How to use the content marketing pyramid

In this blog, Bradley, our Head of Content, talks about the content marketing pyramid and how it can be utilised to scale your content, increase engagement and drive lead generation. 

In today’s digital marketplace – to stand out from the competition, you need to be creating content.

But not just any content. You need to create content that is valuable, up-to-date and most importantly: better than everything else out there.

Fortunately, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. And you most definitely don’t need to be creating different topics left right and centre.

You just need to rethink your approach to content creation.

What if I told you that you could get more out of the content you create with far less effort?

Rather than creating blog after blog, eBook after eBook (all without any real strategy), you need to consolidate your efforts and maximise the value of what you create.  

I’d like to present to you a different approach to your content creation – it’s called the content pyramid, and it will enable you to do much more with much less!

Building a content pyramid

If you already have gated content assets in place, such as eBooks, market research, whitepapers and so on, building your content pyramid will be pretty straightforward. You just have to start by breaking those assets down into smaller (and more digestible) pieces of content.

If you don’t have any gated content assets in place, that’s where you need to start. Having a couple of eBooks – or even a piece of market research – will give you a lot of content to work with. You can easily cover two or three months’ worth of content.

You also need to plan ahead. It’s worth brainstorming how you’ll break down larger pieces of content, including what formats you’ll use and where you’ll post the content.

All of your content assets should be linked to and from each other where possible. What this does is that it signals to search engines (and your readers) that bits of content are related to each other and there’s more information to be read.

What are the benefits of a content marketing pyramid?

A foundation and a vantage point

The best thing about a content pyramid is that it is both at once a foundation and a vantage point. You can work from the top down – breaking down content into different forms – or from the bottom up, using smaller assets to help build larger ones.  You can even start in the middle and build your way up or down!
 

Strategic content creation

With a content pyramid, you no longer create content for the sake of creating it – you actually have a strategy in place. Every piece of content is created for a purpose and activities are far more coordinated.

It’ll also improve your overall operational efficiency as everyone will have a clear understanding of what’s being created and why, as well as how it needs to be promoted. With your teams unified using a content pyramid, you’ll be able to move much faster.
 

Unified customer experience

When you create content in a siloed and disconnected fashion, it leads to a fractured customer experience which in turn reduces satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Because you’re just creating content with no underlying strategy or central piece, it’ll also read differently to everything else you do.

Fortunately, the content pyramid ensures cohesive messaging (as the content you create utilises existing content) and centralised information.

Streamlined delivery of content

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with the content you create, a content pyramid approach gives you all the collateral you need. Using it, you can reduce the amount of time you spend on content creation substantially, all while increasing the amount you create.

Format diversity

Your target audience might prefer reading over watching a video. They might absorb content better via presentations and podcasts.

Luckily, content pyramids give you both the flexibility and time you need to create different assets to appeal to your target audience.

Because you’re leveraging existing content, you have more time to change it to a certain format or style. Just refer to your buyer personas; work out what channels your target audience frequent and how they prefer to consume information!

Improved search engine optimisation (SEO)

Every piece of content you create and publish on your website is an opportunity to be found on search engines for the keyword term(s) the content is optimised for.

And, as you include links in your assets pointing to the original piece of content, you’ll be able to drive much more traffic to your website and to the page the original piece of content is hosted on.

Let's start doing content properly 

It’s never too late to start revamping your content strategy. You have to think of content as all-encompassing – it touches every area of your marketing and sales activity. So you can’t do it in a disconnected or piecemeal fashion.

As you begin to consolidate your activity and interlink your content assets, you’ll begin to drive more targeted traffic to your website, increase your business’ exposure online, improve the quality of your content and get more value out of your marketing campaigns. Have a think about it – it’s the next step in your content strategy.

Speaking of the next step in your content marketing strategy - have you heard of topic clusters? They can increase your visibility on search engines, drive targeted traffic to your website, improve your overall search engine optimisation and help you educate interested parties.

Looking to optimise your content marketing strategy? Our team of experts can help develop a strategy that aligns with your brand and speaks to your target audience. To find out how we can help you, speak with our team.