An Example of a Winning Content Strategy

A successful example of a positioning-directed content strategy is the website for Erickson Barnett. In fact, Eric recently featured them among the agency sites in the "Crit" section of his Agency Critique website. Evaluating them on the basis of positioning, platform, content and design, Eric rated their site a strong 4 out of 5.

As Eric and I discussed their site, we realized that Erickson Barnett would make a great example of a well-positioned firm with a strong content strategy for this newsletter as well. I'll first review the areas that make their content strategy a success, then share the results of a recent conversation I had with Lee Erickson about the "cost" of a good content strategy.

First, and most importantly, Erickson Barnett clearly positions themselves as a business-to-business technology marketing firm. You can't miss this; it's spelled out in giant type on their homepage (see image above)! As Eric pointed out, this is not only good for the sake of clarity, but also good for the sake of honesty, noting that while "B2B technology marketing is the bread and butter of most mid-sized advertising agencies," most firms don't position themselves that way. Erickson Barnett is a firm comfortable with who they are and confident in what they do, which enables them to tightly position themselves without ambiguity.

The Orange Thoughts section of the website (see image below) features a group of more developed articles, which they update quarterly. While their goal is not necessarily establish themselves as thought leaders in the industry, the Orange Thoughts clearly build a strong online thought profile for the firm with a unified voice. Having read them, any prospect will know what kind of firm Erickson Barnett is; their vision, their strengths, and their unique approach.



Each article is a well-written, clearly articulated idea and composed in a way that is conducive to online reading. Often broken out into easy to follow lists, these articles all contain strong advice and actionable steps that their clients and prospects can put to use. My only critique would be that while the titles are strong from an editorial point of view, the meta title for each Orange Thought simply duplicates the page title, rather than anticipating potential search queries related to the subject of each article. This is a valuable opportunity that Erickson Barnett is passing up to improve search traffic to these pages as finding the subject of a page is the first step in search engine optimization and any internet marketing strategy needs to be heavily weighted toward search.   next >