What Is It, Why It Matters, And How To Get It!

We’re going to write a lot more about content authority, but want to introduce a concept that our agency has been deploying with the assistance of our partners at Metonymy Media and Dittoe PR.

Background on Content Authority

The challenge that we continue to find with our clients is that there always seems to be a lack of strategy as they’re deploying their content marketing. Altimeter reports that 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

There are both pre-requisites and post-analysis that needs to happen with your content marketing strategy. The evolution:

1. Brand – Your company needs an established culture and identity.
2. Messaging – Companies need to research understand who your audience is and how to communicate with them, distinguishing yourself from your competitors.
3. Content – Companies need to develop content that provides the answers that prospects and customers are researching online, providing value and building trust with them to lead them to engagement with your company. This needs to be accomplished across mediums.
4. Promotion – As companies identify high-performing content, that content needs to be promoted to reach and acquire new audiences. It’s not just paid search, but paid social and public relations outreach that maximize shared, earned and paid media.
5. Analysis – Comprehensive analysis to identify what performs, where it performs and the gaps to develop more content needs accomplished. The analysis may even show that you need to modify your brand or adjust your messaging.

We often have customers that wish to jump directly to developing content even though they lack a strong brand identity or don’t understand who they’re writing to or how they consume the content. And at other times, we see a huge investment in content development without a strategy to promote that content.

If there are weaknesses in the preceding or post-production strategies with your content marketing, you can not fully realize the impact potential of the content you’re developing.

What is Content Authority?

Content authority is an established methodology where research doesn’t simply provide what to write to fulfill the demand for content about your products and services online, it’s the methodology to increase the effectiveness of that content over time. With an effective content authority process in place, your content will increase its visibility in search engines, social media, external relevant sites, as well as your own.

How is Content Produced to Develop Authority?

Content Authority brings an agile marketing approach to your content production and implementation. Content is purposeful and measured to continue to build authority.

What are the Metrics of Content Authority

Because you’re observing every aspect of your brand, messaging and content, metrics include every element to monitor performance through acquisition, retention, and upselling of customers. Customer journeys (not just one) are illustrated over time as every attribute of your content and the customers’ interaction with it is captured and monitored – including recognition, sentiment, ranking, views, ranking, conversions, interactions, impressions, clicks, completions, shares, etc.

Results of Content Marketing

Here’s a simple example of how Content Authority actually drives overall ranking for clients. Below is an overview of the client’s content and the aggregate ranking of that client month to month over the last few years. Note that overall, they’re ranking on the bottom of page 1 at best.

Here’s the content that we produced, shared, and promoted. With an average ranking of 3rd or 4th, the value of this content strategy overshadows any content that the client has produced. As you know the click-through rate on those positions is exponentially higher than the bottom of the page or top of page two.

More to Come…

The term Content Authority was penned by Bryant Tutterow, who has implemented and refined the strategy at several companies. The results are very much like compounding interest. By focusing across the spectrum of communication mediums, content types, and audience locations and driving and promoting and optimizing a concerted effort, we’ve been able to grow ranking and reach of our clients up to 940%.

We’ll be writing a lot more about content authority in the near future. If your company is publishing a lot of content online but you’re not seeing your impact increase, contact us at DK New Media and we can assist.