Making your Email Content Searchable

Success in natural search optimization has a lot to do with the quality and frequency of the unique content you publish. As marketers, we often spend significant effort creating content that goes into emails, the landing pages they drive people to, and the marketing assets that these lead to, and we are not left with as much time as we would like to create content for blogs and other online properties that are searchable.

However, this does not have to be the situation. With Eloqua, it is very easy to repurpose any of your email content to make it publishable and discoverable by search engines. (see Eloqua's own feed of interesting content for an example)

The first step is to create an RSS feed that you will publish your content into. In the communication area, under Communicate-> Feeds, create a new RSS feed, and call it something like “Marketing Events and Promotions”. This is where we will keep a running feed of all the marketing content that would be interesting for people to discover in a search. Be sure to select that this is an internal feed (a feed that his hosted within Eloqua) rather than capturing an external feed (such as from a Blog's RSS Feed as we talked about previously).

With this feed created, but empty, our next step is to feed content into it. We are creating a lot of content in email, but this content does not get found by Google as it does not generally end up hosted on the Internet in a way that it is linked to and discovered by Google. We’re going to change that by generating a publicly available feed of email content that might be interesting.

For each email that is interesting and non-promotional; new whitepapers, notices of events and webinars, thought leadership articles, or case studies, the email that you use to announce it can be added to the RSS feed we have just created. To do this, from the email editor, select Publish to Fee from the Content menu. Select the RSS feed you just created, make sure the title and description are accurate (it will default to the title and description from your email) and click Publish.

Now, the email is linked into the RSS feed. The feed will show the title and description of the email, and the link will guide the user to a hosted landing page that is the exact content of your email. The feed itself can be very useful for internal constituents, like your sales team, who are interested in knowing what marketing communications are happening. Adding the feed to a web desktop such as iGoogle, or an RSS feed reader, gives a very quick and easy way to stay on top of the communications that are happening.

However, this feed can be used to create a web friendly, hosted portal that highlights the events and promotions your marketing team is running, and makes them all immediately searchable by Google. Simply build a landing page on an Eloqua hypersite, and insert the RSS feed into it. By adding a style to the feed, and some creative around the feed, you can create a more accurately branded experience. Make sure that this page is linked to from somewhere, such as your main web site, so that it can be found by the search engines, and all the content within it will be found by them.

Now, each email that you send out can be dropped into the RSS feed and will appear on your landing page without any extra work on your behalf. You gain the search benefits of creating a rich, consistent flow of content, without having to duplicate effort or write any new material. Of course the more interesting and non-promotional your material is, the more likely it is to have other people find it interesting and link to it, which further increases its search friendliness.

When the article in the feed is clicked on, or crawled by Google, the full content of your email shows up, cleanly formatted and fully searchable by Google:

Experts in the Field - Astadia

Over the past 2 years we've put a lot of effort into developing our partner community, and as we approach our upcoming internation partner conference (next week - Jan 7-9th), it's a great time to highlight them. Each partner brings unique expertise to the table and some great experiences in marketing that make them valuable partners in your Eloqua journey. However, the thing I really enjoy highlighting is the contributions that each of them make to the community of knowledge around demand generation.

Astadia, a partner we've been working with for some time, has been a great example of this. They freely share their expertise with a long-running series of Tip-of-the-Week pointers that are well thought out and a great read. If you're an Eloqua user and looking to grow your expertise, I highly recommend signing up for their tips.


They are available as an RSS feed here:

http://tips.astadia.com/feeds/EloquaTipoftheWeek/subscribe


Or as a regular weekly email here:


http://tips.astadia.com/forms/EloquaTipsSubscribe




And whether you're an Astadia client or not, they would be glad to have you sign up.


Thanks to the folks at Astadia for putting these tips together. If there are other resources that anyone finds valuable and wants to suggest, please don't hesitate to add them to the comments. We all do better by sharing knowledge.

Content For Free?

Creating fresh, interesting content about your industry can be a tough challenge. I think we all know a marketer (not us, of course, but someone we know) who has run out of ideas after a few months of creating content, and because of that, a marketing campaign falls flat. B2B marketing usually involves quite a bit of buyer education and establishment of trust and expertise. This involves helping the prospective buyer learn about your industry, your market, your products on their own. That can take many months. That's a lot of content.

So, here's a way to short-cut that. There are often numerous people within your industry, or even within your company who are creating content on a variety of blogs. You, being in the industry, are probably tracking it all in great detail. Use that to help educate your audience.

The bloggers will enjoy the free exposure, your audience gets rich content, and you look like a hero for producing a great monthly education piece without the usual late nights of content creation.

In the "Feeds" area, under "Communicate", add a feed from a good industry source. All you have to do is drop in the URL for the RSS of the feed. I'll grab the feed for the Digital Body Language blog (the sister blog of this one), and add it in.

Eloqua automatically grabs the feed content and makes it acessible for you to use anywhere you like. Emails, hypersites, etc, can all have the content automatically dropped in just by adding a reference to the feed. Any clicks on the feed items will also be tracked as part of that person's profile.

You can, of course, create the feed items directly from content within Eloqua, but more on that another time.

Now you're ready to use the feed content in your own marketing. I'll go through an example of dropping it into an email, but the same applies in Hypersites if you want fresh content on your landing pages.

In the email editor, at the bottom of the editor, you'll have a link for "Insert Feed" if you have the capability enabled. Put your cursor where you want to insert the feed content (often a side-bar is the best bet) and click Insert Feed.

You'll be presented with a dialog box that lets you configure how you want to work with this feed - don't worry, you can always click on the feed content to change the settings later.

Essentially, you're picking how many items you want to insert, what style and appearance you want, and whether you're inserting the content once, as static content, or in real time as the email is sent.

Unless you have a specific set of content you are interested in, the best bet is an automatically updated feed, as it pulls fresh content on the fly.

That's all you need to do, now your email contains a feed from the blog you have picked, and you can see what topics are of interest to your audience out of those blogs.

This is a new area for us, so if you've started using it and have an interesting story, or feedback on it, I'd be very interested in hearing from you. I know that it's popular in both Sports Marketing (lots of interesting post-game commentary), and Financial Services organizations (plenty of up-to-the-minute market news), but if you're using this in a different way, drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.