Three Reasons Why You Should be Content Marketing on Your Website

Sitting in a Nashville Craft Content Camp one day, a speaker said, “You rent Instagram and Facebook and the only real estate you own is your website.” Can I hear an amen?! This concept really defines the priorities and balance of how we approach all of our content marketing efforts in our PR business. So for those of you who are putting a priority on social media for your content marketing efforts, I wanted to share three reasons why you should be prioritizing on content marketing on your business’ website and supplementing or complementing with your social media channels.

You rent Instagram and Facebook and the only real estate you own is your website.

1. Content Marketing on Your Website Gives It a Permanent Home

Does your business have a website? This may seem like a silly question, but you’d be surprised how many businesses have social media accounts and yet do not have a permanent online space to call home.

Not owning a website is permanently relying on third-party social media platforms to house your marketing content—if Facebook or Instagram folds tomorrow, all of your content could easily be lost. If you are spending any time on creating content, it is a good idea to give it a permanent place to reside.

Fortunately, launching a website has become much easier, from Wix and Squarespace to WordPress (my personal favorite) which is being commonly taught at universities today and used by The Southern C.

Not only can a website give your content a permanent space to live, but it can help attract attention to your business.

2. Content Marketing on Your Website Develops a Search Engine Presence

You work hard to develop a social media presence, but what about your presence in search engines like Google?

I won’t bog down in SEO today but understand Google loves websites that regularly add new content. So if you are only posting your marketing content on social media platforms, you are neglecting one of your most important elements in competitively positioning yourself– Google. And really, aren’t so many of your decisions based on Googling or a review?

Search engines love websites with blogs because it signals new content will be added to this site. Google constantly changes its formula but at the heart of everything is a website which adds new, original content.

If you say you hate to write but like to create small videos, go ahead and record your new product, new idea and add it to your YouTube Channel. You can easily embed the video to your website by clicking share on YouTube, copying the embed code, pasting into the new post.

When you are in edit mode for your post in WordPress, add three Xs in the spot where you want to place your video. At the top right corner, click text, paste embed code, click back to visual mode and viola, you now have a video embedded into your website.

I didn’t go in depth into creating videos but check out this previous column on video marketing for great tips.

3. Content Marketing on Your Website Aids in PR

Now that I’ve persuaded you to begin adding regular blog content in the way of posts or wrapping your thoughts around a video to grow your search engine presence, let’s talk about how to use it to grow your PR.

The picture above is a great example. National Realtor® Safety Month is in September each year. One of my real estate clients, EXIT Southeast, has a broker who sponsored a safety training class and had a great action shot. So how might I use this content and their website to generate press? Two ways:

1. I create a blog post and share it with a reporter to inspire the story, which I’ve done successfully with television reporters, too.
2. Or, I pitch the story to the reporter. Once it is published, I create a blog post about the subject and hyperlink to the media article – in this case the Tennessean. Realtor Safety Day ended up earning front page coverage and was turned into a great blog for EXIT Southeast (see by clicking here) which was then blasted out via MailChimp and promoted on social media for a full-circle content marketing moment. This was just repeated for 2018.

At the end of the day, none of us know when Facebook might implode (as it almost recently did) or how its analytics can change and impact your messaging. In conjunction with social media, work on building your email list, something you own.