It’s no secret that effective content marketing and social
media strategies are a necessity in today’s marketing world. The skeptics have
been quieted over the years after the data has repeatedly demonstrated how
properly executed content marketing and social media tactics improve engagement
with your target market and drive customer action.
Benefits aside, in practice, it is often difficult for
companies to manage all that goes into a successful content marketing strategy;
this is especially true for smaller, resource-constrained firms. It takes a
great deal of time and effort to update and monitor the ever increasing number
of social media platforms… not to mention maintaining a blog, sending e-blasts,
creating videos, building case studies, managing content curation and hosting
webinars. It’s enough to drive a marketing manager to drink!
Not to worry, you can put that bottle down (until the
weekend) – content hubs are here to make your content marketing lives a little
bit easier – and more effective.
Content hubs are used to aggregate all of your company’s
content, created or curated, into one beautiful and custom designed hub. This
includes posts from all social media channels, links to 3rd party
articles, YouTube videos, podcasts from SoundCloud and of course all of your owned
media such as blog posts and white papers.
Here are five reasons why your company should hop on the
content hub bandwagon!
1. One-Stop-Content-Shop:
Bringing your content under one roof allows your audience to see all of your valuable posts in one place without having to seek out your content on numerous mediums. You can distribute all of your great content through a single link to your hub, saving time for both you and the individuals that you’re targeting. You can also drive additional traffic to your content hub by sharing posts directly from the hub to your various social channels.
2. Build Collections to Organize Content:
Collections are a great feature that allow you to create groups of related content within your hub. This is especially useful when you need to tailor your messaging for unique audiences or if your company has a number of different product/service offerings. Simply create a collection for each target audience or thematic content group and upload the content that fits within each collection.
3. Compelling Call-To-Actions:
A fantastic feature of content hubs is the ability to drive action from your readers through custom call-to-actions that are built right into your content stream. Content hubs give you the flexibility to design these CTAs to build continuity between your brand and the behaviour-driving message.
4. Memorializing the Good Stuff:
Did you know that the average lifespan of a Tweet is under 20 minutes? You spend a great deal of time creating and curating engaging content, only to have the post get lost in the content marketing noise. Content hubs allow you to “memorialize” your heavy-hitting pieces of content by pinning them to the top of your hub’s feed. These posts will stay put regardless of the number of new posts added to your collection, resulting in an increased shelf-life for your best posts.
5. Data Driven Insights:
Content hubs have built-in analytics and reporting as well as the ability to easily integrate with Google Analytics – music to Sherpa’s ears. Hub engagement, unique users, collection popularity, and performance of posts are just some of the metrics that allow you to build measurability into your content marketing efforts.
As more mediums get added to the content marketing and
social media mix, marketers are faced with tough decisions as to what channels
would appeal to their target audience, and more importantly, how to effectively
distribute content across the channels that they choose. By bringing content to
a single hub, and by targeting unique user groups through “collections” versus
different content and social channels, content hubs allow you to showcase your
content more efficiently, saving both you and your target market valuable time
and effort.
We have built a number of content hubs that convert for our
clients; you can check out Sherpa’s “Content Cave” here. If you like what you’ve
read, I would be happy to take you through an in-depth content hub demo!