Page 32 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

The competitor had overlooked new demographic subsets who were coming into
the market and eager to use their products. When I did research on these
segments, I found a wide open opportunity. The competitor had no content
targeted to these personas. We set about dominating the under-served channels
with amazing new content served up especially for them.

2. Explore different types of content.
YouTube first floated the idea2 that different types of content, when combined
together in an ideal mix, are extremely successful in building an engaged
audience for the long-term. The three types of content are:

Hygiene content: This is the content that serves the daily health of your
audience. This content makes them aware of your brand and helps them
connect to you when they need you most. This is the specific, short-form
content that is most likely to turn up in organic search results. An example
of hygiene content is a series of how-to videos from a do-it-yourself store
like Home Depot.
Hub content: While hygiene content might get somebody to your site, hub
content is intended to keep them there. This could be a series of articles
about a more in-depth topic, or perhaps a serialized story, that makes people
want to go down the rabbit hole and stay on your site. This could also be
“evergreen” content that people seem to love and read month after month.
An example of hub content is the addictive and thrilling adventure videos
produced by Adidas Outdoor featuring daredevil athletes using their gear.
Hub content lifts subscriptions to your content, spurs engagement, builds
brand interest, and may even lead to brand loyalty.
Hero content: Hero content is something brilliant, dramatic, and bold that
transcends the normal day-to-day Internet offerings. This is the content that
creates viral buzz. A famous example is the epic videos Nike created to
celebrate the World Cup. The most recent one, “Winner Stays,” playfully
captures the schoolyard fantasy of young soccer players who morph into
their favorite global stars. This type of content is difficult to produce. Nike
was intentional in spending millions to create this hero content with the
goal of creating massive brand awareness and dominating the conversation
around the world’s biggest sporting event. The video received 100 million
views.

We’ll be exploring these “3H’s” of content and how they relate to social
sharing in Chapter 8, but for now it’s important to understand that each type of