How Big Rock Content Can Fuel Your Content Plan

Social Fresh East: Jason Miller

Our special edition of interviews at the Social Fresh East conference continues with Jason Miller, head of Global Content at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Jason is a colorful thought leader with a lot to share. We discussed his valuable insights on the power of visual content and how a “big rock content” asset can fuel a content program for the entire year.

The Power of Visual Content

Jason points out that the attention span of the average internet user is 8 seconds. Yes, 8 seconds! The visual element of your content can account for as much 80% of the experience, especially considering this short attention span. To capture your audience’s attention you grab them with visuals. Jason points out that engagement goes up on LinkedIn updates when you use visuals. A well designed infographics or Slideshare can tell a story and can be very effective in cutting through the marketing clutter.

Our social newsfeed is filled with so much content (noise), which further calls out the need to capture people’s attention with an 8 second attention span. Useful and visually compelling infographics can also earn linkbacks, which is obviously good SEO juice. Jason wrote a blog post when he worked at Marketo about Kittens and Bacon that includes an infographic. It’s fun and interesting.

Image source: Marketo blog.

Jason also authored a visually compelling e-book. And, that leads to the next topic we discussed on this episode….

The Big Rock Content

Jason defines a big rock content asset as a substantial piece of content such as “the definitive guide to a problem you solve.” A great example is the e-book Jason authored and published earlier this year: The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn.

A big rock content asset can be 20, 30 or more pages long. It should be visually compelling of course. It can be gated for lead capture. Then, using the turkey analogy Jason described, you “slice” up the big rock content asset into 10 blog posts, 2 infographics, 2 Slideshare decks, 2 webinars, etc. These numbers are arbitrary to illustrate a point. Just like a big turkey dinner at Thanksgiving time gets “repurposed” into multiple meals, so can a big rock content asset.

A big rock content asset can fuel a content plan for an entire quarter when it’s focused around a keyword phrase. This approach is scalable and great for SEO too. You can plan your content calendar for the entire year with four big rock content assets (one per quarter), according to your marketing plan and resources. By adding PR, demand generation and native advertising elements, a big rock content asset can create valuable top of funnel content which can be nurtured for relationship building and for lead generation. Big rock content can have huge ROI results.

Feature image courtesy of Anthony Quintano.