It’s like death and taxes, it’s inevitable. The bigger the company, the worse content marketing gets.
HubSpot teaches you how to type the shrug emoji and buy Bitcoin stocks. Salesforce shares inspirational business quotes. GoDaddy helps you use Bing AI, Zendesk shares catchy sales slogans, and more.
Based on content marketing best practices, these articles are bad.
It will not resonate with decision makers. If you Google “how to buy Bitcoin stocks,” no one will buy a HubSpot license. This is the very definition of vanity traffic. That’s a lot of access with no obvious impact on your business.
So why does this happen?
This question has an obvious (but flawed) answer. That is, large companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complex and writing good and relevant content becomes difficult. I experienced this firsthand:
- Additional legal reviews and stakeholder approvals creep into the process.
- Content has been diluted to provide a more general “brand voice”.
- There is a growing misalignment between the search and content teams.
- As early employees leave, there is a lack of content leadership within the company.
Similarly, companies that receive funding need to grow, even if they are already huge. Content needs to be fed to the machine, continuously increasing traffic even if the traffic does not contribute to revenue at all.
While there is some truth here, I have come to think that both of these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It’s a mistake to think that the same people who grew a company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and it’s a mistake to think that companies intentionally target useless keywords just to get OKRs. is.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is intentional and not an oversight. I believe that bad content and the vanity traffic it generates is actually good for business.
Even if the traffic doesn’t directly convert, there are benefits to generating large amounts of traffic. Or put it in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why Dialpad builds landing pages Local phone number?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why is there a list of the most popular website pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles never convert…
…But it doesn’t have to be.
Every published URL and targeted keyword becomes a new gateway to your website from the remote corners of the internet. This is your chance to get backlinks that wouldn’t exist otherwise and get your brand in front of people. thousands of of new and otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits may not directly translate into revenue, but over time, they can add up to huge profits. indirect Impact on revenue. They can:
- Enhance domain authority And so is the search performance of every other page on your website.
- Improving brand awarenessand foster unexpected interactions that land your brand in front of the right people at the right time.
- Reject your competitors’ traffic and weaken their voice.
These small benefits become more valuable when added up over hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can keep the cost of content to a minimum, the disadvantages are relatively small.
What about topical authority?
“But what about the authority of the topic?!” I hear you crying. “If I stray too far from my field of expertise, won’t it affect my rankings?”
I’ll simply reply with this screenshot of the “health” subfolder in Forbes. 4 million Estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And large companies can minimize costs. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies expand their production through networks. Freelancer writers can avoid the costs of busy employees. They have established efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication, and maintenance. The cost of an additional content “unit”, or 10, or 100, is not that high, especially when compared to other marketing channels.
This is also relatively rare. opportunity Costs to consider: The fact that the energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-related topics.
In fact, many companies working on this strategy have already ripped off the low-hanging fruit and are writing about almost every product-related topic. There is a finite number of highly trafficked and relevant topics. If you blog consistently for 10 years, you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world are very established and very efficient. sale process. Content gating, lead generation and scoring, and retargeting allow you to make relatively good use of very small conversion rates.
HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stocks also includes its own related call to action. And for HubSpot, building a database of motivated investors is more valuable than you might think.
The more your company grows, the larger your audience will be needed to continue to maintain that growth rate.
Companies typically expand their addressable market (TAM) as they grow. This is similar to how HubSpot expands its reach from marketing to sales to customer success and launches new product lines for new (and much larger) audiences. This means that the target audience of his marketing content will also grow.
Peep Raja says:
But in the largest companies, this principle is taken to the extreme. As a company prepares for an IPO, the audience expands to nearly everyone.
This is something Janessa Lantz (formerly of HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped us understand. The target audience of a post-IPO company is not only end-users, but also institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, and even ordinary investors.
These people can impact your company’s value in more ways than just buying subscriptions. They can invest or encourage others to invest, dramatically impacting stock prices. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH ads, and, you guessed it, the seemingly “bad” content that appears every time they search for something on Google.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for your company post-IPO.
These visitors may not buy a software subscription when they see your article in the SERPs, but they will notice your brand and the next time your stock ticker appears in the news. You might listen more carefully.
They won’t be power users, but they might download e-books and add extra units to the email subscribers reported in S1.
They may not be contributing to your bottom line now, but they will be contributing to your bottom line in the future, either in the form of higher stock prices or in the form of being a target demographic for future product lines.
vanity traffic To do It creates value, but it’s a form that most content marketers aren’t used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply to you, it makes sense to capture them for your company, but it also means not offering them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race. The number of keywords and topics is limited, and your competitors will claim hundreds of keywords and topics. thousands of Having a large number of uncontested SERPs can quickly become a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly build a moat. Backlinks and brand awareness are virtually impossible to challenge. If left unchecked, the gap between your company and your competitors may widen at an accelerated pace.
Spouting “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is your chance to deny your rivals a solid share of the voice and ensure your brand always has a seat at the table.
final thoughts
This kind of article is misclassified instead of thinking like this: bad contentit’s better to think of it as a cheap digital billboard with surprisingly good attribution.
It’s no coincidence or oversight that large companies are chasing “vanity traffic.” There are good reasons to invest energy in content that never converts. Most content he is not in the format that marketers are accustomed to, but it does have its advantages.
This is not an argument that all companies should invest in super broad areas. Keywords with high traffic. But if you’ve been blogging for 10 years, or preparing for an IPO, “bad content” and the vanity traffic it generates might not be so bad.