If you read around the subject of content marketing, it’s easy to become discouraged. You’ll find a figure claiming two million blog posts are published every day. You’ll read about businesses here in the UK employing 50 or 100 people to write articles for their websites. With only a few hours a week (or a few hundred pounds a month) to spare, how can you possibly compete?
The answer is, of course, that you don’t have to. You’re not selling shoes, or holidays. When you investigate what’s online in your market sector, you’ll probably see that it’s quite within your reach to create the best ‘content hub’ around, because there’s probably very little competition. If done well, this will quickly become a huge marketing asset.
A content hub is a top level index of resources around a particular topic, which could, for example, be a product category or an application. So you might want to create a ‘blue widgets’ content hub, or a ‘widget measurement’ content hub. This page will list relevant articles, broken down into categories, with the aim of making it the go-to place online for the topic. The articles don’t have to all be on your site – the idea is that this is a useful independent resource – but they could be.
Much of the material may already exist: ‘White Papers’, user guides and the like. However, creating the ‘content hub’ page should also give you ideas for articles you need to write. The key is to put yourself in the position of the curious prospect, and work out what they might need to know. Remember, there are very few people in the world thinking about this, which is why you have it within your reach to create the best resource around.
One often-quoted example of a good content hub which I think could be a template is from property site Rightmove. Yes, it’s very extensive if you start at the top, but drill down to individual pages like this one aimed at house sellers, and we have a much more manageable starting point: 15-20 useful articles gathered together with an obvious target. The articles all tackle the sort of questions prospects would appreciate having answered. Could you do something similar?