Universal Content
(marketing /w the more the merrier)
With more and more options for users to consume content online both in the SERPs, new media websites and less and less attention span, website & business owners need to think constantly about fitting their message and business story through the many different avenues available online. We’ve been thinking a lot about this concept for the past many months and we have been creating for our clients what we call “comprehensive universal content”.
This so called “comprehensive universal content” helps:
a. target your customers in the many avenues that they hang out. For example, if your customer consumes video to learn, then you’ll want to create a youtube video OR if your audience is young and hangs out on tumblr, then you’ll want to create animated gif’s.
b. helps you rank in the search engine result pages for multiple media types.
c. enables your readers to understand your ideas and content in a more comprehensive way.
- as a bonus, you may be able to rank on the SERP’s for more than one listing per first page (for example, your blog and a youtube video)
We love creating articles with multiple forms of communication in one piece of content, especially tutorials with text, video and images all in one.
See some of our favorites:
A. Text (blogging, resource centers, informational)
This article is written from an educational aspect and our main choice of communication is text.
What we would like to emphasize about this whole concept is not to rely on one marketing avenue (for example SEO and text) because:
a. if one day google decides to make all listings paid or you get a search engine penalty, then your’re screwed (we’ve seen many webmasters go through that in 2013)
b. you need to think about the missed audience you’re not connecting with on other platforms and mediums.
B. Video (youtube videos, vine)
In addition to speaking the language of video (which many love to consume), you’ll be competing and getting traffic on additional platforms such as youtube and twitter(vine).
Tip: We like to transcribe our videos (tip we learned last year from Rand Fishkin at Moz [we still call them seomoz :) ])
C. Audio (podcasts, audio from videos, soundcloud)
If your audience consume audio, then you want to create it for them
D. Images (showcase, infographics, screenshots)
Images — share amazing high quality images with your readers/customers.
Infographics — create visually stunning information
E. Discussions (comments, community interaction)
We decided to post this article on medium to get more input from the marketing world (and to learn more about medium — this is our first post) and to open the discussion to the community and to the 2 way stream. Please feel free to comment on this article so we all can grow from this topic.
F. Filetype (pdf, xls, txt, google docs, presentations)
See Universal Content Formats PDF
G. Others (local, maps, offline, social)
- We encouraged the communication on our blog commenting system
- Embed our other site content
- Google docs
- UGC
- Maps
NOW YOU’LL HAVE TONS OF CONTENT TO SHARE. YOU’LL BE ABLE TO BREAKUP THE UNIVERSAL ARTICLE INTO MICRO CONTENT AND MARKET SPECIFIC PARTS OF THE CONTENT TO SPECIFIC AUDIENCES IN ADDITION TO BEING ABLE TO COMMUNICATE BETTER WITH YOUR AUDIENCE.
We would love to hear your opinion about universal content creation.
Oh, and don’t forget “universal marketing” strategies…
Article created by Astral Web
