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‘Content’ is a word that has been over-used and now refers to too many things.
Essentially, it is anything on-line… not particularly helpful when trying to communicate a ‘content strategy’ to your wider business.
Luckily there is a relatively simple framework that allows us to disambiguate ‘content’ and hone in on what’s important.
Originally this framework was created by Google to explain what a good YouTube channel management strategy looks like. This is how it goes:
“Hero content” refers to the big, tent-pole events that are designed to provide a massive step-change to your audience growth.
“Hub content” is regular, scheduled content that provides a reason to subscribe to a channel and return on a regular basis. Episodic and formatted series work best as hub content.
“Hygiene” or “help content” means your channel’s basic, always-on videos. These could include tutorials that answer the most popular search queries in your content area. It can also be product demo videos.
Using Volvo Trucks as an example, here are the kinds of things they are doing:
84,784,253 views
General interest
971,350 views
Industry interest
8,694 views
Product interest
In fact, this methodology translates very nicely to websites as well.
These are your product or service pages, and your category pages. It is also the kind of content that should sit next to those pages to build trust and help customers with their final bit of research before they are willing to purchase. Your hygiene pages will be the ones you want ranking in Google for your transactional keywords.
This is your brand’s voice on-line, but more importantly your way of keeping in touch with your audience on a regular basis. Often, this sort of content is found in a blog… but often it drops short of being engaging and valuable. Too often a blog is written for the sake of it, because “that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?” Well no, not if it is not delivering on objectives and delivering value to the business.
This is content created on a less regular basis with mass audience appeal. It is designed to generate attention, links, website visits, and brand awareness. To achieve all those things, it needs to be PR worthy (authority building) and the idea needs to be ‘sticky’ (attention). Often, this kind of content also requires greater investment per piece, hence the lower production frequency.
