📝 What is Tangential Content?
Improving Your Content Marketing Strategy Through Tangential Content
Tangential content is content used in marketing to tap into a broad audience by supplying information on a wide range of topics related to your business but are not the soul of your business.
Most companies would invest in blogs, articles, and other marketing materials that highlight their brand. As much as it is understandable, producing focused content can limit the brand from reaching its full potential.
This limitation is especially problematic for businesses that belong in the niche industries. Unless you have a universally appealing product, it can be challenging to increase your audience if you only create brand-centric content.
After all, the main objective of content marketing is to build a lasting relationship with consumers. They should be able to find your content helpful and insightful for them to remain engaged. Otherwise, your content is nothing but a sales pitch that most customers tend to ignore.
Furthermore, leveraging tangential content to your marketing strategy can likely boost your audience and engagements.
What is Tangential Content?
A blog, article, or social media post composed of tangential content brings exciting topics that the customers care about without being about the brand. For example, a travel agency published a post highlighting the best restaurants to eat in Los Angeles. The writer may not have chosen a topic that directly talks about the company, but it is still related to the travel industry. The goal of producing tangential content is to have the reader see the connection between the content and the brand. In this case, the post showcased where the customer can go if they availed from the travel agency's services.
Incorporating tangential content into your content marketing strategy can help you reach a wider audience beyond your intended target. It is without compromising the target buyer persona that can likely engage with the content itself.
Topical Content vs. Tangential Content: What's the Difference?
Traditional bloggers, writers, and digital marketers would often utilize topical content throughout their marketing materials. This content places the focal point solely into the brand to help the customers better understand the product. It usually involves reviews about the product and guides on how to operate with them. Unlike tangential content, this focuses on the brand itself and its core audience. As a result, the people who are likely to stumble upon the posts are familiar with the brand. Although this type of content deserves a prominent place on the company website for future references, this cannot increase the brand's reach.
It is vital to create content that accommodates your core audience, but expanding your reach can be the key to increasing sales and growing your brand. Tangential contents are beneficial when businesses want to put their names out there. These are the types of content that more people would share since the subject matter is broader than the brand. Nevertheless, the chances of building links and being featured off-site are high.
Overall, digital marketers must take a step back and ask themselves this: Even if the content is not directly associated with the brand, can the target audience find value in them?
Advantages of Tangential Content
Now that you have a clear understanding of how tangential content creation works, here are ways how you can take advantage of this strategy:
1. Help the Brand Build Its Reputation
Implementing tangential content to your marketing campaign can boost your appeal to a broader audience. The more people that know about the brand, the more likely the consumers can be.
2. Improve Link Building, Reach More People
It is easier to acquire backlinks that digital marketers can implement into their content. With improved link building, the higher the ranks you can get from search engines and the more people you can reach.
3. Increase Audience Engagement
The better the content that you produce, the more people will be motivated to engage with it. Tangential content offers insightful and helpful topics, beneficial for any audience.
4. Endless Ideas
Leveraging tangential content gives bloggers the license to a plethora of ideas they haven't covered before. There will never come a time that you will run out of ideas! On top of that, it keeps your campaigns unique, engaging, and valuable.
How can Bloggers Identify Tangential Topics?
Implementing tangential contenting to your posts can get complicated, especially if you don't know how to incorporate the brand in them. Not to mention the confusion that it can bring to your social followers accustomed to your old formula. That said, here are the approaches that you can consider to select tangential topics to write about:
Establishing your Target Buyer Personas
One way to select tangential topics that your target audience can identify with is through establishing a target buyer persona. This persona refers to the characteristics that represent the typical consumers of the brand. Knowing your audience's demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits can help you determine the topics that will catch their interest. Ensuring that the tangential content stays relevant is the key to producing value for the brand and the audience.
Take Advantage of Data Analytics Tools
Social media platforms are slowly becoming friendly to many businesses introducing data analytics tools for marketing and ads. For instance, Facebook has the Audience Insight tool, which provides information about how the audience perceived the content. This tool allows digital marketers to discover the topics that their target audience finds interesting.
Using Mind Mapping Strategies
Writers can take advantage of mind-mapping strategies to expand multiple topics in a single idea. Developing concepts and looking for ways to relate to them is an effective way to keep content relevant.
Staying Updated on What's Trending
When coming up with tangential topics to write about, it is imperative to pay attention to the latest trends. Bloggers often publish content about holidays, weather, pop culture, politics, and other events to keep things interesting.
Testing the Strategy in Social Media
Every type of content takes time, money, and resources to make work. Fortunately, you can mitigate that investment by testing out tangential content on social media before adding it to the marketing campaign.
Additionally, spend a significant amount of time digesting the content before making a judgment.
Conclusion
For a content marketing strategy to become a success, think about the audience. Tangential content takes the process up a notch by reaching out to a broader audience while staying relevant to the brand. Offering unique, insightful, and engaging topics, this steers away from the focus on promotions.
However, implementing tangential content is the key to widening the spectrum for both the sales and content. Producing this content is the best way to generate organic traffic letting more people know about the brand.
Until next time!
Casey