Sunday, March 16, 2014

Content marketing and small business

There is a lot of competition on Internet. Everyone that produces online content is competing to reach the limited attention of the largest number of people in the most relevant topic to generate a benefit: selling advertising, e-commerce, or related services. The creation and promotion of contents on Internet has paved the way for "Content Marketing": its success is due to its ability to generate direct or indirect revenues for businesses and people.

But as more and more content is produced, and more and more people produce better and better contents, the digital space is becoming saturated with a profusion of articles, videos, tutorials, infographics, case studies, etc. that compete for a limited, more and more tired audience. In this game where marketing melts into media, the ultimate reward for the best content is to get recognition from Google and other search-engines through being placed first on their results pages.

Content is king
The most insightful, most digestible, most original and contents appealing to the most people will take the lion's share of the audience. Recognition by websites through the creation of links, and people approbation through social media "likes" are markers of quality that push less remarkable contents out of sight. Or so goes the basic logic of search-engines and news curating systems: expose what is successful.

Leaving asides all the techniques that deliberately intend to trick people and search engines (and will sooner or later be punished by the latter) and the below-par homemade websites or publishing platforms that do not implement the fundamental of search-engine optimization, there are in practice several stains to the beauty of the simple mechanic of "content in king".

Established media domination
One of the major skew to the system are the established websites, media and brands. Even though it is not in their best interest in the long term, they can publish content (maybe occasionally) that is not best in class. They are however so established, have so much traffic and are such references that have succeeded in gathering so many links and "likes" in the past, that a new content from such media or brand is often put on top of search engines and other news-pushing systems (such as Facebook homepage, LinkedIn Pulse, Google News...), while a single article in a newer or smaller website or blog can be more useful, insightful, easier to understand, original...

Where that system becomes perverse, is when the established media copies (a negative intent that is not a sound long term strategy either), or less harmfully, and much more often, just mentions or curates such an interesting content from a secondary media. Many times, the established media will receive more visits and corresponding benefits (advertising dollars, products sales, requests of services...) that helps the established media or brand rather than the newer one.

New websites invisibility
The corollary issue is that new websites that produce great content cannot obtain all the benefits that they should in terms of traffic, at least not in the short-term. New contents cannot have earned all the recognition (links, likes...) that older contents have; new websites cannot have earned as much recognition as older media. So it will take time to obtain links, likes, "recognition" before search engines and social media understand that the newer websites content can be more interesting than the older. In the meantime, the established media or brand contents will be put forward until the new publisher earns enough recognition to be taken seriously by search engines and social networks algorithms.

Of course, obtaining that recognition will require efforts of marketing, to communicate and broadcast its contents; resources that could otherwise be spent producing new quality contents... In the middle and long run producing great content will help the smaller media, but can it obtain and manage sufficient resources until then?

Solutions for the small companies and new publishers
The evident solution is of course to produce great quality contents, and a large quantity of it. Over time all search engines, social media and people should understand that your content is worth it. But the human resource, capital and time of a small company are very limited: they must therefore be spent strategically to maximize the best return in the shortest time. That is what we do with Fluorcom: we help small business using their resources to maximize the value of digital communication investments.

Competitive advantage
The strategic solution for small companies engaging into content marketing is to start where they have a certain competitive advantage: skill, experience, networks, contacts... Producing contents for themes, areas, products where they can, still often proves too much to do. It is therefore very important to narrow down to less competitive niche, that is to say, where less established media and brands compete. Mechanically, it should prove to be a smaller investment of resources to attain a certain recognition and volume of audience. Of course, the volume and the potential benefits through advertising or sales of other products and services should be carefully weighted to be worth the investment in content production and promotion.

This is what we achieved through the creation of "Architecte de Bâtiments", with a modest success, going after the niche of architecture of buildings in France, using skills (responsive website and content creation) and contacts available: partnership with my father's architect agency (!).

Contiguous niche
For content publishers that are not beginning anymore, there is another solution through which we seem to reach a faster harvest: having already a small asset, such as "Architecte de Bâtiments", we develop a similar approach in the contiguous niche of the architecture of houses in France. Having gathered some more skills in understanding architecture and the French construction market, as well as a little recognition through Architecte de Bâtiments, we have created "Architecte de Maisons" through a new partnership with my uncle's architect agency, specialized in the architecture of houses (!!!).

The result is that we can reuse some contents and designs, relate information between both sites and reach an audience faster than the first launch period of Architecte de Bâtiments. Even though this niche is larger, it is also much more competitive, and we seem after only 3 months to gear towards a promising future.

Internationalization
As an update to the Architecte de Bâtiments and Architecte de Maisons ventures, an English version was by translating and updating their contents and adapting them to the international market. This new venture, ArchiAdvisor, will allow us to test the global market for architecture and understand better the dynamics of content marketing for architecture in English.