So, you’ve launched your own brand and created its blog.
You produce and share tons of content, but people haven’t been following you yet.
You feel that your efforts aren’t focused towards the right direction.
Then you start scouring the Internet, and come across this strange “HHH” model. This model has been presented by Google a few years ago: their aim was to propose a tested process to YouTube Channels’ owners.
Reading those pages triggered some alert in your mind.
“Should I program and schedule my pieces of content?”
Oh oh, you got the point across!
Programming and scheduling your content strategy do represent a crucial point of your success.
I know that letting your hands go on the keyboard is one of the best feeling you can ever try. Yet, if you want your brand to succeed, you have to create your own content strategy.
Programming means bringing a consistent user experience into existence; you have to work towards your big picture.
What’s the big picture?
Nice question.
The big picture is the entire perspective on a situation – in your case, it represents a plan. Your plan will be composed by what you want your brand to communicate, what you want your brand to symbolise for your customers and how to achieve these goals.
Also, aiming to the big picture means feeling free to work without taking care of short-term outcomes, which would be such an important point.
Now that you’ve realised how useful would be a content strategy to your business, we have to discover what “HHH” stands for: Help (or Hygiene) -> Hub -> Hero.
Let’s start from this interesting statement: Millions of potential customers are just looking for instructions, information and solid advice.
We can take advantage of this situation by sharing content which cover these people’s queries. In this way, our future customers will get to know our brand for the first time. And this is Help content’s goal.
But first of all, you have to define who you want to reach. In other words, you have to create your buyer persona.
Don’t you know how to do it?
Have a look at the following image:
Let’s start with our first content strategy!
HELP CONTENT:
Once you’ve created your buyer persona, you need to capture their intent.
What are they looking for?
Take advantage of tools like Google Trends and YouTube Trends. You will also love another Google’s tool -> Keyword Planner.
All of them will strongly help you out in finding your potential customers’ solution.
But pay attention on a crucial question: which queries can your brand credibly answer?
This point is very important, because we’ll include our brand in every piece of content. And our brand shouldn’t be ambiguous: anytime our customers see it, they have to unconsciously match it with a certain kind of quality content.
As usual, I truly believe that an example helps us in getting better the grasp. This is one of the B&Q videos, highly recommended:
At this point, we have had our first approach with our potential customers. The next step is giving them a good reason to get back. How can we do that?
HUB CONTENT:
This is where hub content comes into play.
What’s that? It represents the reason why your customers get back, subscribe or hit like to your channel.
It consists on a regularly updated timeline. The content shared has to be valuable and engaging for your well-defined prospects.
Hub Content is supposed to make your customers develop loyalty towards your brand.
Your content has to be consistent and regularly shared. If you don’t know where to start, the following points will help you:
- Develop your own unique writing style -> your customers have to clearly recognise your brand’s voice;
- Additionally, maintain a consistent-graphical style;
- Schedule meticulously your sharing strategy. I personally tend to schedule it one month ahead.
A clear example is provided by Craft. They regularly share recipes and tips to improve their customers’ experience:
Once you’ve approached your prospects, and got them subscribed to your channel, it’s time to strengthen their faithfulness…
HERO CONTENT:
It’s your piece of art.
It takes lots of time and money. Yet, it’s what makes your customers love your brand. They get inspired, motivated and touched.
Hero pieces of content should be the peak of your strategy. They could be a live-streamed event, a high-quality video, a VLOG.
Don’t aim your video to be liked, aim it to be either loved or hated.
It has to strongly impact your audience.
Obviously, it can’t be loved by everyone. That’s why creating your own buyer persona is that crucial.
Share previous videos before publishing your hero piece of content, work on promoting it. Use offline advertising, social media posts, influencers’ support, etc.
Let’s say that your hero content should constitute the 10% of your whole amount of content shared.
Regarding the example, I’ll give you two outstanding examples. Enjoy them:
Travel With Style – Casey Neistat for J.Crew
Gisele Bündchen – I WILL WHAT I WANT
You want to read a few tips regarding how to go viral on YouTube, I wrote an article about it (link)
That’s it.
As written above, in Google’s purpose this strategy was meant to help only YouTubers.
In my vision, you do can use it for your whole strategy.
To sum up, act this way:
Attract your prospects by sharing content related to their trend topics. It could be a blog post, a short video, an infographics, an image, etc.
Once you’ve got your prospects attracted, then give them a reason to get back to your website, social page, blog, etc.
Share tons of valuable content regarding your brand or product’s realm. If you’re selling cheese like Craft, share recipes, video-recipes, photos of dishes, reviews of your customers, etc.
The more value you bring out in this phase, the more likely your brand’s going to make a splash.
Set up webinars, podcasts, VLOGs, interviews with experts of your realm, etc.
Share free eBooks.
Finally, share your piece of art.
Your inspirational video will convert all of your prospects on faithful clients.
Don’t aim to save money or time.
It has to be perfect. Once you’ll get it done, it’s going to be on your timeline all life long.
Hope this helps, good luck with your next content strategies!