Jan 5, 2023

Content performance principles

We’re perpetually refining our tactics, tools, and operations at Ercule.

Yet all of our pursuits are guided by a few core principles:

  • Good SEO makes all of your marketing better
  • An authoritative content library is worth the investment
  • Your work is valuable, and you can prove it
  • Content marketing means building an engine
  • Build your library brick by brick

These practical beliefs come through years of scintillating client engagements, rollicking successes, and humbling failures.

In this post, we’ll dive into each principle.

Good SEO makes all of your marketing better

Looking for an excuse to do great marketing?

Good SEO means you have to:

  • Build a content strategy that speaks to your customers’ jobs to be done and paint points – and your brand’s value prop, features, and differentiators
  • Write consistently, clearly, and thoughtfully for humans and machines.
  • Reuse and repurpose so that you cover all the angles your customers care about.
  • Know your audience, and distribute your content to the places they’ll find it.
  • Focus your website on user experience.
  • Provide clear paths forward to conversion and use of your product.

An authoritative content library is worth the investment

A content library is a powerful and enduring asset. Visitors remember, and go back to, content that helped them. So does Google.

Unlike any other channel, high-quality content continues to generate traffic and leads for you without constant maintenance or spend. And the more content you have, the easier it is to reuse, repurpose, and expand to generate even more.

Your work is valuable, and you can prove it

Content takes a long time to build, and doesn’t always convert people right away. But we have the tools to show us what’s working, and what isn’t, and whether we’re headed in the right direction. Learning to use these tools isn’t easy, but with the right training, you can (and should!) get the data that proves your contribution to the business.

Content marketing means building an engine

Content marketers don’t just write articles – they build and run content engines. A well-running engine is constantly improving, and requires people, process, resources, analytical, and technical skills to make it work.

A content engine lets you get efficiently from an idea to a published article that generates traffic and leads. It also extensively re-uses, re-imagines and builds on the content you already have to get to the content your customers need.

Build your library brick by brick

Every bit of content you have can be mashed up, combined, remixed, and reused to produce brand new assets, and to promote and distribute across all your channels.

Content creation doesn’t mean writing masterpieces. It means publishing what you can, finding the good stuff, and building more and more of that in an iterative process. Iterate on what’s working, look for positive signals, go back to your metrics, and use them to know what people want to hear more about.

Continuing the conversation

Those five principles inform everything we create at Ercule.

Currently, we structure our work around three core services, designed to elevate your marketing team at every step along the way:

  • Strategy
  • Production
  • Analytics

We always love to learn about different approaches to strategy, production, and performance. Drop us a line any time to continue the conversation.

We’re *actually* here to help

We’re marketers who love spreadsheets, algorithms, code, and data. And we love helping other marketers with interesting challenges. Tackling the hard stuff together is what we like to do.

We don’t just show you the way—we’re in this with you too.

Background image of a red ball in a hole.