Tangential Content
Tangential content is content that is related to your topic but does not directly address your core topic and, most importantly, is not promotional in nature.
Branded content is a challenge for link building or PR mentions. Many publishers refuse to publish articles that sound too much like an advertisement for a brand, and instead charge large sums of money to publish the text in an advertorial or similar.
Tangential content can help you tap into additional audiences, in addition to the current audience already targeted by your products or services. This type of content can also engage users who have never heard of your brand or products.
Tangential content is a very good way for brands to generate trust, reach and relevant backlinks. All of this has a great impact on organic search performance and the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) of a website.
What is the benefit of tangential content?
Tangential content can provide several benefits to your website and online presence:
- Building backlinks
- Increase in reach
- Increase in traffic
- Increase dwell time
- Increase authenticity
- Increase of trustworthiness
Increase relevance
Since tangential content is not promotional, but is meant to add value to users and readers, it increases the authenticity and trustworthiness of your website. Your website gains relevance as users find important information. You can attract new users to your website and other websites can even link to your content.
In addition, many business owners have a problem with content marketing: they don’t know what to write about (anymore). Tangential content can broaden horizons here and uncover new opportunities.
Higher trust & more authenticity
This point can’t be stressed enough, as it simply has such a huge impact and yet is often ignored. A post with the key message “This product happens to be the best!” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in a potential customer. Rather, he will be skeptical and frustrated because he didn’t experience any real added value while reading it.
An informative, practical and solution-oriented article with valuable tangential content, on the other hand, is guaranteed to be positively remembered by the reader. This way, you not only create the basis for more trust with potential customers, but also automatically improve your standing with Google in terms of SEO More info on Google E-A-T.
By the way: A healthy variety also ensures more authenticity in your content. Writing about the same topics over and over again can be frustrating and makes your texts less and less attractive over time. With tangential content, you can keep coming up with new and exciting topics without boredom and SEO ranking suffering.
Link building made easy
Have you ever tried to gain reach with an extreme form of branded content? Then you probably know how tedious it can be. Actually, it’s not surprising, because you probably wouldn’t link to heavily promotional content on your website either.
It’s a completely different story if you provide content that contains valuable information for a specific target audience: Your chances of getting backlinks from larger blogs increase many times over. Ideally, they’ll even link to you automatically.
Increase your reach
You may be operating in a relatively small niche and targeting only a small audience with your content. What do you think you can accomplish by publishing tangential content? You reach readers who would never have come across you on their own and build trust early on. You can expand your audience at will.
Plus, you’re sure to beat out a competitor or two with high-quality tangential content. As mentioned earlier, many companies still rely heavily on traditional brand- or product-related content. This is your chance to stand out!
Develop tangential content
To successfully develop tangential content, companies should follow these steps:
- Define buyer personas: To figure out which tangential content is right for a brand, companies should first paint as concrete a picture of their target audience as possible. This can be done, for example, by defining buyer personas. Buyer personas represent one or more ideal customers who fit a company’s products or services.
- Identify relevant topics: Based on the Buyer Personas, companies can then develop tangential content. The content should address the needs of the buyer personas – without being promotional. Tangential content can also relate to current topics. For example, companies can position themselves on a current topic or event to pique users’ interest.
- Research keywords: In the next step, companies should find out how their target group searches the web for the topics they have developed. To do this, they should conduct extensive keyword research that uncovers all the important, relevant search queries.
Example
A backpack manufacturer no longer wants to market only its various models in traditional advertising. The company has run out of ideas after several years. It no longer knows how it can continue to promote its backpacks in a fresh and interesting way. What’s more, the company wants to expand its target group and attract new customers.
That’s why it publishes country-specific travel guides. These offer readers real added value by providing inspiration for their next trip or important information for their next vacation. The content only indirectly relates to the company’s own products. It is not directly promotional. In this way, the backpack manufacturer addresses new users on the web who have come across the company’s blog while researching a vacation destination.