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Well, that was weird.
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Now December is here and the question for some of us is, well,
How Do Tech Companies Market in 2021?
The simple answer is more content marketing. And yes, you might consider working with PeakZebra as you roll into the new year. Have a look at the services we offer.
But it’s tricky. It won’t be more of the same content marketing we used in 2020 and years prior. From where I sit, the new content marketing won’t be marketing. It will “just” be content. Meaning it will actually have content. It will acknowledge that technical buyers are making buying decisions based on architecture, based on the details of what a product does, and based on how they plan to implement their overall security posture.
“Story” May Matter Less Than You Think
It’s become a commonplace of marketing firms to talk about how “brand is storytelling” and “all marketing is storytelling” and so on. And storytelling is fine. It has it’s place in the scheme of things and, yes, if brand is a big part of what you do (not true of most security vendors, honestly), then yes, you need to tell a story about your brand.
What matters more, though, is that your content makes complex content more readily processed by the human brain. Consumer brand marketers tell you that, to take one example, shoes are a commodity and it’s the Nike swoosh that creates the value in the buyer’s eye. But you aren’t selling shoes. You aren’t trading in commodities. In fact, you believe that if your ideal customer really understands what’s advantageous about your security thing, they’ll pick it over competitors precisely because they get the concept, even if it’s nuanced, even if it’s complex, even if it’s hard to wrap their minds around.
Of course they’ll get there faster if you make it easy for them to wrap those minds.
Talk to Me Like I’m Smart
I get hired a lot with the idea that I can unleash some SEO on some content and, wham, those pages will start ranking number one. But that’s not actually what works. I learned an important part of what works while working for a few years at TechTarget.com. What works is building up a body of work, all of it properly tuned for SEO. TechTarget gets that right, but part of why it works for them these days is that they enjoy significant incumbent advantage. They’ve been at it for twenty years and most of their sites have thousands or even tens of thousands of articles.
PeakZebra in 2021
We’ll start with smart content and basic SEO block and tackle. We’ll make it performant, so that it scores near 100 on the Core Web Vitals metrics that Google will begin to use in ranking results in 2021. For many clients, this will mean taking WordPress sites and relaunching them as statically generated sites using lightning-fast frameworks like Gatsby.
On WordPress and Gatsby sites alike, it will mean creating Pillar Blogs, not an abandonment of blogs as we know them, but given an order and a meaning beyond a reverse chronological scrolling list. Pillar Blogs are a happy mashup of the content blog and Pillar Pages. They can have chapters, tables of contents, interactive worksheets, and whereas you’ve used good SEO practice to link from new content back to older entries (you’ve done that, right?), a Pillar Blog will automatically populate future links from older content to your new additions. Miraculously, it still functions as a blog.
So did 2020 have a Christmas?
Honestly, I don’t know as I write this. The real world is out there and the death count is rising. I mean, sure, there will be a Christmas. (Did I mention that Pillar Blogs add a capability that executes verb tense changes as dates pass. After Christmas, this paragraph will read differently than it does as I write it. A small thing, but you know you could use it. There will be a Christmas, but it’s going to be quiet. It’s a period in which PeakZebra is focused on rolling out its own content and capabilities.
Want Some Goodness in 2021?
Let’s be in touch.
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