Creating Content Capital - How to Stand Out and Create Value Over Time

What is Content Capital™

Content Capital is a strategic framework you can utilize to invest in meaningful content creation that will create compounding value over time. Similar to financial capital that is invested in high performing stocks or index funds, Content Capital helps your brand stand out by yielding high returns.

Let’s take a look at the exponential growth curve for Content Capital below. Notice that progress is slow in the beginning, but accelerates over time as additional value is added and time invested.

Content Capital Growth Equation

The Content Capital Equation includes three parts:

• Time Invested (by your team)
• Value Added (to potential customers)
• Brand Growth (what’s in it for you)

Time Invested encompasses the time and effort poured into content creation to create a substantial volume of high quality content. 

Value Added is the value your brand’s content provides for the end user, often in the form of useful information. This includes providing the “best answers” to user questions, insightful information that helps users make an informed decision, and more. 

Brand Growth is the positive return on investment your Content Capital yields. For example, website traffic, brand exposure, leads, purchases, and new clients.

How to Create Content Capital

There are three key digital marketing strategies that must be leveraged in order for your brand to create Content Capital that yields a positive return on your investment.

• Create Valuable Content
• Attract Organic Traffic Through SEO
• Amplify Through Social Media, Paid Ads, and Email

Create Valuable Content

We’ve all searched Google looking for the best and most valuable answers to some of our biggest questions. The results we find may vary. But, I guarantee we’ve all found GREAT content that is exactly what we were looking for. That’s the type of content you want to create. Content that hooks your reader, answers their question, and keeps them coming back for more. 

Valuable Content Includes

• Useful information
• Brevity and readability
• Depth, when required
• Targeted topics
• Content for your audience
• Compelling visuals
• Diversified content mix

Creating Valuable Content Requires

• Subject matter expertise
• Research
• Customer personas
• Documented customer / buyer Journeys
• Goals, analytics, and KPIs
• Content governance (guidelines)
• Editorial calendar

Takeaway: Compelling content that answers user questions naturally attracts new customers and keeps them coming back.

Attract Organic Traffic Through SEO

If you follow the steps above to create valuable content, then you're well on your way to creating Content Capital. 

According to Moz SEO, creating compelling content that answers a searcher’s query is the second most important strategy for driving organic traffic, just behind making sure your content can be crawled by search engines like Google.

SEO best practices can be complicated to master, but here’s a general overview of the SEO landscape.

Three Pillars of SEO

• On-page - Optimizing elements on your website to impact rankings
• Technical - Improving the technical aspects of your website to impact rankings
• Off-page - Actions taken outside of your website to impact  rankings

You have the most control over the first two: on-page and technical SEO. Once you’ve created valuable content, it is critical to make sure it can be seen by search engines and users alike.

Consider the following:

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a great piece of content is not on page one of a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP), does anyone see it?

Philosophical thought experiment aside, the second question is a lot easier to answer… probably not!

On-page SEO Best Practices Include

• Keyword research and optimization
• Title Tag and meta-description optimization
• Proper use of headers and header tags (H1, h2, etc.)
• Don’t bury the lead, start with the answer to their question

Technical SEO Best Practices Include

• Ensure crawl accessibility
• Fast page speed load times
• Great website user experience
• Snippet/schema markup

Takeaway: SEO is a powerful tool to attract brand agnostic customers to your site, product, or service to increase your visibility

Amplify Your Content with Social Media, Paid Ads, and Email

Now that you’ve created valuable content and optimized it for search engines, it's time to amplify your content to yield the best return on your investment. Content Capital is all about maximizing your return. Leveraging social media, email marketing, and paid advertising can improve your contents overall visibility, brand engagement, and traffic back to your site to close the deal.

Amplification Best Practices

• Identify distribution channels (pick the best for your customer personas)
• Segment channels by customer / buyer's journey
• Establish amplification checklist
• Cut your content into smaller segments and cross-post
• Use different formats and content mix across platforms

Amplification Applications

• Social Media - Best for engagement, brand building and exposure 
• Advertising - Paid to play, attract and hopefully convert new customers
• Email marketing - Share content with existing audience of subscribers

Content Capital vs. Paid Ads vs. Social vs. Email

The Content Capital strategic framework only works when you combine together the three strategies discussed above. Individually, paid media, social media, and email marketing can work in the short term. When you combine valuable content creation, SEO, and an integrated amplification strategy that incorporates social, ads, and email, you're creating exponential value that compounds over time.

Let’s take a look at the growth curves for each and how they differ.

Growth Curves Explained

• Content Capital: Hockey Stick growth over time - it takes longer to grow, but starts to compound with unlimited growth potential
• Paid media: Low barrier to entry (money), but once you stop paying, growth falls off a cliff
• Social Media: Need to build your own audience. Engagement can be inconsistent, and only as good as your last post. Paid media is often required for growth.
• Email: Short shelf life with low open rates and takes lots of effort - often, only as relevant as your last email.

Takeaway: When used together, social media, email, and paid ads can be powerful tools to extract maximum value from your content.

‍Bad Money Drives Out Good Money

Just like in economics, bad content drives out the good impacts of the Content Capital strategy. Here are some landmines to avoid when implementing this strategy.

Content Creation Worst Practices

• Thin content
• Duplicate content
• Cloaking (hiding keywords in plain sight)
• Keyword stuffing
• Auto-generated content

When Content Capital Pays Off

Just like a great investment, Content Capital pays off overtime. It requires patience and relentless consistency! As we’ve outlined in this article, it can be extremely rewarding. When executed correctly, Content Capital drives website traffic, brand exposure, leads, purchases, new clients, and revenue growth!

Yes, it has a high barrier to entry (Time Invested), but it also has a high reward.

Brand Growth Case Studies

Hosa Invests in Content Capital with Giant ROI

Hosa Technology was struggling with organic growth, Fratzke helped their team implement a winning Content Capital strategy that yielded high returns and helped supercharge their direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategy.

Waterfront Law Firm Grows Leads

Pender & Coward launched a new Waterfront Law Division in Virginia. Our team helped their new division grow from zero to thousands of users each month leveraging the Content Capital framework.