Create Your Own Content Category

One of the tenets to delivering higher purpose content marketing is to develop your own content category.

Let me explain.

I was talking to a web marketer a few weeks back who asked:

"I have seven competitors and we are all fighting for the same keywords. Every company blogs and is pretty much talking about the same thing.  What do we do?"

If you are talking about the same concepts and content as your competitors, what value are you adding to the conversation?  Are you truly providing anything that will differentiate you from your competitors, over the thousands of other messages out there your customers are possibly engaging with?

One of the ways to take your content marketing to the next level is by creating your own content category.

This is exactly what Citrix Systems, makers of GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, has done with their concept of Workshifting. Workshifting is the idea that we can work from anywhere, anytime. The word didn't exist a year ago, and today there are over 500,000 mentions of it on Google and thousands of websites that discuss the concept.  

Citrix created the category.  They own this category. 

We have tried to do the same thing with the term content marketing. I first used the phrase as Penton in 2000, but Junta42 aggressively used the term starting in 2007. The benefits of this strategy are too long to mention.

I believe Kristina Halvorson has done the same with the term web content strategy. 

Can you change the conversation and help your customers at the same time? Think about it.

Comments

[Zack]

Good, smart post. I've done this as well and I have to see it's great in terms of creating brand and ultimately, awareness. I speak about Tradestreaming, which is the investors equivalent of lifestreaming -- using social media tools to add to and plug into the collective tradestream. I recently launched a book under the same brand. My website, http://www.tradestreaming.com, will also ultimately serve as the homebase for other content products using the same content category.

[Doug Kessler]

Nice one. We often create new categories for our clients for just these reasons.

The trick is to also use the accepted category terms so you're not trading a high-traffic term for a zero-traffic one.

We like to use language on a website like, "[New category is much more than simple [old catgegory]".

[Clare Price]

Great post Joe! I am so frustrated with the "same note" content and conversation we see everywhere on the Web. I've also found that defining a new content category only works if there is true value for the client behind it. Also totally agree with Doug's comment. It is important to make sure there is a connection to an accepted category so that the client has some context to make the logical leap to the new category.

[Joe Pulizzi]

I like the conversation here. Clare/Doug, I agree with you about something that customers can connect with...but I also believe, that depending on how much time and investment a company wants to make, that a new term could work as well (as long as there is a hole/opportunity in the market).

That said, your suggestion is much easier.

[Lisa Horner]

Thank you for your post Joe. When we talked about setting up a blog last year, we struggled with which way to go - more product centric, or more broad education. Because we always attempt to bring valuable content to our customers, and because we could see a shift in the way people were working, we felt we could help both workshifters & companies adapt to these changes easily. Thanks again for acknowledging our focus - and if you're ever workshifting, please shoot us a guest post with any insight for the community.

[Joe Pulizzi]

Very cool Lisa. Considering I will do about 50 in-person events this year, workshifting is my life!

My big advice - set limits to when you are actually working and when you are not...if you don't, you are always working.