Structured Content and Topic Cluster Model
Lately I’ve been hearing these two phrases a lot, and I’m curious how many B2B marketers are familiar with them. In the B2C realm, they seem to be ‘old news’ as large companies are investing heavily in content marketing vs. product marketing which means they are likely well-versed in structured content and the topic cluster model.
In a recent blog post by one of my partners, Blake Eckert, related to the 2018 marketing trends to watch, he mentioned content marketing is still among the top 3 priorities cited by B2B organizations. Did you know that 45% of marketing budgets are spent on content? Not advertising, not tradeshows. But rather generating valuable content for their target audiences. To put this in perspective, that represents several billion dollars in annual spend.
Traditional B2B marketing has focused heavily on corporate communications and product marketing. So many organizations are still trying to understand what it means to focus on content marketing.
Let me break it down.
Content Marketing vs. Product Marketing
The difference between content marketing and product marketing is that content marketing addresses the primary subject or topic an individual in your target audience would be interested in learning more about, whereas product marketing provides detailed information about how a specific product functions to solve a particular pain point.
You may be thinking it’s the same, however the difference is in the focus and intent. Content marketing concentrates on adding value to the customer’s knowledge-base by providing information about a suitable subject, and places the product in the background. It relies on the consumer to draw the connection of your organization as a trusted resource and an expert on their primary subject of interest, and therefore your products must also be relevant and superior.
On the other hand, product marketing places the product in the forefront and provides examples of how it can be used effectively. It relies on the customer taking an active interest in the product (or a similar competitive product) and potentially researching some options.
To give an example:
So why is this important, you ask?
Simply put – the times are changing and so is SEO.
Topic Cluster Model
Search engines continuously update their algorithms. Some updates are tiny and some are huge. I know what you are thinking…it changes every other day. EXACTLY!
Because it changes so frequently and more web searches are being conducted on mobile devices through audio commands and voice recognition (a la Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, etc.), search engines are now taking into consideration ‘searcher intent’.
What this means: As you make a request of a search engine, the algorithm is trying to understand your intent and will scour the web looking for the most relevant content to match your request while also taking into consideration your previous search behavior.
For example, if you did a search for "Marketing ROI Dashboard Templates" and you only spent 5-10 seconds on the first few websites provided, but spent 20-30 minutes on one website in particular, Google would rank that site as being of high value on the topic. With that high-value ranking, the algorithm would adjust to bring you more sites with that type of content so the next time you ask Siri to “find a marketing agency that does marketing ROI tracking”, it would try to provide you with agencies that have content you previously found meaningful and would display them as the top search results.
The topic cluster model is a way of categorizing and promoting website content around a particular theme, aka a pillar, and then linking all supporting content such as blog posts, articles, brochures, product web pages, videos, etc. to those pillars.
How does this relate to product marketing?
If you take this new search engine methodology into consideration, your website ranking may suffer if your site is heavily promoting products and has little topic-focused content. A company that has several resources such as eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, how-to guides and interviews with experts about geomodeling will outrank an organization that has product-focused webpages, flyers, case studies and videos about the product that does geomodeling. The former appeals to a much greater audience whereas the latter is so specific, a search engine may only bring up the site if the requester has previously visited or has given a very precise search command.
7 seconds to capture a website visitor's attention
Imagine a new potential customer trying to find an answer on how to integrate seismic with geology. Perhaps your competition has migrated and adopted a content marketing strategy, but your company is doing product marketing. The search engine is going to show the most relevant sites first and yours might not appear on the first page of results.
This matters tremendously on the crowded, information-crazed World Wide Web where you have 7 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention. If they do not find your content meaningful and they bounce from the site quickly, the search engine will store this information and will calibrate it to other similar searches by other people – not just the one visitor.
Additionally, if your company’s content isn’t appearing in the search results, you are likely to miss sales opportunities. More and more B2B purchasers are conducting their own research and have a very good idea of what they want before they speak to a company representative. Showing up late to the ball in this case doesn’t end in a Cinderella story. Rather it means your sales team has to do a lot of ‘selling’ to even get your product in consideration.
“B2B buyers complete 57% of the buying decision before they are willing to talk to a sales rep.”
For more information about Topic Cluster Model:
Structured Content
And how does structured content fit into this equation?
You can imagine that as companies begin to transform their marketing strategy they will suddenly be faced with a large volume of high-value content and will need a way to quickly reuse, repurpose and link pieces to a particular topic or pillar.
Structured content relies on a taxonomy system for topic-based tagging of content so you can quickly index, reference and publish paragraphs, content chunks, keywords and phrases for multiple purposes.
Sticking with our example, if your company offers software and consulting services for static reservoir modeling and you create a blog article that has one paragraph dedicated to linking seismic to geology, you may want to repurpose the paragraph on a social media post, a web page update, an event invitation, in your software’s user manual, and in the consulting services brochure. By using structured content, you can quickly index the paragraph and link it to the other pieces and/or distribute it to several channels in a fast and systematic way.
Because structured content relies on metadata and tagging, you can quickly create new content pieces by repurposing existing material which drives and maintains consistency in messaging. It also helps organizations catalog their content in a searchable database. For example, using a content management system such as FontoXML you can label content chunks based on topic and then assign relationships to personas, audience demographics, market segments, etc. You can also quickly visualize all of the related marcom pieces that leverage a specific body of text, which allows you to make updates to the paragraph and automatically cascade the replacement text.
Structured Content: A Marketer's Secret Weapon
Webinar Hosted by The American Marketing Association, January 2018
Additionally, structured content helps marketers index website content more granular than at the page, asset or image level. By labeling a content chunk vs. an entire page, document or video, you can begin populating microdata into your HTML tagging which also greatly improves search engine results.
Most companies tag their websites with an HTML set of descriptions that allows search engines to show a short description of the page or downloadable file. Microdata allows “…search engines to better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way. Microdata is a set of tags, introduced with HTML5, that allows you to do this,” according to Schema.org, an open source community with a mission to create, maintain and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, web pages, email messages and beyond.
For more information about Structured Content:
Why should a B2B Marketer Care?
Transforming your marketing strategy to accommodate the new expectations of customers means you’ll be generating a lot more content. One of the surprising stats from 2016 in B2B marketing came from a survey conducted by Gallup which indicated,
“B2B customers with high engagement scores achieve 50% higher sales/revenue and 34% higher profitability.”
To stay relevant to your target audience, you need to have content they enjoy, find valuable and actively seek (hence engagement). You also need to be visible. This means you must rank high in search results and need to monitor your bounce rate closely.
By adopting a content marketing strategy, you naturally begin to move away from a product marketing-centric approach which will create and adhere to a topic cluster model – helping you achieve and maintain top search rank positions. Additionally, you can gain efficiency by implementing a structured content methodology to repurpose, reuse and mass produce consistent, high-value messaging.
To me, these new "buzz words" are so much more than mere buzz. They are life preservers in a sea of churning content that help us bring organization to the chaos and stay afloat. As marketers, we are expected to manage a plethora of data, content, assets, products, personas, segments, etc. – all of which need to be communicated across several channels at once. (And let’s not forget the disparate technologies we are using to accomplish this colossal task!)
Things are definitely getting complicated.
If we don’t take a pragmatic approach, we’ll drown. Bring on the life preservers and work smarter, not harder.