap dividends for your organization far into the future.
If you create content haphazardly, you will find that you are spending a lot of time, effort and money on a bunch of loosely-fitting resources that look nice but, in the end, will kick the bucket long before that mayfly develops a mid-life crisis. Instead, you want marketing with lasting impact that helps you increase:
Traffic
Rankings
Inbound Links
Leads
Sales
Referrals (the Holy Grail)
An easy way to create content with a lasting marketing impact
To make sure your content has a long-lasting impact, make it Discoverable, Interactive and Shareable.
DISCLAIMER: Admittedly, there are other factors that come into play here with numero uno being that there is some semblance of a content marketing strategy driving tactics, but I would argue that these three characteristics should be a critical part of that strategic and certainly tactical planning.
Let’s look at each of these characteristics separately… shall we?
Discoverable Marketing
Creating marketing that is discoverable means creating marketing that search engines and humans can access via the web:
Search engines will find, index, categorize and then return the content as a search result.
Humans will access the content via their Twitter feed, Facebook stream, RSS reader, etc.
For example, this blog post is very discoverable. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discovered by Google within 15 minutes of being published. The post will be indexed and categorized by the search engines and will be available to be returned as a result very quickly.
Content that is located offline or behind firewalls and log-ins scores low on the Discoverability scale.
The more “discoverable” content that you create, the more momentum you will build in your online marketing. Check out the graphic below for more ideas.
Interactive Marketing
It is expected that your business and thus your marketing will be interactive today. This is even more important when looking to build long-lasting impact to your marketing.
Creating content that is interactive will give your marketing “legs.” If people are not able to interact with your marketing, it will likely disappear within a few hours to the bottom of the ocean of web content that is added to the Internet every day.
For example, Facebook “Like” pages are very interactive. They often allow people that “like” the page to add comments, discussions, video and images. A properly executed campaign on a Facebook Fan page can have a very long-lasting marketing impact.
Shareable Marketing
It is amazing how quickly good people, good ideas, good products/services and yes… good marketing bubble up to the surface on the Internet. The tools available to us today create a truly connected society where we can openly share information.
Marketing with lasting impact means creating marketing that is shareable.
You don’t need to look any further than this blog post to see how easy it has become to share good stuff with your network via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or countless other networks.
Below is an image of the “share” buttons that are available on every CMI blog post.
Marketing Tactics/Mediums and the D.I.S. Model
The graphic below categorizes different tactics and mediums on the D.I.S. model.
This graphic is by no means a finished product, but it’s a good start to help you start thinking about how your content can be more discoverable, interactive and shareable.
I would love for you to INTERACT with me and the other members of the CMI by letting me know what the model is missing or where I have misplaced a tactic or medium.
I would also hope that (if you found this article helpful or interesting) you would SHARE it with your network, so that they might DISCOVER it, INTERACT with it and SHARE it with their networks.
What are your thoughts about creating content that has a lasting impact on the Internet? Do you think this blog post will outlive a mayfly? 🙂
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