When creating an online presence, so many businesses simply throw their content up on a website or social media page and call it a day. After all, it’s digital - it can be changed.
Instead, imagine creating a brick-and-mortar store dedicated to the online content you’d like your audience to interact with. You’d probably use more care - you would think critically through the eyes of your audience about what content should stay and what should go. You would arrange the content to create an experience for your guest, like a museum or art gallery. Also like a museum, you may choose to lead a guest through the exhibit, to the gift shop - in other words, lead them from interacting with content to closing a sale.
This is essentially what a Content Hub is - a one-stop online presence that ties your brand’s content together in a cohesive presentation. You may be saying to yourself, sounds like a blog. While both have content, blogs are typically organized in chronological order. Content Hubs allow you to present your content in anyway that creates a curated experience for your prospect, leading them through a buying journey. Besides lead generation, Content Hubs also allow you to gain valuable insights into your audience, which can transform the way you engage with them for the better.
Blogs also tend to have an emphasis on articles. With Content Hubs, you can distribute a variety of content, like photos, social media posts and videos to keep your audience engaged. Content can be branded, collected from other sources you deem credible, taken from social media or user-generated. In our information age, there’s an abundance of engaging content ready to use.
Let Your Content Become a Playground
While Content Hubs are a form of marketing, they shouldn’t be seen as a place to store ad after ad. Take Red Bull’s Content Hub, The Red Bulletin. Their description is “The Red Bulletin features breathtaking stories from the World of Red Bull and its playgrounds”.
You won’t find a single ad for Red Bull there. Instead, Red Bull satisfies its target audience and brings in more prospects by focusing on the lifestyle of its audience. Its content is about leaders and new growth in areas like music, innovation, art and niche sports like cycling, surfing and even wingsuit flying. By focusing their Content Hubs on what their target audience’s interests are, Red Bull brings in a wide audience to their brand.
The Content Experience Framework
We often speak about building and optimizing Content Hubs with our clients. Uberflip, a local Toronto marketing technology start-up, promotes the idea of content experience and developed the Content Experience Framework. This is an easy to use process to centralize, organize, personalize and distribute your content to generate results.
Personalize Your Content Streams
You might notice ‘persona’ pop up a lot when talking about Content Hubs. A buying persona is a fictional person who represents an entire target audience. Because it’s easier to visualize one person rather than a crowd, creating a persona with traits and pain points that match your prospects help you to understand how your brand can connect with a wider audience. Big name brands are so invested in this practice, they create whole lives around their personas, going beyond names and stock photos to make schedules and journals for their buying personas.
A Content Hub is arranged based on different solutions you offer your persona. Does your persona need more education on your industry? Create a knowledge-based Content Hub. Need a place to store all the content you place in emails to your clients? Let your Content Hub become a destination for all those links.
How to Categorize Your Content
There are many ways sort your Content Hub. Few ways you should organize by are:
- Buying Personas
- Industries
- Languages
- Use Cases
- Departments Buying Your Products
- Pain Points
- Product Families
- Education Topics
- Stages in the Buying Process
To maximize the benefits of a Content Hub, use Macromator’s expert content strategy services. Combining digital marketing tech skills, writing, editing and curating, Macromator builds content hubs that turn prospects into sales. Contact Dan Radu, President at info@macromator.com to learn what results you can generate.