Why Parallel Content Topics Won’t Help You Reach Your Goals (But Here’s How)
You’re not getting results because you’re publishing content about parallel topics.
^^^ What’s a parallel topic?
Parallel topics are easy to get traffic to. These topics generate interest and buzz, but they don’t actually help you grow your business. These topics don’t actually help you get leads or build your list, or whatever your objective is in marketing because they’re coming at the wrong angle.
Most of the time, as marketers, we ask ourselves a simple question when we evaluate whether or not to publish a piece about a specific topic:
Is this something our audience will care about?
That’s the question we ask ourselves. We sit in a big room and we say, “What does our audience care about? What does our audience want to read about?”
The reality is, there are a lot of things your audience cares about that have nothing to do with your product or service.
For example, let’s take Nathan, our head of marketing demand generation. He likes brewing his own beer and Metallica. Okay? God love him for it. But me writing content about brewing your own beer and Metallica are not going to help put marketers into our sales funnel.
It just won’t, right?
Now, that’s an extreme example, but we can take that further. I just wrote about another parallel content example in my soon-to-be-released book, The 10x Marketing Formula. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Imagine you run an ecommerce gardening tools business. Obviously, your audience will be interested in all things gardening. With this in mind, you start creating content to help your growing audience solve their gardening problems. You write blog posts, design infographics, and create videos around key topics like soil health, planters, and keeping pesky rabbits at bay. Traffic is on the rise, so you decide to go all in on a new guide: “The Ultimate Guide to Common Garden Weeds.”
This topic makes sense, right? After all, you sell gardening tools, and weeds are public enemy number one. You know this is a topic your audience cares about and involves a serious problem they’re looking to solve.
Check mate.
So, you sink hours into researching, writing, and designing the definitive online guide to weed identification. You publish and promote this premium piece of content. And, on the surface, things seem to be going great. However, even though you’ve got a steadily increasing stream of backlinks, social media engagement, and traffic, sales remain stagnant.
The reason? You have a parallel content problem.
While your ultimate guide adds major value, the content doesn’t directly intersect with your products. You’re helping your audience while starving your business.
I know the parallel content problem inside and out because I’ve experienced it first-hand.
A few years ago, I published a blog post about the best placement for social sharing buttons. That post got tons of tons of shares, tons of hits, and people really liked it…
…but once I actually looked at the data to understand how many actual signups that post produced for CoSchedule? It was really, really, really low.
Why?
CoSchedule’s core functionality — helping busy marketers get organized — has nothing to do with that parallel topic.
So, the question becomes:
How can you avoid the parallel content black hole?
It has everything to do with understanding your content core.
For example, instead of publishing a post about social sharing buttons, we used the content core exercise to pivot to topics like the complete marketing project management process to get organized.
That topic is a perfect fit for CoSchedule’s audience because it’s a topic they’re highly interested in. And it combines with an angle that matches their needs for the tool that is CoSchedule.
^^^ What are the results of publishing pieces so closely connected with our content core? More customers.
Wanna Learn More?
You can learn more frameworks like parallel content and the content core exercises in my upcoming book, The 10x Marketing Formula.
Sign up for exclusive early access for pre-orders now. You’ll get the first chapter free immediately, receive access to the 10x Marketing LinkedIn Group, and receive updates on the book’s progress (like the content you just read)!
