Why Three Priorities Should Guide Your Content Marketing - Here's Why #211 / Blogs / Perficient

Content marketing is a complicated and relatively young practice. What really matters to achieve success?

In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen gives you the three top priorities to get ROI from your content strategy.

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Transcript

Eric: Mark, content marketing is a complex topic. What would you say are the most important things content marketers should be pursuing right now?
Mark: I have three priorities that I try to follow myself. Number one is to balance quantity and quality, two is to prioritize content hubs, and three, build content bridges.
Eric: All right, let’s take those one at a time then. Start with balancing quantity and quality in your content.
Mark: In the old days, the conventional wisdom was to create as much content as you can. In an upcoming video in our “Here’s Why” series you’re going to talk a little bit more in detail about what that means and what that looks like in terms of balancing those two things.
Let’s talk for a moment about why it seemed to used to make sense to just create as much content as you possibly can.
Before social media, for example, almost all content had a short lifespan. Most people got their content through an RSS feed or email notification and that was it; it was gone forever. Now with social media, if you’re doing it right, you can take your best content, your evergreen content, promote it again and again and again so more people see it.
Also, Google hadn’t yet shifted its focus fully to content quality and user-value. All the traditional signals are still there in Google, but these are things that they’ve done a lot better with in recent years. So having really great quality content now can become evergreen in search where Google keeps promoting it even if it’s older, if it’s still relevant.
And finally, everyone was playing catch up back then because most brands lacked sufficient quality or quantity of content. I think those are the reasons why they concentrated on quantity. Now Google’s shift to machine-learning driven content quality has swung the pendulum the other way where content quality has become more of a priority.
So the ideal I think is—and this is if you have the capacity and the resources to do this—is to put as much as you can toward that high-quality user-focused, highly-relevant content. If you have the capacity, fill that in with shorter posts in between other kinds of content so that you keep top of mind but you’re giving lots of context around your content.
Eric: Let’s talk about the importance of content hubs.
Mark: Yes, and this is something I learned from you, and I love it now because I see what it does in our own content and that of our clients, for sure. So, once you get a quality content mindset, content hub creation is the next step.
Let’s talk about what a content hub is. At the most fundamental level, it’s a centralized curation of your content around one of your main topics.
You can have multiple content hubs on your site, but each one is centered around one of the things you really want to be known for. So blog content we know gets pushed down and disappears. A hub creates a better user experience, because everything that the user wants to know about that topic they can find in that one place, but it also helps search engines to see what you should be known for.
Examples on our site include our hubs built around our research studies. Because of those, we’ve got number one ranks for over a year now for “mobile versus desktop,” “digital personal assistants,” and many other high–volume keywords that are really important to our business.
Eric: Right. And I think what most people don’t realize is that in a blog construct—this is a little bit of research work I did—75% of the content that goes in a blog are things that Google really shouldn’t index. And like you said, that content gradually disappears over time as it descends in the hierarchy.
Mark: And it should, right?
Eric: Yes. But in a content hub, you have the big advantage of really controlling where everything shows up which is great.
But the last priority you mentioned is building content marketing bridges. What do you mean by that?
Mark: First of all, I have a lot more detail about that in another “Here’s Why” episode and also a blog post that I published about it, but let’s talk about the basic idea.
A content bridge means bridging the gulf between brand goals and consumer wants and needs. I see the most successful content has the right balance of both. You can be out of balance either way too much, trying to engage consumers but little about your products or services or what your brand is really about, or the other way of just trying to sell, sell, sell that people don’t want to see with no helpful informational content.
So you want to find the bridge, the balance between those two.