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Tangential content ideas

Branded Content vs. Tangential Content

Most companies still use a classic and straightforward way of content creation: that is, making a branded, sometimes promotional, content that directly concerns the company products and services. Nice job.. for XIX century!

Fortunately, there exists a more effective way to communicate your brand message to the audience: Tangential Content.

In modern conditions we have an overwhelming flow of information hitting us from a plenty of online sourced: Twitter, Facebook, news, YouTube and so on. Filtering this flow and selecting content that is valuable (for a certain individuum) is a challenging task nowadays.

A common way to treat branded content is... to ignore it! In fact, for a promo post or just a company announcement to sneak inside the user's brain, it has to be somewhat outstanding.

What Is Tangential Content: meaning

On the contrary, Tangential Content doesn't imply any products, sales offers or any other form of direct advertisement. Instead, it reveals some topics that are connected - tangentially - to what the company does.

This connection being gentle and soft, it allows to bypass the common user's "Ad blocking filter" - not the Chrome plugin, but the built-in filter in his head.

The goal is to provide some helpful insights on this tangential topic. The rest is up to user himself: our brains are doing pretty well when trying to build interconnections. That means that you don't need to address your key message directly: it can be a tengential communication.

Tangential Content benefits

Arart from the higher engagement because of the absence of promotional, branded signals, there is a number of other benefits you instantly get with the Tangential COntent Strategy:

  • Huge enlargement of the focused topics and keywords (is crucial for specific narrow niches);
  • Simpler outreach: tangential, informational and educational content is much easier (and cheaper) to promote in comparison with classic ads, commercials and press-releases;
  • Showing expertise. Unlike when you talk constantly about how perfect your company is, in that case you cover a plenty of other topics and demonstrate confinence and knowledge;
  • Collaboration. It's a tough task to get someone involved in your branded, commercial content. On the contrary, tangential content strategy gives an opportunity for various cooperations;
  • Lower competition level. It can be easily seen from the Google Ads statistics: just compera a couple of your transactional, highly-converting keywords with informational ones. Chances are, the costs will differ dramatically.

 

Tangential Content Strategy

The first thing to do once you decided to boost your content marketing with a solid tangential content strategy is to perform a diligent (and creative!) keywords and topic research. A simple way to collect ideas about the content you'll create is to ask your colleagues, clients and friend to share their questions that could normally arise concerning your business. Most probably, apart from some commercial questions (how much your services cost, what are the benefits, etc) you will also get a number of general questions that will not concern the company itself. These could be "Why...", "How to..." and similar questions.

If you are not a fan of such a self-made surveys, you can also try one of the modern instruments that provide the most popular questions related to a certain query. Those are based on semantic stats. For instance, it could be the Google Ads Keywords planner tool or a standalone service like answerthepublic.com.

Creating tangential content

Thanks to its nature, tangential content is much simpler to create. Unlike the branded and promotional post which requires a company-specific knowledge and certain writing techniques to convince a client, tangential content is more about the exploration, insights and education.

That means you can make use of external authors, experts and influencers to make their voice strenthen your content.

Tangential Content Examples and Ideas

Let us try some brainstorming and show a few ideas on how to implement the Tangential Content into your marketing strategy:

    1. For a law firm: create an overview of the latest legal updates in the local laws;

    2. For a construction company: make a post series describing different materials, their peculiarities, history, etc;

    3. For a professional killer: make a research on the modern sniper rifles;

    4. For a cleaning company: discuss the cleaning chemicals evolution over 100 years;

    5. For a pet shop: make a post series on the breed-specific preferences (feeding, toys, etc);

    6. For a car rental company: outline the most popular touristic car routes in vivinity;

    7. For a local pizza place: make a story about the fist pizza in the city; ...