The FINANCIAL — In an age where paying top dollar for online visibility can only get brands so far, maintaining a strong, diverse web presence is an intense focus for many marketers.
More specifically, areas such as traditional and local search engine optimization (SEO), social media and content marketing saw the greatest increase in marketing demand this year, according to August data from SEOmoz.
The SEO software provider found SEO was the most time-consuming—and most used—inbound marketing tactic for online marketers worldwide: 23.9% spent more than half their time on SEO. Just 7.8% invested similar time in social media marketing and 6.3% in content marketing.
Still, many found time each day to devote to all three. As eMarketer reported, more than half practiced SEO daily. Near half managed their social media programs every day, and 23.7% performed content marketing daily. Of the remaining marketers, roughly 20% managed one or more of those three tactics at least two to four times per week.
The study broke out the three marketing areas into distinct tactics, but SEO, social media and content marketing are not mutually exclusive. All three rely heavily on the production and distribution of content—both written and visual.
SEOmoz found over two-thirds of online marketers worldwide generated short-form content assets such as blog posts, social media updates, articles and guides—all of which are used in SEO, social media and content marketing.
Images, videos and infographics were also used by 38.2%, 35.9% and 25.7% of respondents, respectively, and additional data suggested these visual assets were of greatest importance to content marketing programs. In fact, 66% used YouTube for content marketing, compared to 49.1% who said they used YouTube for SEO. Video-sharing websites Vimeo, Pinterest and Flickr were also used by more marketers for content marketing than SEO.
Yet use of these visual marketing platforms and sites was low relative to social sites that also allow for video and images, namely Twitter and Facebook. Roughly half (48.9%) of marketers used YouTube, and 20.6% were on Pinterest, compared to the 82.7% on Twitter and 87.7% on Facebook.
Looking ahead, 69.1% of respondents said they expected Facebook to become the dominant social media platform. Also of note: 85.9% said they anticipated site and author ownership of online marketing content would become critical in response to Google’s Panda update and the influence of Google+.
