In Content Marketing
Tangental content: why it could be a good idea for brands and seemingly boring of niche verticals.
Account Manager
It all starts with thinking of creative ideas for our clients. From there we find unique datasets (or we make our own unique data sets through surveys), and after that it's a matter of a data visualization, creating a story out of that data and presenting a unique piece of content. I'm managing our clients’ workflow, whether they have one project or four in production, and what I try to do is make sure that someone in the team is running the surveys and getting the data we need from there, kind of putting together a narrative and seeing what the can people tell and then, once he has the campaign, relay not to our promotions associates, and from there put together in outreach strategy that makes sense for whatever the clients goals are.
Today we're going to be talking about tangential content and its potential for producing huge wins for brands or businesses with a limited audience for brand-centric content.
What is tangential content?
Tangential content is basically a piece of content that doesn't directly relate to a client or business's key business or key focus. Some examples of tangential content would be something like a car insurance company taking a germ swab of steering wheels and seeing how Jeremy they are, or a personal finance company seeing how Millennials are spending their money on video games.
Why do we sometimes choose tangential content ideas over more on brand ideas and what does that process look like?
I think when we first visit our client, when we first started ideation process for a client, the bigger question that we ask initially is “what are your goals” – especially if you are trying to generate as many links as possible. The suggestion we would offer is taking the tangential content route. Our reasoning behind that is if you're wanting to acquire more links you definitely want to be able to cast a bigger net. If you focus with content that more is on brand and specific in each to your target audience there you're not going to be able to reach the eyes of newer client or newer consumers that aren't necessarily already aware of your brand or the services that you offer.If you produce something, for instance, within the personal finance verticals – say, your savior services credit cards – and you want to expand your reach beyond the personal finance vertical, one thing we would suggest in the ideation process is “where else do we use credit cards for”. Beyond there you can come up with “if you go to sporting events”, “if you travel”, “what you do at the grocery store” – anything like that. Those are other tangential-related ideas that can propel your content into that much larger of an audience and help you get those links that you're trying to look for.
Short walk through a tangential content outreach campaign
One great example, a time tangenital content really worked – we were doing a campaign for our client Porch. They are home services professional: they set you up with contractors and those types of things. I was sitting in this meeting and thinking about what types of content I would look at, what do I do in my own - you know nothing that really did: I don't fix things, I don't know how to fix things, but I do know how to cook – and that's something I like to do in my home.
I started thinking and wondering, who else is like me? What other millennial men are like me, that can cook? So we ran a survey asking people what can you cook. And the results of the survey came back, and that almost half of Millennials couldn't cook a chicken! 20-25 percent of Millennials didn't know how to make break and bake cookies, and then we looked and we said “what is this item?” It was a picture of a butter knife, and they didn't know what that was either! So a third Millennials missed that. Generated these awesome headlines, we were able to pitch to publishers that really succeeded.
What was the process for promoting to get big links like the Washington Post
When we took this point, I think one of the biggest things that stood out with that campaign we see a lot of traction when it comes to the generational comparisons. When we put it into promotions something that, I think, differentiates Fractl from other agencies is, we sit the creatives done with the promotions associated whoever will be pitching that campaign. We were sitting down with one of our top promotions associates, and they were discussing “here's five to ten statistics that we think are really interesting for the campaign”. From there that's when we look for the higher DA sites that have the much larger audiences – in this case one that we targeted and were successful with was the Washington Post. The bigthing again that we saw a huge hook clip from was the one third of Millennials could not identify a butter knife, and from there it spiraled to a huge amount of publications and ended up getting a segment on the view where Whoopi Goldberg talked about it for about five to ten minutes. That was pretty cool.
Again, Porch they are a site that helps connect home contractors with home owners whenever they need a project they're working on. You might not necessarily think they would be the experts and who knows about a butter knife, but from there we made sure to tie it back to the client. When you are cooking, here's what you need to be mindful of when you are in your kitchen to make sure it's safe.
There's actually some data to back it up: we recently did a study posted on Moz that showed that tangential content has earned up to 30% more media mentions and. 77% more social shares on average than branded content.