I’ve seen several articles and social media posts recently about why modern content marketing needs a “beyond the website” strategy.
Here’s the gist of these arguments: With the decade-long slide in search traffic (made worse by AI-powered answers and zero-click search features) and the “for you” trend in social media feeds, you should now distribute your content in as many places as your target audience spends time and fundamentally change the overall strategy of your owned media (your website, blog, email newsletters, etc.).
The implications of this kind of approach are certainly too many to cover here, but some implied best practices include:
- Create zero-click content. Posting a provocative headline and image with a link to read the whole article no longer works. So, this approach entails offering valuable insights directly on whatever social platform, email, or other channels and including call-outs to visit your website (to subscribe, buy, donate, etc.). Amanda Natividad, SparkToro’s marketing lead, explains this approach thoroughly.
- Craft specific approaches for each “walled garden.” Some talk about this as a “social-first strategy” or even a “social-out strategy.” This approach involves designing a distinct content plan for each channel rather than using those networks to promote your owned media property (website, blog, e-commerce site, etc.). You’d need a separate strategy for each social platform your audience uses (Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and other platforms where they engage (YouTube, retail media networks like Amazon and Walmart, and content syndication platforms). Then, you’d use the insights from those interactions to inform the rest of your marketing strategy.
- Protect your proprietary content (even from search). Creating digital scarcity is hard. Suggested best practices include placing content behind a subscription wall (creating an exclusive “members only” feeling) and preventing search engines from getting it. (Note that Reddit has blocked all search engines except for Google, with which it struck a $60 million deal to allow indexing.)
All three of these new so-called best practices depend on rented land (channels outside your control). My next column will discuss content strategies on these external platforms in more depth.
In this column, I’ll explore the implications this approach has for your owned media approach.
Does a “beyond the website” approach mean “owned media” is a dying strategy?
I say no. But these trends fundamentally change what kind of content you should focus on for owned media. You have to offer more than simple facts or answers to frequently asked questions.
People don’t believe their eyes and ears
Last week, I spoke to a tech client whose team wanted to revitalize a dying digital content experience. They felt frustrated.
Five years ago, with help from a couple of ad agency consultants, they came up with the idea to launch a digital platform to provide easy access to facts about their technology. All they needed, they thought, was to set up a digital library that could answer every technical question their clients might have.
They’d let the facts speak for themselves and win the customer retention battle.
Five years later, the platform’s organic traffic is slowly disintegrating.
You see, facts rarely speak for themselves (they’re bashful that way). And they almost never win an argument. But now, more than ever, facts have become commodities.
Facts don’t win. Beliefs win. You can lament that fact — but it doesn’t stop it from being true.
In fact, a recent study found that two-thirds of people believe that AI tools like ChatGPT have some degree of consciousness and can have subjective experiences.
In this big-data, deep-fake world, we have more “facts” than ever. And we don’t even have to click to get them thrown at us.
So the question marketers have to answer isn’t “How do we get anyone to click on what we’re saying.” It’s “How do we get anyone to care about what we’re saying?”
A few years ago, researchers at Wharton conducted a study in which they introduced people to various algorithms. Most people found them interesting and valuable — until the algorithm made a mistake.
Once people saw the mistake occur, they were “very, very unlikely to use it and didn’t like it anymore.” The participants seemed to judge algorithms more harshly than they would people, one researcher noted.
But, if these people had input into the algorithm or were allowed to adjust the forecasts, they not only liked the algorithms more, they didn’t lose nearly as much confidence when an error occurred.
We’re already partly under this magic spell with generative AI search. People know it’s all based on “the internet.” And, since we’ve all contributed to the internet, they feel they have a grasp on how these gen AI tools work. And so mistakes in the tools’ output don’t deter them from using it.
So, in 2024, you can’t base your owned media strategy on “just the facts.” You must make people care — and quickly.
As I told my tech client, you have to give people something to believe in (to quote the classic Poison song). On all your owned media properties, you must give audiences something more than facts to care about and act on.
If you don’t, you risk creating some version of this scene from the TV show The Simpsons: Lisa feels sad because one of her favorite teachers left. Her father, Homer, doesn’t seem to get it. “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” Lisa tells him.
“Hey,” Homer says, “just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.”
Ultimately, with every piece of content for your owned media property, ask this question: “Why would someone care about this?”
If you can’t answer it, you need to have an honest discussion about whether that content deserves a place on your property.
Creating belief is about understanding intent
So, how do you start creating content that goes beyond simple fact-based research, data, and information?
Go back to that argument you had on social media or with the colleague or boss who never seems to “get it.” Think about those customers you’re trying to convince to purchase from you or advocate for you.
You’re never going to win those battles with facts — you must understand why they’re arguing, searching, or deciding. You must understand their intent.
To understand intent, you must first create mechanisms — content-driven experiences — that enable your brand to listen more effectively to the signals generated across their interactions.
This is where that walled-garden approach can help. It can provide both the data and insight to help you understand what to create that is scarce, precious, and valuable enough to encourage those interested in knowing more to visit your owned media.
Here’s an example. At a recent Digital Summit, Jennifer Healen, McDonald’s VP of U.S. marketing, explained how insights and observations about how McDonald’s resonated across social channels informed how they created multiplatform marketing campaigns. The insight that McDonald’s was “anime’s most bootlegged restaurant” encouraged them to create a whole campaign and owned-media property around “WcDonald’s” (the most common anime bootleg of the McDonald’s brand).
Connecting these two specific approaches — external and owned media — requires new skills. In my research and consulting practice, I’ve seen marketing organizations develop a self-enablement process to create this level of capability.
It typically involves three steps:
1. Arrange the data house
Create a dictionary or interpretation for understanding intent. Put simply, you need to discern the most appropriate response to a customer’s interaction with your content. This is where a metadata structure and content tagging system to track behavioral context (or intent) comes in. Side note: That’s a great use case for generative AI solutions.
For example, a structured article called Discover How Digital Marketing Is a Good Thing for Your Business might be tagged with a “beginner” or “learning” intent. Someone who consumes this white paper would NOT be considered a lead but will be nurtured as an engaged audience.
2. Develop ‘best next’ capability
Once you have an intent signal, you must understand the “best next” (not next best) thing to make that customer understand and care about the answer. You need content-driven experiences that deliver “best next” content. For example, targeted messaging for the beginner or learning audience member who read the white paper should prompt them to read a “how-to-change” piece.
That’s overly simplistic, of course. But you can see how you can capture levels of nuance with more than just answers to a question. You can glean whether this beginner feels confident or fearful about change through additional content consumption, a poll, or a survey. As you learn more about the nuanced aspects of the customer’s journey, you can automatically deliver the best next experience for that customer.
It’s not all about technology and dynamic content. There’s a human element to this, too. You can share this information with others who can deliver additional experiences that fall outside the digital content realm. For example, you could share insights about the beginner prospect’s behavior with sales. Once the sales team understands what the prospect needs, their role can evolve from a persuader to a consultant helping the prospect understand the best way to move to the next step.
3. Connect the experiences
This step enables the most insight. Once you map your content to understand what you need to deliver based on intent, you must develop the capability to aggregate this data and serve the content (and the intent) contextually across the different experiences. You need to find a way to connect the experiences into a single view of the audience’s progression through its journey.
You might call this “personalization,” but it’s just understanding how to contextually connect your owned media experiences to make the customer want to spend more and more time in your ecosystem.
For example, if the beginner persona ultimately purchases your services, you might want to connect their profile to the onboarding or training module of a 101-level set of training classes. The insight gleaned from a more statistically relevant data set improves these activities or even makes them possible in the first place.
This third step may be the most challenging part of the process because it often requires integrating multiple technologies to create a single view of the customer.
But you can start small. Even if you can just connect the intent upper/beginning part of the journey (awareness) to the mid part of the journey (sales), you are starting to get much better.
People believe in stories, not facts
Data gives you the opportunity to make people care about what you have to say. To get beyond just answers, you must create compelling content that integrates those answers (facts, figures, data, information) into compelling experiences that appeal to the audience’s feelings.
One widespread marketing fallacy is that buyers want factual answers about the products and services they’re considering.
That’s not true. Often, the brand that supplies the least information about a product and the most inspiration, belief, and emotional connection will be the chosen one.
So, you need to convince customers they’re buying into a brand they can believe in. To do that, give them content experiences that lead them to believe.
My next column will explain how to use the new rented-land approach to get your point of view out into the world. That’s how you’ll engage people. Then, use your new owned media strategy to help people change and believe in your story.
Updated from a January 2022 article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute