Hi Reader,

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Dearest gentle reader, I just watched Bridgerton Season 3 Part I and here’s what it taught me about content marketing.

Just kidding!

I did watch Bridgerton Season 3 Part I yesterday, but I can’t say I was thinking at all about how content marketing relates to Polin’s romance. Rather, I’ve been more concerned about some industry news and how marketers like you and I can adapt to it. Let’s get right into it.
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In today’s edition:

• Google is at it again
• Content marketing is more than just SEO
• Free editorial content calendar template

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes 20 seconds

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Google is at it again 🔍

Google is in its Gemini era. This week, Google announced some exciting AI updates that sent a lot of marketers in a frenzy, and for good reason. Google introduced AI overviews in search, which means showing quick summaries of search queries with relevant links before search results. So what’s the problem here? It’s great for users, but kinda bad for content publishers like you and me.

Generative AI has already been competing with content publishers for traffic in the last few years, as people can get answers to simple questions from Chat GPT, Gemini, or any other chatbot. Google’s recent announcement takes that competition to a whole new level. Why would anyone want to keep scrolling on the SERPs below the AI overview when AI has already answered their question?

This update renders a whole lot of shallow TOFU content useless for SEO. All the ‘what is [insert subject matter]” articles are now more likely to already be answered by AI before the user even gets to see your article on the SERPs. Contrary to the opinion of many marketers, I don’t think this means that SEO is dead. It’s just going to challenge all of us to think smarter and change strategies.

My prediction for many future SEO strategies is that marketers will focus more on lower in the funnel articles with complex content that satisfy the user’s search intent better than AI can. And this makes a lot of sense. There’s only so much that AI can share in an overview. And building authority on complex topics gives you the upper hand in situations where a user needs in-depth information about a search query. I’m pretty excited to see how marketers execute this strategy.

On the other hand, Google mentioned in their update that these AI overviews will include relevant links from the SERPs to buttress their answers. If you’ve ever used Perplexity AI then you should know what this looks like. This means, much like featured snippets in Google, that there is also the opportunity to create content that can feature in overviews. I assume the criteria for this is similar to that of featured snippets. But I guess we’ll find out exactly what we’re dealing with soon.

Above the never-ending tussle between SEOs and Google, I think we’ll be alright. Marketing is always changing, so I’m pretty sure we can find a way to adapt to this too. There is also a lot more to content marketing than SEO, which brings me to my next point.

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Content marketing is more than just SEO 🌐

When many people think about content marketing, all they think of is writing SEO content for a blog. And that’s why whenever Google comes up with a crazy update that may tank organic search traffic, everyone panics. There are so many other content marketing tactics apart from SEO, and we’ll delve into some of them in this issue.

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Video marketing

Video marketing isn’t just about repurposing blog posts. This strategy allows you to attract visual learners by creating engaging and informative videos for many different reasons. These could be to explain complex topics or show your products in action. Bamboo is a company that does this extremely well with the Bamboo Stock Market Course 2.0 on YouTube, and their continuous video stock market updates on Instagram and TikTok.
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Podcasts

Similar to videos, podcasts provide valuable content in an audio format. Recently, podcasters are even merging this strategy with video marketing and uploading video podcasts to YouTube. This seemed to work for Grey Finance with their Limitless Podcast on YouTube and other audio platforms.
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Newsletters

One of my favorite newsletters ever is MoneyRise Weekly by Risevest. This newsletter has a way of breaking down complex finance news and principles into fun and easy banter. Newsletters are often seen as a lead generation and activation strategy but they can also be used as retention tools. They’re much cheaper and easier to execute than podcasts or video productions, so you can explore this too.

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Webinars

Webinars offer interactive learning experiences that build brand authority and generate marketing qualified leads directly. They allow you to connect with your audience in real-time and you can use them to demo product features, interview industry experts, conduct live Q&A sessions and more. During my time at Tix, I hosted a few webinars that attracted tons of leads. Paystack is also another company that hosts regular webinars so you take a page from their book too.

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I wouldn’t go as far as saying the possibilities with content marketing are ‘endless’, but they’re pretty vast. After hearing what you can do with any of the above tactics, I hope you’re planning to diversify your content strategy.

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A cute little freebie 📅

I’ve been doing some audience research to find out what templates marketers need the most to streamline their work. The most common answer was a content calendar. I figured that there are so many social media content calendar templates out there, but probably not many editorial calendars that really have all the rows and columns you need to be efficient.

I like looking at all my editorial info at a glance. So if you’re like me then you’ll love this free editorial content calendar below.

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This content calendar is just one part of a content marketing template bundle that I’m working on and can’t wait to share with you. I’m always open to feedback, so feel free to reply to this newsletter with some templates you think should definitely be in this bundle. The content calendar template is FREE butttt you should probably get your coins ready for the full bundle. I promise it’ll be worth it!

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Until next time,

Olohireme