Content Marketing Strategy in 2020

 When your business invests in content marketing, you improve your ability to engage your buyer personas, convert more leads, boost brand awareness, and connect with your audience. This leads me to two questions for marketers: 1) Does your company already actively invest in content marketing? 2) Will you continue — or begin — this worthwhile investment in 2020?

Are You Actively Investing in Content Marketing?Yes: 69.6 %Yes: 69.6 %No: 18.9 %No: 18.9 %Not Sure: 11.5 %Not Sure: 11.5 %Yes: 69.6 %Yes: 69.6 %No: 18.9 %No: 18.9 %Not Sure: 11.5 %Not Sure: 11.5 %

Content marketing can take many forms. The key is to identify which content marketing tactics are most effective so your business can use them to achieve your marketing goals.

From our work at HubSpot, I’ve identified a few tactics I recommend you focus on in 2020. While content marketing trends come and go, you’ll see consistent ROI from creating clustered content to build topic authority, striking an editorial balance between search-focused and thought leadership content, and aligning your content with the problems your business solves.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these content marketing tactics.

Keep Creating Clustered Content to Build Topic Authority

Once upon a time (in 2017), HubSpot’s blog hit a massive traffic plateau. Our team put their heads together and, after identifying some macro trends in search and content, decided to reorganize HubSpot’s blog into topic clusters. That reorganization, along with the introduction of a search insights report, led to a 25% YoY increase in traffic and improved our search rankings for over two million keywords.

In short, the topic cluster methodology works — keep investing in it. Here’s how. 

When creating topic clusters, you want to ensure that each cluster touches on all of the ways people are searching for that topic. You start with a pillar page — which I like to think of as the 10,000-foot view of a topic — about the main keyword you’re targeting. Then, your cluster (or subtopic) content should be about related yet more specific angles of that topic. All of this content, including the pillar page, is clustered through an internal linking structure.

If you’re a visual learner like I am, this illustration will help:

Topic cluster model

Source: impactbnd.com

To drive the point home, let’s look at an example. Say I wanted to build topic authority around working remotely in 2020 — a subject I am deeply passionate about as a fully remote member of HubSpot’s (awesome) Marketing team. 

I would start with my pillar page — at HubSpot, we often call them our “Ultimate Guides.” The pillar would provide a comprehensive overview of working remotely, including definitions, trends, benefits, and the pros and cons of remote work. Then, my cluster content would include a number of related posts on more specific topics and keywords, such as ways to stay focused as a remote employee, remote jobs, and how to negotiate a remote position's compensation.

This way, I’m solving for various related search queries, populating more of the SERP, and building greater topic authority. 

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