Content Marketing has been seeing a monumental rise in popularity over the past five years, fueled by the fact that people like experts. Brands and companies that give away valuable information about their domain to their target audience gain credibility. This credibility goes a long way in formulating an opinion of a brand and will play a big part in decision making.
Credibility is the name of the game. You can’t go out and write a blog post about Kim Kardashian’s latest nude photos if you are a family-oriented product for the bathroom. It might drive traffic to your site, but it won’t result in the sort of lasting, credible relationship with your potential customers.
Luckily, there are resources for content marketers like us, the best one being Google Trends.
Google Trends is great for a number of reasons. First, it’s super visual, which lets you glean interesting insights into its towering mountain of data more rapidly. Second, you can organize your search by your niche and location. For example, I wanted to see what’s trending today in France in science and technology.
Turns out that the Microsoft Lumia is topping the charts today. Maybe it’s a good time to write a review for what I think of it? Is it doomed to fail like the rest of Microsoft’s mobile initiatives? Or is it finally going to break them onto the world scene and challenge the likes of Google and Apple? If I wrote about that, I would be hitting the top 3 trends in one blog post. Not too shabby!
An even better strategy for content marketing than responding to trends is getting ahead of trends. Finding subjects that are on the rise will help you get ahead of other sites that will start writing about it later on. This helps you rise above the noise when the true global frenzy begins. Take a look at this graph of interest about Fiat Chrysler in Canada over the last few days:
Those news articles that came out earlier on July 26th will benefit from higher ranking and referencing than those coming out afterward. Notice as well how the proliferation of articles probably also caused people to start searching, and after 10 or so major news outlets start writing about something, it’s very hard for the smaller content marketers out there to make a dent.
If you’d like to talk to me about how I can help with your content marketing strategy, please contact me!
Tony Hymes 