Content marketing’s taken off in a big way; as more and more pile in, getting visibility will be harder and harder. Here are a few strategies to maintain and improve performance in the storm.

On an anecdotal level, content marketing bridged the chasm from niche to mainstream this year. It’s uncommon to meet an online marketer who isn’t at least familiar with the core concepts (and the C-suite’s increasingly turned on). On an empirical level, search for content marketing-related terms have exploded.

As everyone piles in, the economics driving content marketing are going to be diluted. This thing’s not going back in the box (particularly as the shine on Facebook pages starts to wear off and display ads continue to underperform). What will happen is a few rounds of specialization and professionalization.

In other words:

It will not be enough to do content marketing. Brands and agencies will need to excel at a specific form of content marketing, where they stand out in an increasingly crowded market for branded content.

What does this mean for SEOs and content strategy?

Increasingly, we’re going to have to find our unique angles of attack. We’re going to have to be media innovators who build content brands around a very particular spin. Consider the arcane example of the @respectthehyphen tweep, who dedicated himself to correcting tweets that failed to hyphenate “Spider-Man” on twitter. Irredeemably absurd. And immediately memorable.

SEOs have considerable experience advising clients and stakeholders on how to create linkbait and execute linkbuilding strategies. They have less experience building content brands that, by virtue of inherent qualities, maintain and increase engagement over time. This is content marketing for the initiated.

Differentiation or specialization’s less of a stunt than a strategic tradeoff. The more you can sacrifice one approach to content, the more you can excel at another.

(A note: Sacrifice requires boldness, as competitors and haters will always say “But you can’t neglect ______!” Publishing has always required boldness in terms of vision – and humility in terms of audience. The vision needs to be: Excel at one thing – a narrowly- and concretely-defined mission, and everything else will fall into place.)

For the purposes of helping you start down the road of content marketing specialization, I’ve compiled a number of routes, and added notes and examples where relevant.

Centre of Excellence approach

Centers of Excellence are perhaps known best from the academic sphere, where they sprung up during the 90s and 00s as universities and other institutions sought to nurture and promote their expertise in specific subject areas.

Tragically, every business will claim that it’s a center of excellence in its area of business. PayPal will say it’s a center of excellence in online transactions, MailChimp in email marketing, Jose Cuervo sloppy drunkenness. Or something.

This is not the case. To specialize your content marketing by the center of excellence approach, you will need to do at least a couple of the following things:

1. Fund or initiate basic research into a relatively narrow field that relates to your business
2. Give one or more people license to pursue knowledge in that field purely for its own sake
3. Insulate the research 100% from commercial impulses, and
4. Turn over that knowledge immediately to the commons regularly

This does not include funding research that’s designed to promote a company’s products. It also excludes “this is a great idea I had about our products or market” types of content. This approach is above all rigorous in terms of maintaining credibility with subject matter experts, and creating new knowledge that is open to all.

Typically, this kind of content marketing has been led by industrial giants with research budgets and an open approach to innovation. However, it’s open to any company with an appetite for discovery, a determined brand journalist or closet enthusiast who wants to get out of the closet.

Killer App Approach

There are so many techniques to content marketing. The humble blog post alone has dozens of classical variants (the rant, the list, the curation, the step-by-step how-to, etc.). And new techniques are piling on by the month.

With the killer app approach, a company chooses to excel at one technique at the expense of all (or almost all) others.

And the more specific, the better. You don’t just focus on videos. You focus on documentaries. On the long documentary format. On long documentaries with expert interviews. In Swahili. (Maybe not that specific).

This ruthless focus has a number of beneficial side effects:

• You learn to find the stories best told according to your chosen media;
• You get damned good at that particular media;
• You build up a great workflow and network of suppliers and partners; and
• You produce knock-their-socks-off content (which, with some luck, inspires your community to adapt to other formats free of charge)

It takes a well-disciplined content brand to resist the siren call of dabbling across countless media types, but – provided you choose a technique or format appropriate to and loved by your target audience – it’s a classic way to stand out in the media landscape.

Attitude approach

You know how companies invest in their values? High-priced consultants with mysterious credentials chopper in and chopper out leaving behind them words like “courageous, reliable, responsible and clear”?

A wise man once told me that a value has no value unless the opposite is also valuable (who’s going to say they’re cowardly, unreliable, irresponsible and shifty?).

In this way, values are like attitude and tone. Businesses uniformly adopt a tone of voice and attitude that’s remarkable only in sounding like every other business. For attitude and tone of voice to make you stand out in content marketing, you need to write “against the current”.

Ad agency copywriters are maestros of attitude and tone of voice, but they’re seldom well-positioned to write thought leadership. It takes determination and investment to create an attitude and personality that stands out, reinforce it with information and point it at audiences. But it also buys goodwill by the bushel.

Artist approach

Anyone who’s seen Lost in Translation is familiar with how A-list celebrities in America who would never deign to appear in an advertisement in America regularly appear in ads abroad. The same goes for content marketing.

Every industry celebrity, editor or expert has a price. If you can find that price (either by digging deep or by sheer persuasion), then you can bring a voice with built-in star power to the content marketing show.

Hugh MacLeod as an illustrator, Adam Lisagor in video or Robin Sloan in copy are perfect examples.

Frequency approach

Some sources gain their authority not by dint of their depth, insight or exclusivity, but just because they’ll reliably have the latest almost as soon as it’s available. They can be trusted to have the latest (first generally).

In going down this road a brand is assuming the natural role of trade media. However, given the strains on trade media to do all things at all times for all people, they often fail at this rudimentary vision. The door is left open for a certain kind of brand to assume this first reporter role, particularly via a lively channel like twitter.

What’s interesting about this approach is that the brand may not hesitate to link to third-party content (as opposed to the typical content marketing owned media approach – i.e. pulling traffic to owned channels or portals). Their role in the information transaction is the hand-off. In exchange, they get lots of followers and a broad reach.

Hubspot’s the classic example of this, as its blog and other channels are as popular as any other source online for content and social media updates (particularly for small and medium-sized businesses).

Influencer approach

Every content marketing guru will tell you to kneel before the blogger gods in your space. With this differentiation tactic, you make that supplication the core of your existence. You commission interviews with the influencer, genuflect on your blog and twitter, promote him or her nonstop and basically hitch your content marketing star to his or her personal brand.

There are different ways to make this work: 1) Pay them, or 2) Make your abject admiration so plain and explicit that they can’t help but acknowledge you (or look like a blind and dumb fool). PR agencies are characteristically proponents of this kind of content strategy, to varying extents.

Eloqua played well on this strategy, with its blog trees for the US and UK, and its influencer “tower”.

Crowdsourced approach

It’s a classic at agency/marketing meetings: someone says “Yeah, we’ll get people to send us their favorite photos/poems/shoelaces/etc. and we’ll put them together into something really cool!” We quickly learn how difficult it is to “get people to do” anything.

The upside to crowdsourcing content is genuine and huge: Every contributor becomes incentivized to push your content and brand around the social web. And you’ve got built-in authenticity.

This approach lends itself to brands with broad and shallow appeal, such as marketplaces, storefronts and organizations.

Media partnership approach

Driving traffic online from a stand-still’s a known issue. There’s nothing for accelerating you into the content market like buckling your content brand to a fast-moving media partner.

Consider what Forbes is doing, for example. They’ve built out a number of content channel opportunities for partners (for a price) where the brand gets a platform and at least some built-in traffic. SAP, UPS and NetApp have all opted in.

Open/Honest approach

Few brands have the courage and clarity to talk about what’s what in their space, with warts and all. This may mean recounting lessons from flubbed products, discussing shared problems in the industry or even exploring challenges within the company culture.

Nothing’s fresher than a dose of plain talk in the marketplace. Unfortunately, it’s really uncommon. Not surprisingly, people will come back again and again to a straight talker (Note: There’s sometimes a fine line between being a straight talker and “the angry guy” – the litmus test is whether you’re equally critical of yourself or your own company).

Change agent approach

All brands are change agents in one respect: They want to change non-customers’ habits into being customers (a la Michael Schrage “Who do you want your customers to become?”). The change agent approach comes into its own when you champion change that goes well beyond the purview of your company.

Salesforce’s end of software message was a change agent approach, even if it was less content marketing than a brand value (Dreamforce counts as content marketing, though, doesn’t it?). Depending on your timing, this approach can end two ways:

1. Boil the ocean: Your efforts to bring about a dent in the world only make a dent in your enthusiasm and schedule.
2. Drops of water will break rock: Your determination and obstinacy are an example for how world-changing things happen.

If you’re a zealous type (and you can rope in enough support), then this can be a way to differentiate and brand your content marketing efforts.

Personal brands approach

This is the classic analyst company route. The Gartners, Altimeters and Forresters of this world either hire or groom minor industry celebrities with large and dedicated personal followings. Not all brands are as likely to be comfortable pushing a handful of people, as those people can quickly overshadow the brand and its own values.

Content marketing thrives on authentic opinions and personalities, which is why this route stands out from the masses of company blogs and feeds. We’re naturally attracted to leaders, not company content platforms.

Exclusive/Paid approach

This may be the final divide between brands and publishers. When you start charging for your content, you are not thinking like a publisher; you are a publisher. I can see a number of companies charging for access to an exclusive API, for example. Or even building a media brand under their main brand.

I’ve long argued that – in the digital economy – businesses have a better raison d’etre in the media landscape than traditional media businesses. At least a typical business has a product to sell, on the back of the media (and not just the media itself).

Financing breakthrough content in a shared partnership between brand and market is a clear differentiator, for brands willing to play with their business model.

Controversy approach

This was long the sovereign domain of bloggers, but – though the tactics and techniques of blogging filtered across – bloggers’ sense of controversy did not often make the leap to company’s content marketers. In a way, it’s a pity, and it’s lead to a lot of stale and soulless company blogs that don’t achieve anything (and get scuttled).

We all know that there’s enough BS in business to make for a juicy headline every day. Newspaper editors knew it, and exploited that fact. For content marketers with the right kind of sensationalist talent, this remains a profound way to stand out online.

The Attention to Detail approach

Maybe it’s because we can make content so quickly now, with so many different tools and in so many different media. Maybe it’s because we’re all multitasking. But the truth is this: Most content online (even stuff from reputed agencies) shows little attention to detail. From punctuation faults to edges that just don’t quite line up, content is by and large…well…sloppy.

For that reason, content that’s developed with the eye for detail of a monk with OCD gets noticed. It positively stands out. It’s effectively the Steve Jobs effect. Perfection does, in fact, get noticed.

The social good approach

Sometimes a company just dives head first into a selfless cause. People invest their time and energy in an effort that has no clear output for the company’s bottom line. It just feels right, and makes their world a better place. Building this kind of thing into a content marketing plan stands out, at least when the audience can be made to give a damn about the cause. (That’s usually far easier than making them interested in your products, though).

That's a dozen or so routes for differentiation; there are doubtless a dozen more, but the point is that content-producing companies are going to need to find a strategy to stand out in the market (or risk the worst of fates - anonymity).