A lot of decision makers are skeptical about content marketing and SEO because even the best strategies take time to show results which is quite a reasonable concern. Like a water wheel, these marketing strategies require a significant amount of effort to start moving and are slow at first, but take on a life of their own after they’ve gained enough inertia.
With consistent engaging, people in your network that have built up trust and look forward and expect you to reply and also reach out to you and cite you when you produce content which builds the network further and boosts the ranking higher. This becomes a natural multiplying effect which contributes to out-sized results in all sorts of channels. It’s self-reinforcing which stands true in SEO efforts as well. Thus, when brands invest in content marketing and SEO, they’re putting effort toward strategies that will build momentum over time and drive results in the long run
Relevant content + time = results
Websites with relevant blog content and downloadable assets send Google and consumers a message that says, “We have the information you’re looking for about this topic.” Search engines start to serve the result more often in results pages, and people will see the content more often, share it and link to it, which boosts the ranking even higher.
Rand in his video suggests these 3 critical rules you can use to gain success with the flywheel effect.
- To gain organic traffic you should be willing to invest more and for longer duration as it takes time to earn rankings, build social networks or build links.
- Be willing to experiment and accept failure. If your investments aren’t generating certain kind of results as expected, don’t divest but continue and invest. Being patient in the flywheel will generate results in the long-run.
- Try and find the flywheel in everything that you do to market. Re-marketing and re-targeting works on the same concept where more people visiting your site means you can re-market and re-target to more of them and keep bettering your campaigns and it will seem like a better channel to invest in.
Not all experiences will be a complete loss, it will take time and experience to know where the line is. If you have invested time and money to perform, it’s always a validated learning along the way.
Does co-creation ring a bell? Have you felt the flywheel effect in your marketing strategies, if not, it may be time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies.
Here’s a great video by Rand’s whiteboard on the flywheel concept.
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