Taking your content from zero to hero
2 Minute Read
Is this a familiar story? Stakeholder X demands an ultra-urgent piece of content. Why? What’s the objective? Your content strategy can easily get derailed when you’re under pressure to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders. But there is a secret weapon you can call on in the fight against a scattergun approach to content.
Hero content: your multi-tasking secret weapon
Hero content is the stuff you can sink your teeth into. Think e-books, guides, research reports or a video series. It’s got serious substance, offering your audience (and search engines) heavyweight expertise, educational value, all served with lashings of evidence and data.
The reason why we love hero content – and why it works so well – is that it solves both strategic and practical challenges. It provides a super simple, purposeful approach to content that provides the anchor you need to stay focused – so your content becomes strategic, rather than the result of the latest stakeholder request. Hero content can take the pain out of creating ‘always on’ content, whilst improving your lead generation efforts and boosting your ROI.
Putting together a killer content pitch
Selling in a new idea to stakeholders is often a challenge in itself. Here are some key points to help you sell in the concept of hero content:
- Hero content is cost-effective – once you’ve invested time to create your hero content, you’ve got months of content ready to re-purpose and roll out across every channel. It’s what we call the the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) approach. As an example, a good e-book might provide you with 3-6 months of blog, email and social content. Many marketers are already using the hero approach to maximise the value they get from their content.
- Hero content generates leads – it’s a big ask to expect someone to share personal information without offering something significant in return. Hero content provides an opportunity to package up an unmissable piece of content that your customers want and need, giving you permission to ask for their contact details in return.
- Hero content improves SEO – consumers are becoming research experts and Google loves high quality content as much as your audience. Serving great content when your customers are online searching for information is a big opportunity to connect.
- Hero content builds brand capital – creating heavyweight content packed with useful data and insights can help build credibility and trust with your audience. What better way to show you’re customer focused than by giving away useful, thought-provoking and non-product related content?
- Hero content can help build up your content hub – the enormity of tackling a content hub from scratch can mean the whole project never gets started. Hero content provides a focused and logical approach to building up a content hub on the go.
Of course, these are just some ideas. You know better than anyone what’s most important to your stakeholders. Knowing your audience – and which messages to dial up or down – is the key to a killer stakeholder pitch.
