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It's not that hard to stretch this strategy to other businesses. If you're running, say, a plumbing business, you could teach your blog readers so much about p

It's not that hard to stretch this strategy to other businesses. If you're running, say, a plumbing business, you could teach your blog readers so much about plumbing. Answer their questions and teach them real, useful stuff - everything from fixing a leaky faucet to setting up plumbing for a new house. Unfortunately, most businesses think that writing a blog post means writing 100 posts on "10 reasons why you need to hire a plumber". That's useless to readers. Help readers learn something actually useful about your business and they'll reward you with their loyalty.

wwickey 11y ago
Yes. Good point. I don't mean to suggest the content marketing won't work. Priceonmonics' bests posts (say, over 30k views) have a strong data-driven component combined with great writing. One of Priceonomics' tag lines is "DATA. LONGFORM CONTENT. ANALYSIS." They excel at data crawling and visualization. Combine that capability with talented storytellers, give those writers the freedom to explore a variety of topics, and you've got a winning recipe for repeated virality. A plumbing company is a great example. You can write great plumbing content, (and definitely still accomplish your goal of getting people with plumbing-related pain points into your funnel or driving awareness for your business) but it's tough to make that type of content spread consistently, even when well-crafted. Combining the data gathering + analysis/visualization + great writing for homerun content that generates leads on a consistent basis is the challenge I'm talking about specifically. Moreover, the plumbing company does not likely have a marketing department with all 3 of those skills sets represented. Priceonomics just announced their 'Data Studio' offering to help companies in that position (and there are plenty of them!). btw, not sure if anyone posted the 6-page summary of the Content Marketing Handbook yet: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix-media/The+Content+Marketing+Handbook+Summary+Version.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix-media/The+Content+Marketing+Han... Obviously a great guide for duplicating what Priceonomics does at your own company. Interested to see how the Data Studio works as an outsourced content service.

wwickey 11y ago

Yes. Good point. I don't mean to suggest the content marketing won't work. Priceonmonics' bests posts (say, over 30k views) have a strong data-driven component combined with great writing. One of Priceonomics' tag lines is "DATA. LONGFORM CONTENT. ANALYSIS." They excel at data crawling and visualization. Combine that capability with talented storytellers, give those writers the freedom to explore a variety of topics, and you've got a winning recipe for repeated virality. A plumbing company is a great example. You can write great plumbing content, (and definitely still accomplish your goal of getting people with plumbing-related pain points into your funnel or driving awareness for your business) but it's tough to make that type of content spread consistently, even when well-crafted. Combining the data gathering + analysis/visualization + great writing for homerun content that generates leads on a consistent basis is the challenge I'm talking about specifically. Moreover, the plumbing company does not likely have a marketing department with all 3 of those skills sets represented. Priceonomics just announced their 'Data Studio' offering to help companies in that position (and there are plenty of them!). btw, not sure if anyone posted the 6-page summary of the Content Marketing Handbook yet: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix-media/The+Content+Marketing+Handbook+Summary+Version.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix-media/The+Content+Marketing+Han... Obviously a great guide for duplicating what Priceonomics does at your own company. Interested to see how the Data Studio works as an outsourced content service.