If you're a marketing professional working today, advanced content creation and promotion is on your mind. Everyone knows you must have content and lots of it. Delivering content to an audience that addresses pain points but which also educates them and maybe even tells an entertaining story, however, can be a tall order. Sometimes that audience is looking for information to help with the purchase of a product or service. But sometimes the audience is looking for information around a product or service and isn't necessarily interested in making a purchase at that moment. This means you need to create two types of content:
- Commercial content: Essentially product descriptions or an explanation of services, commercial content is straightforward and to the point. By being focused on delivering information about a particular product or service, this type can offer help to a customer in making a purchase decision.
- Editorial content: This type can take various forms, from a list of tips to a whitepaper or webinar. Editorial content is focused on delivering information that increases the user's knowledge of a particular topic. Editorial content can inform future purchase decisions, but that isn't its main intent.
The two types are distinct and work separately but in concert with each other. A content promotion strategy that incorporates both types and is based on research can help increase your relevance. And that can increase your search and SEO results.
Commercial content
Commercial content comprises product descriptions and explanations of services created around keywords derived from commercial intent queries. Many of the keywords will come to you intuitively. But if you sell shoes, for example, you don't just have one giant page named "Shoes" that lists all the shoes you sell.
Instead, you break down the shoes into categories based on keyword variations, as explained in Chapter 5 of the eCommerce Guide to Search Visibility and Content Marketing. To determine all the appropriate keywords, you research the variations, paying attention also to long tail keyword phrases, such as "women's 6" red heels" or "men's high-top hiking boots."
In this way, you're organizing the shoes in a way that makes sense according to how shoppers are typing search engine queries. You're using commercial content to help search engines point shoppers to your site, specifically to the page showing the thing they want to buy.
Editorial content
The second type of content deals with search queries related to your product or service when the user isn't looking to buy. Keyword research around creating editorial content can be more difficult. The key, as explained in Chapter 6 of the eCommerce Guide, is to tailor the editorial content creation around research that can help you discover the most relevant content to create.
Begin that research based on an audience's needs and interests. An audience who shops for hiking boots, for example, might also look for hiking-related content, such as beginner's tips or the best trails for novice hikers. Next you need to get more specific by finding out which websites answer those queries, analyzing the most pertinent articles and focusing on top authors and social influencers in that topic.
Note which authors and influencers have the most followers. Which types of content - articles, videos or infographics - are shared most often? On which content did users comment most? These details help you further pinpoint the audience. Most importantly, these details help you identify which particular aspects of a topic will resonate with that audience, which strengthens the relationship you can build with that audience.
Commercial content is product-focused. Editorial content falls into thought leadership territory. Adding your marketing smarts to both commercial content and editorial content ensures you're delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time - which can provide a smooth yet calculated buyer's journey for your customer.