Where would you go to celebrate your next anniversary if you could travel to any place in the world at the same time and budget?
Pick your answer. You won’t need to Google this as you have at least one place in your mind.
Let me guess some of your answers – Paris, Rome, or Venice.
Did I get it right for you?
I bet I got it right for many.
What just happened here?
The need to celebrate your anniversary is already associated with some place names without requiring you to run a Google search or ask any friend.
We would term these places as “travel destinations” for “couples” to “have a great anniversary experience.”
Now let us run this exercise a few more times for the city you live in.
Where would you go to have Sushi in your city?
Where would you go shopping for sneakers?
Where would you go for a morning run?
Whatever answers you have, I bet you did not have to Google for it. You already have your unique place preferences for different types of needs you have in the physical world.
Now let us switch gears towards our information needs and source preferences in the digital world.
Which website would you visit for startup news and funding? My answer – TechCrunch.
Which blog would you visit to learn about SEO? My answer – Ahrefs Blog.
Which YouTube Channel would you watch to check out the latest iPhone review. My answer – MKBHD.
Which Twitter profile would you follow to get the mantras of wealth and success. My first preference – Naval.
Which Instagram page would you follow for the showcase of great moments from our planet. My answer – Nat Geo.
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the concept of a content destination.
Every person online has their own subconscious/ conscious list of content destinations mapped to a subset of their overall information needs.
This doesn’t mean that the person would not explore new sources of information via a Google search, YouTube video, or a social feed recommendation on topics for which they already have a premeditated source in mind. We all may do that for our own reasons like diversified opinions or facts check.
A person’s list of content destinations will change over time. He may choose to swap or add to a list of his information sources. For example, switching to The Verge from TechCrunch for tech news.
For example, ever since I chose to pay more attention to my habits, James Clear 3-2-1 Newsletter has become a must-read for me every Thursday.
You may be thinking – “What if I can become a content destination for my target audience for a subset of their information needs. That can do wonders more for my content marketing program.” Yes, it will.
In later sections, we will touch upon how to know if some source is a content destination or not and what it would take for yours to become one.
Before that, I would like to share the working definition of content destination that we at SmartScale Marketing, a content marketing agency focused on building content destinations, use internally.
Our Choice of the Term “Content Destination”
Our choice of the term “content destination” is largely inspired by the concept of a “travel destination”. We internally debated a lot about whether to call it “content brand” or “content hub” but as we started drawing analogies with a travel destination, we became convinced that “content destination” is the best term to communicate through both internally and with our clients.
What is a Content Destination? The Working Definition by the Team at SmartScale Marketing
A content destination is a content hub (collection of content pieces) built on a content platform (example – website) that a significant number of content consumers (target audience) often visit directly and frequently as their go-to source for a certain niche of their content needs that empowers them to deal with their problems, goals, challenges, and desires.
“Just like not every city becomes a travel destination, not every content source becomes a content destination.”
But we all know that new travel destinations emerge all the time.
Who would have thought that Dubai would become the most popular travel destination of 2022 if someone asked this 20 years back but here we are?
If you are a strong believer in the power of content marketing just like us, you should definitely work towards becoming a content destination as it unlocks numerous benefits which we will list below.
Types of Content Destinations. It is Much More Than a Website Blog
While there can be multiple ways to classify content destinations, we will do it based on the content platform they are built on.
Your Website Resources Section
This is the most common and obvious content destination. When you visit any website practicing content marketing, they will probably have a dedicated area to house all their content with labels like “Blog”, “Resources”, “Content Hub”, or a branded name like “Resources for Humans” on Lattice’s website.
Each content platform has several content formats to offer. Your website is the most flexible and can almost house any content format.
Here is an extensive list of possible content formats you can put under your website’s resources section.
- Blogs/ Articles
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- Newsletters
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Case Studies
- Web Stories
- Infographics
- Templates
- Courses
- Communities
- Support Knowledgebase
- Free Tools
The Blog subsection under the Website Resources Section is often the most common destination to start building out for most businesses. The team at Ahrefs started with their blog and then added their Academy to the mix.
Your YouTube Channel
You don’t need a website to build a content destination. This is well proved by many YouTube creators who started out by creating a free YouTube channel and consistently putting out amazing videos to build huge subscriber bases.
Your Twitter Profile
You can build out a content destination on Twitter with a big following of people who will end up reading your tweets on a niche that you focus on.
Your Facebook Page and Facebook Groups – You can have more than one content destination on a single content platform
You can have a very popular Facebook page with millions of likes and a niche Facebook group with thousands of loyal followers.
More Content Destination Type Examples
- LinkedIn Pages
- LinkedIn Groups
- Instagram Profiles
- TikTok Profiles
- Pinterest Profiles
- Subreddits
- Profiles on emerging content platforms like Clubhouse
- Profiles on third-party sites as contributors
4 Reasons That Make a Content Destination So Powerful?
You Can Build an Engaged Subscriber List
If you were to ask us, what is the best way to distribute a newly published piece of content, our answer would be to send out an update to your email subscribers first. Quick Fact – We have read most of Backlinko’s blog content via Brian Dean’s email updates.
You must be thinking, “I don’t have an email list like Brian Dean’s. And even if you do trick my website visitors into subscribing to my newsletter, I manage just a few opens per campaign.”
What we have to say is that if you can focus on building a content destination just like Brian Dean did for SEO learning, you too can have a healthy and engaged email list that would enjoy your emails and bring you business benefits.
Your Subscribers and Followers Will do the Promotion For Your Destination
If you ask your friends, what is the best place to go for a coffee in your city, you will most likely get a recommendation that they themselves have been to and also had a great experience. Many times, they would even proactively suggest you a place to visit in order to help you and also sometimes impress you a bit with their knowledge about the city.
Similarly, if someone was to ask us, how do you guys stay so updated with SEO and SEM updates, we would confidently recommend Search Engine Journal as the go-to resource for them as well.
With a content destination, you can build an army of followers who would recommend you as a source with confidence.
You Get an Aspirational Goal For Your Content Marketing Program
Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need a compelling goal to run the marathon. The pursuit of becoming a content destination for your target audience will keep you motivated to keep churning out great content that will meet their information needs.
It will make your content strategy more cohesive and focused, saving you from the temptation of creating random content for a poorly defined target audience.
You Can Monetize Your Content With Confidence
Why do we do content marketing? Because we believe that it works.
And when someone says content marketing works, they have experienced the correlation with increased revenue and sales for their business.
Monetizing your content can be tough.
By becoming a content destination, your audience has already interacted with your business via several content pieces that have made your brand both popular and trustworthy to me.
You can test out more call-to-actions to your sales and signup pages in your content and still get good engagement.
The bottom line, monetization becomes a natural extension of a user’s content journey with you.
How do I Know if a Content Source is becoming a Destination? Key Signals
Becoming a content destination is not a big bang event. It is a culmination of gains from a well-executed content marketing strategy across months and years.
Dubai didn’t become a travel destination within a day. Your blog or YouTube channel will not become one so fast either.
However, there are some good indicators of a content source becoming a content destination. Let us check them out.
Branded searches for the content source
The audience will directly search for the source in Google or other search engines to visit the website or profile.
Check out the screenshot of monthly search volume for some popular content sources in the United States as per Google’s Keyword Planner.
Intentional clicks by searchers on a search result even if it ranking low for their query
A content destination’s loyal audience will not mind a little scroll to get to a result from their source of reference. In this example, the person seems to be a fan of the Backlinko blog and even if the result is ranking at the bottom of the first page, chooses to click and read that. The SEO at Search Engine Land would be thinking, how do I rank at number 1 and still lose the click to the last result.
Direct traffic to the content source’s home page
If you check out the Channels report in Google Analytics for a content destination, you will find a healthy number under direct traffic.
While some direct traffic can be just other traffic not being accounted for, a lot of it would actually be direct traffic through bookmarks and users directly typing and accessing the URL from their browser.
Big subscriber list
James Clear needs little introduction to anyone working on building better habits. His very popular “Atomic Habits” book aside, his email newsletter itself is a content destination subscribed by over 1 million people. That is some crazy number.
Healthy engagement rates
A high engagement rate is another strong signal for a content source becoming a content destination. Going back to the James Clear newsletter example, the open rates are over the 35% mark.
Organically recommended in social and news feeds
All the content platforms what to reward sources that their users regularly visit or engage with. If you follow TechCrunch, any new article they publish will likely end up in your Google Discover, Twitter, or Facebook feeds.
We Plan to Share Comprehensive Content Marketing Case Studies & Content Destination Examples With You
With this article, we wanted to bring to the spotlight the term “content destination.” We won’t stop here.
While we did mention some content destination examples here like Techcrunch, James Clear Newsletter, Backlinko blog, and so on, we believe that there are many more examples out there that can inspire you in building your own content destination.
We plan to share these content marketing case studies and content destination examples, one piece at a time.
If you want to be notified whenever we post an amazing content marketing case study analysis, you should definitely subscribe to us right now.
It’s Time to Embark on Your Content Destination Journey
If you are someone who is leading your organization’s content marketing program or is a member of the team, you should aspire to build at least one content destination.
With an intricately planned content destination strategy and smart execution, you can also become a go-to resource for your target audience and reap enormous benefits.
At SmartScale Marketing, we are a team of content destination architects who strongly believe that becoming a content destination is the highest level of content marketing maturity and the holy grail.
We can help you in your journey towards becoming a content destination by drawing out the right strategic path for you.
Would you be interested in us helping you out?
Drop us an email with your content destination aspiration to [email protected]