Congratulations, you’ve created content that has caught people’s attention. But consumers’ expectations of brands are at an all-time high while their attention spans are at an all-time low. So how do you make sure their attention lasts?
Hub content is the answer.
What is Hub Content?
The second of the 3H of content marketing—hero, hub, and hygiene content—hub content is a collection of relevant, branded content served to the audience in a consistent manner. This consistency helps the client’s brand establish a loyal audience.
Though not as high-production as hero content, hub content should be valuable enough to the audience that they will keep coming back for it.
But apart from audience loyalty, hub content also establishes the client’s brand identity and what they’re all about. Good hub content has a distinct tone and brand identity, making each of them easily identifiable by the audience. To actually make it simpler, you can make your hub content be snippets of what you talked about in your Hero content.
According to Google, which pioneered the 3H of content marketing, a series of content, like episodes of a show, work best as hub content. This format is how you can easily use a consistent tone distinct to the client’s brand.
What Makes for Good Hub Content
As mentioned before, hub content is not as elaborate as the attention-grabbing hero content. But grab attention it must. As such, creating hub content means:
- Establishing an editorial voice distinct to the brand
- Using this voice and unique, identifiable brand personality across all content
- Using consistent visual language
- Establishing a regular release schedule
- Developing a cross-promotion strategy to feed the content to your audience
With these best practices, you hit two birds with one stone: educate your client’s audience about topics relevant to the brand and keep them engaged for a long time.
Examples of Excellent Hub Content
You can learn from top brands about how to create effective content hubs.
1. Whiteboard Friday by Moz
WBF, commonly hosted by Rand Fishkin, is presented in a short video and answers questions about digital marketing. The host uses an actual whiteboard to illustrate the ideas they are trying to convey.
As such, Moz’s WBF hits all the best practices for creating hub content—a unique voice, regular release schedule, audience relevance, and promotion across Moz’s different channels.
2. Our Thinking by Goldman Sachs
Economics can be a difficult subject to fully understand, even among those who work in the industry. This is why Our Thinking by Goldman Sachs makes for great hub content.
Here, experts from the world-renowned investment banking company share insights on the global economy and related topics through videos, infographics, and written content. They even have a podcast! As a result, they provide valuable content for their audience—from investors to policymakers.
3. The Garage by HP
The company Hewlett-Packard, commonly known as HP, was famously founded in a garage in Palo Alto, California. This is why The Garage—the company’s online content hub, not the physical garage where they started—is a uniquely HP creation.
In The Garage, the company consistently publishes content centered around technology and how it’s changing the world. Relevant to the brand and its audience, as well as unique, it’s a great example of how to generate good hub content.
Learn How to Create Hub Content
Hub content is just one of the three pillars of an effective content marketing strategy. Knowing how to establish your client’s hub content is key to achieving their content marketing goals.
To learn about hub content and more, sign up for SEOReseller’s webinar on September 14th. We’ll discuss how to successfully implement these strategies and measure the effectiveness of your client’s content marketing campaign
