Marketing Terms Defined: Content Strategy

Content marketing is so much more than just writing blog posts. While the general idea of a content strategy has always and will always be around, a lot has changed in the last couple of years on how we go about it, which leads to the emergence of new content marketing terms.   

Whether or not you handle the content strategy on your team, there are many reasons why you should brush up on your content marketing terminology. Maybe you want to learn more about the effort so you can improve your company messaging. It can help out with team communication so everyone is on the same page when discussing possible trends to tackle. If you’re planning on hearing some pitches from potential partners or agencies, understanding content marketing terminology can help you understand exactly what tactics and benefits they offer.   

The basics of content marketing is easy enough to interpret, but if you want to have a good grip on the most widely accepted 2020 trends, some terms, tactics, and ideas don’t have such common-sense definitions.  

Download our checklist of 30+ ways to promote content here.

Content Marketing Terms to Know  

Content Marketing  

Content marketing is creating and promoting high quality, relevant information tailored to your specific audience’s needs. The goals of content marketing include drawing potential customers in by solving industry pain points, improving your audience’s understanding of relevant concepts, building audience trust in your expertise, increasing search engine presence, and building strong relationships with leads.   

Industry Expertise  

Industry expertise is a reputation you gain among your audience of being the best resource for information or services in your specific industry. When you consistently and frequently produce and promote high-quality content relevant to your target audience, over time you can build industry expertise so your audience will turn to you any time they have a question or problem to solve. You can also establish industry expertise through great customer service, relationship management, and thoughtful communication. 

Here is an example of an inbound marketing strategy from HubSpot.

Inbound marketing  

Inbound marketing is a specific aspect of content marketing that draws in potential leads with incentives to offer contact info and establish a channel for communication. Great inbound marketing focuses on creating content specifically tailored to your audience personas and any topics or pain points that your audience is trying to understand by visiting your website.   

Keyword research  

Keyword research is an SEO task that is entwined with content marketing. It involves creating a list of relevant words, phrases, questions, or topics that your target audience types into search engines. Keyword research is prioritizing all the different search queries based on the number of times it is searched, how relevant it is to your company, industry, and expertise, and how competitive it is to rank for the query.   

Keyword research can help identify what content topics to include on your site and what topics and phrases to include in your copy.  

Keyword Strategy  

Keyword strategy is an effort to take on in before or in tandem with content creation and connects content strategy to SEO strategy. Keyword strategy and implementation of your keyword research. The goal of a keyword strategy is to have your content showcased when someone types a related query in a search engine.   

Focus keyword  

Focus keywords are the specific words or phrases that the content of a piece is shaped around. Usually, the focus keyword is the main query you are attempting to rank for when you are creating a piece of content. Ideally, each piece of content has a unique focus keyword, so you don’t compete against yourself in SERPs.   

Evergreen content  

Evergreen content is content that will be valuable, relevant regardless of when it is read. It isn’t connected to a specific year, season, or temporary trend. Evergreen content can engage and help your audience at any time and can build value, gain attention, and benefit your business for multiple years. Good evergreen content focuses on a core issue that your customer base will always deal with, and offer advice and solutions that will always be up to date.   

Interactive Content

Interactive content is content that is easy to engage with and creates a 2-way channel of communication between your brand and your audience. Interactive content asks for a response or reaction, usually in the form of a quiz, poll, ranking tool, game or response box. 

User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content is content about your product or company that your audiences create. Common forms of user-generated content is photos featuring a product, product reviews, or demo videos. User-generated content is valuable because it is social proof that your customers like your product so much, they want to share their experience with their community. 

Newsjacking  

Newsjacking is leveraging current events or recent news relevant to your industry and adding your spin to jump on trending topics. Jumping on trending news for content opportunities can elevate your ideas and reiterate that you are plugged into the latest industry events. Newsjacking usually includes connecting the news to a company’s audience and contains phrases like “our take on…”, “Why you should care about…”, or “how affects you”. 

Here is an example of a pillar page for “nonprofit marketing with the smaller blogs that create a topic cluster.

Pillar pages  

A pillar page, content pillar, or power page is a very detailed, long-form piece of content that fully and deeply covers a topic relevant to your industry. This is the page that has the most competitive or valuable focus keyword because it is a high-quality piece of content. Smaller, related blogs link to this pillar page to boost the value, traffic, and ultimately ranking.   

Content Clusters  

Content clusters are a makeup of one pillar page and several shorter and more specific pieces of content. The more specific pieces of content tackle aspects of the pillar content and link to the pillar content’s larger idea. This is a newer content formatting strategy where the objective is to increase the value of the pillar content as much as possible.   

Call to Action (CTA)  

A Call To Action is the specific action you want your audience to take after engaging with your content. Every piece of content should have a CTA that helps guide your audience to make a purchase, engage with more content, reach out, or strengthen their relationship with your company.   

Backlinks/Inbound Links  

When one website links to another website, it creates a backlink. Websites links to content that reinforces ideas, offers additional information or context, or when they want to be associated with a web page. Backlinks are a valuable asset to content strategy because the number of backlinks a piece of content has is a ranking factor for search engines. It also creates a new channel for traffic to your site, increases opportunities for initial awareness, and reinforces industry expertise.   

There are tons of marketing buzzwords and jargon to keep track of, but we hope that this list of content strategy terms helps you on your path to becoming a content wizard! If you need help mapping out areas for improvement in your digital content, reach out to our team!