Last month I wrote, optimised and posted an article on our website about the new ‘Share a Coke’ bottles launched by Coca Cola this summer. I knew it was a current topic to be writing about and relevant to us at Tann Westlake, an integrated design and marketing agency. But I had no idea quite the impact this article would have…
Usually when we post an article we share it via Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and this drives traffic to the blog. The article gets indexed by Google, enabling it to appear in the search results. How high in the search results the article appears depends on a number of factors, such as the authority of your site, relevancy of the article and how well optimised the article is. As it was, the article indexed highly for some keywords, and appeared on page 1 and 2 of Google.
The traffic that came to our site www.tannwestlake.com was astonishing and really peaked over the weekend Coca Cola launched their TV ad for the campaign, mainly because people were searching on Google for the ‘Share a Coke names’ list. For the first time in the Tann Westlake history we saw page visits to this article overtake the home page! Amazing! This is a screen shot of our website visits from Google Analytics. You can see a huge peak in the visits about 10 days after the article went live and the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was building momentum.
We have seen another peak in page views last week as Coca-Cola launched another 100 names which has got people searching for the names list again, a keyword that the article ranks highly for.
I think it is fair to say that if you create relevant and interesting content that people are searching for and genuinely want to read then YES content marketing certainly works in driving traffic to your site, creating brand awareness, showing that you know your field and generally helping to build a relationship with current and potential customers. The lesson learnt? Don’t just write content to fill space, write it to satisfy a need for someone or to be an interesting read for someone. Make sure it is relevant and well optimised for success.