Here are nine takeaways from creating content for what are typically considered challenging or boring industries…
1. Find a PG angle for your content
Within the gambling industry, it’s difficult to find a positive angle publishers are happy to promote. So, Re:signal focused in on the angle of poker being a sport. Like any sport, there are talents which players must develop in order to improve their game. For Poker these include maths skills, logic, risk assessment and more. Re:signal decided the concept of bluffing was an area the general public would be interested in learning more about, as lying is a skill everyone would like to be better at detecting in others or maybe even improving their own ability to lie.
2. Get professional researchers involved
We partnered with academic researchers to develop cutting edge research in the area of bluffing, this gave the project legitimacy and the ability to stand up to journalist demand for research integrity. The research finds were originally published on the gambling brand’s website so they were able to act as the original source. Later down the line, this article presenting the findings would be used as the research resource for the infographic to link to.
3. Publishers are partners, involving them means they buy into your content
When it comes to agreeing to publish an infographic with a publisher, it’s important to get publishers involved. But first – you need to establish a publisher as a contact. So we identified target publishers and started ringing targeted editors and journalists pitching the research and asking if they’d like to partner with us to create a dynamic content piece. Re:signal was able to secure a partnership with Mashable, and developed a stunning infographic which delivered the research in a creative way accessible to the masses. As the content was being developed, Re:signal made sure to involve Mashable in rounds of editions, so that they played a role in driving the piece forward as a partnership. This involvement helps to ensure the publisher will not back out further down the line because they’ve bought into the idea.
As a result of this approach, the article published received over 12,500 organic social shares on Mashable. In addition, over 500 links were published from 65 unique domains pointing back to the original research piece on the gambling website.
4. Turn internal staff into valued experts
In the second example, Re:signal worked with a B2B events company. We focused on developing internal staff as experts in the events management space and encouraged them to write articles and update their professional social media profiles online. This is a great way to get internal buy-in for future marketing efforts, it keeps teams engaged, and develops their professional profiles online – everybody wins!
5. Develop the blog as a resource which can be linked to
Re:signal first oversaw the development of content on the B2B event company’s blog. Articles on the blog were data-driven and focused on content the target market would learn from or want to share in a professional capacity.
For this brand, focusing on the blog made sense because like many B2B organisations they weren’t able to provide a personable voice sharing knowledge on the main website (they needed to keep it professional). Hence, the blog is a great place to lend a more human angle to any B2B organisation.
6. Promote staff as the content creators for other websites
For this B2B events company, Re:signal targeted publications focused on management themes, events, and business. We pitched the internal experts on their staff (who we’d been working with to update their social profiles and write blog content) to lend their expertise to other publishers.
Through this process, Re:signal was able to secure placements on sites with Moz Domain Authority scores in the 80s, and MajesticSEO CitationFlow and TrustFlow scores ranging from 48 to 71.
7. Locate offline experts hungry to expand their opportunities
For a brand in the nutrition space, Re:signal sourced nutritionists with limited online visibility, and developed their digital profiles across social media and as writers on the brand’s website. Simultaneously, these nutritionists developed content for the brand’s new content hub utilising their outstanding knowledge acquired of years of study.
By utilising independent nutritionists to discuss topics which the brand couldn’t mention on their own website, Re:signal established a workaround to overcome legal sensitivities regarding what can be said about nutrition under the UK and European law.
8. Separate your transactional content from informational content
There are three types of content online, which can be summarised as “Do, Know, Go.”
- Do – transactional content
- Know – informational content
- Go – navigational content
It’s important to separate these fields out, as many e-commerce sites try to create informational content to mix in the products their selling. This will never work because search engines understand that retailers have biased opinions to promote their products and any informational content coming from them won’t be neutral.
For this nutrition client, we focused on dividing their transitional content from their informational content by placing informational content on a separate subdomain. Now the brand is able to rank for both transactional and informational content.
9. Develop offline experts into online experts
Re:signal then utilised the nutrition experts and the content hub as a base from which to promote the brand. This has lead to a number of high-quality placements in both digital publications and off-line magazines like Cosmo. On the digital side, our PR efforts have lead to features on sites with Moz Domain Authority scores in the 60s to 80s, and MajesticSEO CitationFlow and TrustFlow scores between 50 and 70. From an SEO perspective, this has supported a vast array of rankings for information lead searches driving new potential consumers to the site.
What other tips have you built up from your experience creating content?
