What do we mean by ‘Content Strategy’?

‘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.

Using Volvo Trucks as an example, here are the kinds of things they are doing:

Hero

84,784,253 views
General interest

Hub

971,350 views
Industry interest

Hygiene

8,694 views
Product interest

Why do it?

• Reduces old ‘viral’ thinking of ‘fire and forget’.
• Content synergy: all content types cross-pollinate.
• Increases audience retention.
• Increases sales and revenue.

In fact, this methodology translates very nicely to websites as well.

Hero, hub, hygiene – your website

Hygiene – rank

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.

Hub – keep in touch

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.

Hero – expand audience

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.

Here’s our Head of Digital Media, Anthony Tuite, talking more about the model at the Figaro Paid Search & SEO Seminar on 2nd February 2017