(Nerd post alert. Endorsed and paid for by Carrie’s Inner Geek.)
Well, this is rather interesting!! I thought I’d take a quick look at Google Trends to come up with new keywords (blog inspiration!).
First, I searched trends on content marketing.
Looks promising, right? The growth is a bit obvious, since everyone is buzzing about content marketing like it’s Columbus arriving at the New World. Add in the projected explosion in content creation over the next five-plus years, it’s no surprise to see an upward trend.
But then I added in public relations, social media and search engine optimization (SEO) – the other three key components of digital PR – just for comparison purposes.
Which areas are generating the most online search activity? The results surprised me.
There’s a certain irony that the most popular topic is the least productive out of the four, if directly correlated to business growth and revenue. Social media MASSIVELY outweighs the other three, in terms of search popularity.
Are we globally focusing our learning, interest, staff time and budgets on the wrong thing?
I can tell you this. Out of all four, I’d personally rank them as follows, in terms of what drives the strongest digital marketing results: SEO, PR (traditional PR – pitching, media relations, editorial), content marketing, social media. Almost the opposite of where interests lie.
I also took a quick look at media relations and pitching, to see what search trends looked like there. OUCH. It’s a good thing that my new book is bringing major changes to my blog content strategy. That graph looks like the Titanic. It’s going down, baby.
Food for thought, right?