In an increasingly competitive, increasingly digital world, it’s essential your business sets itself apart online. Using content hubs for thought leadership is one very effective way to do so. By offering one dedicated place for topic-specific content that is useful to potential customers (the essence of a content hub), you make it simpler for that audience to find you and to engage with your information.
These content hubs are the perfect place to illustrate your thought leadership, helping you to win over clients with your commitment to and knowledge of your craft. They also offer major SEO benefits that can help you to drive traffic to your site and, ultimately, to yield more conversions.
A content hub is a destination where website visitors can find branded content related to a topic. It has an upward pointing linking structure with links from spoke pages pointing either horizontally to other spoke pages or upwards towards the hub central page or subpages. It is smaller than a website and bigger than a blog.
Here is an example of a branded content hub we created for an existing client, and it has become a lead magnet (increased organic traffic 198% in 1 year; here is the case study)
Why Thought Leadership Matters
If you aren’t quite convinced of the importance of thought leadership in marketing, consider the following facts from the 2019 Edelman Thought Research Impact Study:
- B2B decision makers are far more likely to work with companies who they view as thought leaders.
- Most decision makers read at least one hour’s worth of material each week from thought leaders.
- A whopping 82 percent of corporate leaders say that thought leadership encourages them to interact with a brand.
Many marketers are under the mistaken impression that thought leadership is overrated. In fact, 17 percent of B2B marketers surveyed by LinkedIn believed that this sort of content would help them close sales.
On the flip side, 37 percent of decision makers and 41 percent of C-Suite executives felt that thought leadership was an integral part of their ability to trust a potential vendor.
What does this mean for you? Taking what you know and producing content—be it white papers, blog posts, videos, tutorials, articles, or social media posts—can win business. If you apply SEO best practice while creating all of this content, there’s a good chance it will be found. And once a potential client has found you, if your carefully curated content proves useful and is high-quality, chances are good they will choose to work with you.
Thought leadership matters for other reasons, too. It serves as a solid backbone for your sales team and customer-facing staff. They can turn to company-produced content for their own edification at any time. They can refer clients to that information when questions arise. This sort of branded information inspires confidence, since it lets everyone on your team, and everyone you work for, know that your business is filled with subject-area experts.
Thought leadership is more than just parroting back commonly held truisms for your industry. Whenever possible, your content should be innovative. It should present new information in fresh ways that will engage and benefit your clients. More importantly, it must always be original and high-quality.
What’s the best way to make this information available to your customers in a cohesive manner? After all, posting an article on social media, putting a video on YouTube, and adding a downloadable white paper to your own website is likely to yield single-hit visitors who don’t even know that more of your content exists on the same topic elsewhere. This is where content hubs come in.
What are Content Hubs?
In essence, content hubs create one place for all of your beautifully crafted content to reside together. If a potential customer finds one bit of information, they are much more likely to find it all. They can begin reading an article, then watch a video, and, if they find it useful, download your white paper and request to be added to your mailing list. It’s a much more efficient way to make SEO work for you.
Content hubs are keyword-rich and SEO-friendly. They take topic-specific information that you have prepared for your target audience and make it easily accessible to that audience. In many cases, an interior page on your website is used as a landing page, or hub, for this information. The page contains links to the various “spokes” of the topic, including articles, videos, and social media posts.
This is an ideal setup for thought leadership content. Once a user finds this content hub, they can easily navigate to other relevant information that they are likely to find useful. This keeps them on your site longer, boosting your relevance for SEO algorithms. It also makes it more likely they’ll progress further down your sales funnel, joining a mailing list, following a social media account, or even reaching out directly for a meeting.
From an SEO perspective, content hubs are an excellent choice, because they can draw in users who have searched using a variety of parameters. Perhaps they were looking for a video and found the link to one you included in a content hub. Since they’re on your site, they might choose to read some of your blog posts, even though they likely wouldn’t have found them otherwise, given their target was a video.
You should also consider navigational hubs, which are usually the hierarchical structure of your menu system, with a downward pointing linking structure with links from Hub pages pointing down or horizontally to sub-hub pages and spokes pages.
Outsource Thought Leadership and Content Hubs
With your expertise, the development of thought leadership content is a goal very much within reach. Without a great deal of extra time, however, you might feel you don’t have the resources to appropriately tackle the creation of this sort of content within a hub system.
It’s true that content hub creation is a complex process that integrates SEO best practice, keyword research, SEO copywriting and SEO link building. Outsourcing this project to a team of experts can mean a more efficient content hub that yields better SEO results and ultimately drives more conversions.
Our comprehensive technique is one many of our partners appreciate. We are also able to offer strategic assistance in creating a roadmap for an SEO-friendly website that drives traffic and boosts conversions—as much as a 95-percent boost in traffic and an 82-percent jump in qualified leads in a one-year period for one client we worked with. We can help you design your content hubs and even create the content calendar and blogs to support them. Contact Galileo Tech Media today to see how we can help you with using content hubs for thought leadership.