If there is one thing this blog has been successful at, it has been communicating to people that content is not something you can just “get into:” That, contrary to popular opinion, content creation is not a practice that businesses can partake in with minimal levels of planning, nominal effort, or no cost. In fact, to be successful at it, content creation has to be a centerpiece element of your marketing plan—so much so, that the content is a product unto itself.
But as the concept of creating content as a product begins to enter our collective consciousness, another question now invariably arises: how does a business, or even a non-profit organization, take something so seemingly brand-dependent as content, and turn it into a standalone product that is worthy of its own attention—or even its own brand? This question is important because the essence of it points to why marketers see content as promotionally viable in the first place: because content has the potential to attract new customers, as well as promote greater levels of brand engagement and brand discourse. The rub, however, is bridging the gap in attention between content that is intended to increase buyer interest, and a target customer that may not be in the midst of a buying decision.
The motive behind developing content as a product is a simple hypothesis: That if content is created as a product, then it is a viable promotional channel for attracting new customers because it has its own center of gravity—it is its own attraction, and on this basis, is a viable means of attracting new customers, and sustaining the interest of existing ones. With this being understood, the focus of this blog post series is also straightforward: to talk through in greater detail, precisely how you will go about getting this done. The truth of the matter is that while content creation is still a relatively unconventional practice in the digital marketing space, it still requires a large degree of dependence on combining unconventional strategies with conventional practices to be successful at it. Therefore, while you may be a talented writer, videographer, or podcaster, to a large degree, you will need to still identify what kind of brand you want, what your demographics are, and how you will get the word out. Inversely, if you are a conventional digital marketer, you will have to learn how to combine your technical abilities with concerted creative outputs. All of this is said to say that if you are planning to be successful at this on day one, it’s time to get real: every business has its own unique mix of promotions and content that needs to be discovered in order to attain success. Planning for anything different is only planning for failure. After all: everybody has a plan til’ they get punched in the face.
Establishing A Barometer for Achievement
Before we can get into any of the meat associated with topical ideation, posting candor, or any of the “fun stuff,” it is important that we start our efforts out at square one. While some may be inclined to consider the first step as SEO strategy or editorial planning, my problem with focusing on these things first is that though they do much to establish the structure of content creation as a practice, they do very little to establish a barometer for achievement. As a result, content can run the risk of being wildly inconsistent, as there is no real method or heuristic for identifying good work versus bad work. There is no way to establish if a piece of content was finely thought out and delivered, or half-assed, and finally, there is no way to hold team members to any sort of real qualitative standard.
By establishing a barometer for achievement, you quickly identify who it is that you want to be, and who it is that you do not want to be. Furthermore, you more quickly identify the people, practices, and standards that must be embraced in order for you to get there. While some may be inclined to use their competition as a measure of success, I think most times this is a mistake. Beyond the fact that most small to medium-sized businesses will probably have subpar or nonexistent content standards, there is also the fact that businesses of all stripes have the tendency to develop their content as an entity that is dependent on the greater brand. If your goal is to make your content a product, then you have to do the opposite and make an entity that can stand on its own. That means 9/10 times, your competition will be a wholly inaccurate measure of success for your own content operation.
So if not the team across town, across the state, or across the country, then who do you compare yourself to? If you are trying to make content as a product, then fundamentally you need to be establishing a barometer for achievement based on other content products that already exist. Who focuses on delivering content as a product? Easy: Magazines, Radio Stations, TV Broadcasters, YouTubers, SoundClouders, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and anybody who relies on a content dissemination platform as a primary means of generating revenue. The reality is that under these conditions, you will notice that deliverables are properly focused, reliably scheduled, possess a clear narrative voice, and are driven by a high standard of production.
So, to start the creation of your content product, you should write down somewhere between 3-10 different content brands that you can use to help establish your own content’s sense of self. Furthermore, it would help if you wrote a small piece about what these various content brands do. I have used The Lair Blog as an example of how to do this.
The Lair Blog – Inspiration
The list above is a short collection of content creators that inform much of the direction of this blog. The purpose of this list is to inform the type of content I create, as well as the qualitative standards that I am willing to hold myself to. Now, to be clear, these organizations and individuals on my list are not my competition. Rather, they represent a collection of things that I have grown to appreciate in content that I consider to be good, and collectively they represent a north star that I can follow to inform my own decisions. Over time, these decisions will cumulatively amount to a unique creative direction that can eventually build upon itself. Nonetheless, it is in identifying these unique inspirational elements that I can now advance to the next step of the process.
Determine What Will Make You Different
Before you get into the weeds of planning any ideas for social media posts, podcast interviews, streams, or the like, you first have to determine what will make your content different. Not observing this, can set you up for a situation where you find yourself doing something that another person is already doing better. And while you may think that the marketplace may ‘have room for another voice”—and you could be right—the fact of the matter is that if you are doing a shittier version of the same thing that someone else is doing, you might as well not even exist. And while I am quite sure that your opinions on (insert topical focus) may be the thing that makes your content “unique,” to this I would say that opinions are like assholes—everybody has them, but most people don’t dedicate entire release schedules to them.
The point that I am trying to make is that beyond your unique perspective, there has to be something else in your broader approach to content that will force your audience to care. This is the thing that makes you unique. I would also go so far as to say that if we were to examine the content focuses of most creators online, each of them would have differentiating factors that help their respective brands stand out.
For this exercise, it is time to identify the key players in your industry space. If you are among them, then that means it is now time to assess what the competition is doing. Take a moment to study all of the places where they exist in a content-generating capacity. While this may be the corporate blog in some conventional instances, these places may also be platforms such as TikTok or Instagram. All the same, they may have a podcast or a documentary series. If your industry space is very large, like marketing or design, I recommend picking industry leaders in your region, state, or professional niche to narrow down your focus. Ultimately, the goal is to identify the content vectors where your competition exists, and see where you can differentiate yourself or find a competitive advantage.
While doing this, take note of how your contemporaries talk about their chosen topic—and try to deduce what the topical focus is in a clear and concise sentence. Additionally, try to keep an inventory of what the strengths and weaknesses are as your chosen brand is delivering content. After that, write down in 1-3 sentences what makes your content brand unique.
Using The Lair Blog once again as an example, this would look like:
The Lair Blog – A personally-published blog written by Clifton Brett that specializes in a vertically integrated focus on communications production–from content marketing and content design, to the business of content, leading creators, and the technologies that make it possible for millions of people.
One of the things you might also realize along the way is that the industry leaders in your space may be suffering from major deficiencies in their content management processes—and this could be anything. You may have some industry leaders that release content inconsistently. There may be others that release content that is superficial in its focus, lazy in its execution, or downright bad. You may realize that your competition doesn’t even market with content in any meaningful capacity. Understand that while having a unique topical approach is a clearer and more scientifically predictable way of standing out, if you can deliver the same thing better than industry leaders, then you have a competitive advantage. In the end, the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented every time to reap the benefits.
Pick Your Targets Accordingly
This is where things become a little bit more complicated, as we start to advance into the weeds of basic SEO strategy. The reality is that if you are not considering the SEO-related implications of engaging in content creation, then you aren’t doing actual content marketing—and this is regardless of whether blogging is a part of your promotional mix. Keep in mind that while content strategy involves an amalgamation of diverse strategic practices, these practices necessitate their existence for two key audiences. The first audience consists of people that are already engaged in your product, while the second audience consists of people who do not know about you—but for one reason or another, may be looking for you.
Traditionally speaking, the easiest way to look for a person, place, or thing that is new is to search for it. Ultimately, despite any attempts to downplay its importance, this is why SEO matters. After all, if you are not taking into consideration how people are looking for you, then your brand has a much lower propensity of actually being found.
Put another way, the purpose of SEO is brand positioning. In so many ways, it is like the digital equivalent of competing for shelf space in a grocery store. People pick aisles based on what they are looking for and are more likely to notice products that are higher up on the shelf—which is why brands pay for top-shelf positioning. SEO is similar in that a search term is much like an aisle—and search results are much like shelf positioning. The purpose of search engine optimization is to position your content where people are looking for it, as high up on the page as possible so that it is found faster than the competition.
Unlike grocery aisles, however, target keywords can be anything—literally. As much as they can be more general queries such as, “Marketing,” “Content Marketing,” or “Content Marketing for Dummies,” keywords also include very specific phrases such as “Marketing for Local Restaurants,” “Salaries for Marketing Jobs in New York,” or “Marketing legal services online.” The point is that internet searches are filtered based on general criteria and specific criteria. Identifying which keywords to use, thus, becomes a matter of measuring not only the traffic volume of a target search criteria, but also measuring the overall difficulty to rank on the first page of that search criteria as well.
In so many words, this explains why we pick a niche before we pick keywords: because in picking a niche topic for our content product, then there is a good possibility that we are picking niche keywords to define it by default.
But these are only the beginning of your challenges. The reality is that depending on the nature of your content, how it is expected to be purposed, and how much of it you intend to have in a given period of time, the process of strategizing for keyword groups can be vastly different.
For instance, if your content strategy relies primarily on cornerstone content or content that is updated every 2 weeks or so, then your challenge will be finding keywords that are sufficiently unique enough to easily score a good page rank, while still being popular enough for that page rank to actually mean something. SEO means very little to businesses that focus on keyword groups that lack sufficient search volume—which is why uniqueness isn’t the end-all-be-all of SEO. So in some industries, getting proper levels of visibility might mean prioritizing larger, more functional search terms—that also might be more competitive in the same breadth.
While analyzing keyword groups can be partially done with services such as Google AdPlanner, the reality is that AdPlanner is designed for buying ads, and will not provide you with the necessary search volume and difficulty figures to develop an effective picture of any associated SEO benefits. In reality, what you will need are specialized tools that allow users to actually measure the flow of traffic, and volume of websites that correspond to a specific search criterion. Two that I recommend are SEMRush & Moz. While both of these services are supported by pricey subscriptions, they are also capable of measuring search traffic, as well as search difficulty. On top of this, services such as SEMRush and Moz will help with the process of optimizing your site for SEO by taking into account the number of outbound and inbound links produced by your site, reducing the number of redundant pages, and ranking individual pages based on Google SEO compliance. The point is that specialized tools will allow you to identify the necessary keywords and page structure to help your content achieve its intended search-based marketing functions.
While this very specialized form of content planning is all well and good, it also raises its own set of questions—namely, how does one apply these types of systems to entities that are measured in hundreds, or even thousands, of updates per year? Typically, content products in this category are entities that specialize in news—and if it is a website, then it is designed to be a content product unto itself.
In this circumstance, one of the convenient things about incorporating news into your posts is that the focus of the headline is the keyword term—so even if you are producing thousands of posts per year, it is quite possible to ensure that each post is driven by a unique keyword group. This only becomes easier if you are focusing on a space that produces a very high volume of content such as technology, fashion, or music. While you can still search up the focus of your headline in a tool like Moz or SEM Rush, I think the process of strategizing around this type of content is a little bit different than content that is updated weekly or is cornerstone in nature.
In the case of longer form, lower frequency content, strategizing can be easily done with technical tools like Moz and SEM Rush. But in the case of shorter form, higher volume content, though strategy can be done using the same tools, in some ways it is inefficient. In this circumstance, it is more efficient to rely on an Editorial strategy that prioritizes topic, posting frequency, channel, and length, instead of an SEO content strategy, which prioritizes keyword volume, competitiveness, length, and structure. Though SEO is still relevant in the context of Editorial Strategy, the way it is leveraged is different when compared to SEO content strategy.
The goal of traditional SEO content strategy is finding an effective niche to target, and using keywords, structure, and length to rank high within a niche that is selected based on its volume and competitiveness. The reason why this is desirable among many business types—is because businesses produce a much lower volume of content per year, which means that for the few posts that a business does produce, the only way those posts can have impact value within a broader topic is if they are targeted to a strategically chosen niche within that topic. Why? Because this is the best alternative to competing with websites in major categories that produce vastly more content, and by extension benefit from a larger SEO footprint.
By contrast, the goal of editorial strategy is to target a large number of categorically related topics across a large number of posts. Ultimately, the goal of this approach is to create a large SEO footprint where content covers a large spectrum of search queries—some of which a website will rank highly for, others of which it simply will not. It is through these multiple search queries, across what can be seemingly unrelated topics, that a web page can elevate its own visibility, as well as cultivate a unique audience. So how do we use something like this in a context that still allows us to target qualified leads, or build an audience based on tangible demographic profiles?
First and foremost, you must recognize the difference between topics and categories.
Topics in the context of SEO represent the focus of a piece of content. But categories represent how topics should be grouped. For example, on a tech reviews blog, your topics can be Sony A7III, DJI Ronin SC, Godox Strobe Lighting, and Dry boxes. Though all of these items are demonstrably different topics, they all fall under the category of photography products. Again, if you’re running a fashion blog and your topics are Nike, Cole Haan, Thursday Boot Company, and Converse, your category is shoes.
As you can imagine, however, the pre-eminent issue with this approach is that you can still run the risk of falling into the same pitfalls as someone who uses popular SEO keyword terms—which is, getting drowned out by all the noise around you. While each deterministic piece of news that you offer is, for all intents and purposes, a unique keyword term—just writing about what is popular and what people are searching for is not going to be enough to make you competitive. The reason why is that if you are merely saying the same thing as more major players, then you will be overlooked in favor of more major players—both by algorithms and by a prospective audience. In the end, despite the uniqueness of individual terms, if their category is saturated nonetheless, then you will have a hard time building a popular website.
The way we circumvent this, is by picking categories that are more niche—and building them with content that is reflective of the categorical specialization. We can even determine the size of our categories by doing keyword analysis, even if we are not directly worried about hitting a highly competitive keyword target. If we were to revisit our category of “photography,” to make our category more niche maybe we change it to “mirrorless photography,” “Sony photography,” or “studio photography” to bring our focus down to a more targeted level. Inversely, instead of just targeting “shoes,” maybe we target “basketball sneakers,” “mens dress shoes” or “sustainable footwear brands.” In both cases, while your site may still talk about certain things that are popular across your chosen category, there will be other times when you may cover things that are only popular within your niche, and that get overlooked by larger, more major players in your space. In the end, both revisions are bound to attract people that are interested in technology, and interested in fashion—no matter what the niche focus of your website is.
Ultimately, the goal of SEO content strategy and editorial content strategy is simple: achieving brand positioning by presenting content uniqueness. While SEO content strategy tries to create this by targeting unique keyword groups—which ultimately dictate the direction of content—Editorial strategy tries to achieve this by creating content that is uniquely categorized. Though SEO content strategy may prioritize a single release that targets a niche topic, editorial strategy targets a niche category, over the course of multiple content topics—and at times, promotional channels.
While editorial strategy avowedly offers more opportunities to talk about what you want, brand build, and even attract audience members from disparate groups, it is higher maintenance and more creatively demanding, due to the level of commitment required to do it. Inversely, while SEO content strategy is more manageable, calculable, and transferrable between team members, it is also much easier to end up with work that is—well, boring.
Finally, it should be noted that all of this talk about topics, categories, uniqueness, and their importance to SEO is not limited to just blogs and corporate websites. These same rules apply to everything from blogs, to corporate YouTube channels, all the way to TikTok and Instagram pages. Though certain social media services may not have the same level of analytics support compared to search engines like Google, that doesn’t mean the principles of finding unique content topics and categories are suddenly irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that Algorithms aren’t arbitrary. They are a reflection of the people they serve. Because people crave unique, quality content, the technology that is designed to filter content will favor work that is unique and qualitatively made.
Conclusion
Whether you choose to create a content product that is a structured series hosted on a specific channel—or a product that is a channel unto itself—it is entirely up to you. But each approach will require vastly different courses of action than its counterpart. In the end, the purpose of this guide isn’t to impose any particular opinion on what can, at times, be an objective choice. It is to empower the reader with options and help them make informed choices based on their own needs.
Contrary to popular opinions, the planning and ideation of content—as it is spoken about in this piece—is a process that requires a balance of both creative thought and technical strategy. For as much as it is about coming up with compelling topics, posting consistently, and planning your posts, it is also about studying the competition, measuring the marketplace, and examining where you can carve out your niche.
In the next part of our series, we will discuss the dynamics of branding your content, establishing technical specifications for your content, channel and medium selection, identifying a production schedule, and journey mapping your content product in relation to a broader audience-building approach.
No Comments