Forget Your Brand and Start Earning Big Media Links.

When it comes to Content Marketing, it’s my firm belief that unusual and unexpected content gets shared a lot more than middle-of-the-road blog posts and infographics.

To be fair, that’s not exactly a life-changing realisation, but it always surprises me when I work with people who seem a little hesitant to depart from their brand or sales pitch to create content which is engaging, unique and exciting.

Content that builds your brand online should have an editorial stance, rather than an advertorial one – and this is a brief case study to explain why.

The Client

I’ve been working with a company called Property Turkey for a number of months. It will come as no surprise to learn that they deal in property in Turkey.

It would be tempting to focus on ‘property in Turkey’ and only create content under that topic – that is, afterall, the business.

There’s one big issue with this: the bloggers and journalists who we want to share and promote our content (and brand, and website) tend not to cover much content about ‘property in Turkey’. Sure there are industry-specific blogs, but these are niche indeed.

To get big media links and editorial in places like The Daily Mail and Metro, we need to think bigger and identify the areas of cross-over between the client’s brand and wider online interest.

For Property Turkey, the list looks something like this:

World Culture

Travel and Tourism

International Cuisine

Property Management

Property Investment

So in about 10 seconds, we’ve identified 5 potential cross-over points with big media (although admittedly the last two are slightly more niche).

By far the most popular of these topics are World Culture and Travel and Tourism. This stuff gets spread around like Wildfire online.

The Content

I tend to use infographics to help win media placements. If you don’t know why, check this out.

For this campaign, I created two infographics which ticked the boxes of ‘World Culture’ and ‘Travel and Tourism’.

50 Amazing Travel Facts You Never Knew

This infographic is fairly simple in concept and delivery, but also pretty definitive in terms of information. I covered as many countries as I could and picked the most way-out and unusual facts about each country.

People love sharing things that makes them seem smart (technically known as ‘Social Currency’), so this hit all the right notes.

As such it earned placements in Daily Mail, Metro and Design Taxi among many other excellent blogs.

39 Ways to Avoid Culture Shock Whilst Travelling

This infographic digs into all the weird and wonderful cultural quirks of different countries. There’s a lot in here which a journalist or blogger could ‘spin’ to make their new content, and that’s exactly what happened.

The Daily Mail focussed on x

The graphic also cropped up on a retinue of other high authority blogs.

The Send-Up

This is a graph which shows the Search Engine Visibility of Property Turkey over the past several months. As you can see, the strong brand mentions and back links earned by content like these graphics has contributed to the overall rankings across all keywords.

If you don’t know why – basically Google’s rankings are based on two things: Relevance (the words on the page and site structure) and Reputation (the number of other excellent websites linking to your site). Content like this helps with the latter.

The ROI

It’s always hard to put a monetary value on ‘links’ and ‘placements’, but put it this way:

How much would you pay for a featured in the most read news website in the world?

Hundreds? Thousands? In many ways, money can’t buy coverage like this because it’s natural, editorially-focussed and organic. It’s based on the value of the content rather than just dropping money on PR, so it’s a smart way for smaller businesses to compete.