What is Big Rock Content and how can it help your Content Marketing strategy?

If you follow the trends tied to the most efficient digital strategies, you’ve heard about Content Marketing. The idea is to produce content in several formats, such as blog posts and ebooks, to raise your company’s authority.

In the process, the increase in customer generation and retention is remarkable. However, given the amount of content being produced every day, overcoming the competition is a growing challenge.

The struggle for space in the market stimulates the public to demand increasingly better experiences, which serves as fuel for companies to improve their techniques. 

Today, the trend is towards growth in the production of in-depth content. No, we are not talking about materials such as ebooks and white papers, usually offered in more advanced stages of marketing funnels.

We’re talking about big rock content, a resource that can help your brand to own a conversation. Do you want to know more about it? In this text, we will cover the following questions:

• What is big rock content?
• What are the differences between big rock content and the regular one?
• How can investing in big rock content help your company?
• How to develop your big rock content?

Keep on reading!

 

What is big rock content?

Maybe you’re wondering what we mean when we talk about owning a conversation. This expression was voiced by the person responsible for coining the term big rock content: Jason Miller.

Head of content and social media marketing at LinkedIn, Jason defined big rock content as a type of material so substantial that it allows the brand to own any conversation.

In other words, it’s content of such quality that your audience can’t help but check it out. More than attracting visitors, it must be groundbreaking, making the audience truly realize its value.

By doing this, the company can express its core message with authenticity, establishing a stronger connection with the audience.

When Jason Miller coined the term, he probably drew inspiration from an analogy popularized by Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The author develops a line of thought that is well represented by the image below:

Since the book is about creating effective habits, the idea is to separate the daily tasks into three groups: rocks, pebbles, and sand.

If you try to fit them all in a vase by putting the sands and pebbles first, you will never be able to fit the big rocks. However, if you start with the big rocks, there will be enough room for pebbles and sand.

In Content Marketing, we can say that the idea is to prioritize the central message of your content strategy.

Once it is established, it is easier to deal with pebbles and sand, which can be understood as the other signals sent to the customer.

 

What are the differences between big rock content and the regular one?

Now you understand what big rock content is and know the story behind the term, right? 

It’s also important to remember that using this resource doesn’t mean that the production of other types of material should cease or decrease.

A good Content Marketing strategy, as you know, depends on the creation of qualified, persona-adequate, and diversified content. This way, it’s possible to offer superior experiences, increasing the chances of conversion.

For example, blog posts are very common formats, especially at the top of the marketing funnel. 

As the lead nurturing develops, you start producing more advanced content, such as ebooks, interactive infographics, and white papers.

These advanced materials are excellent formats to offer more in-depth approaches, leading the customer to conversion. However, no matter how important they are, big rock content should be greater and better than your everyday efforts.

About the format, you can use any of them, from ebooks to videos, and even event-covering. The only thing that matters is its ability to generate a real differential for your strategy.

It allows the brand to own the conversation and serves as a foundation for your company’s message.

From this big rock content, which, let’s remember, must be long and visually appealing, you can develop smaller pieces, such as blog posts, infographics, quizzes, slides, and so on.

To learn more about the advantages you can extract from such an approach, read the next topic!

 

How can investing in big rock content help your company?

The success of a Digital Marketing strategy does not always come immediately. If you want to establish the brand’s image on the internet, it’s necessary to overcome a huge competition, which is only possible through intelligent approaches.

Among other things, it’s necessary to understand that quality is worth more than quantity in content production.

Creating a qualified, profound, and valuable material can generate more advantages than produce several shallow pieces of content.

Following this line of thought, it’s easy to observe the advantages of big rock content. We’ll highlight some of them below!

Own conversations

Big rock content allows your company to own conversations, but what does this mean in practice?

We can understand the internet as an environment of constant interactions between users and content producers. 

This contact allows brands to answer the main questions of their audiences.

The problem is that the more competitive the market, the more companies will struggle for the same space.

In other words, besides your brand, others will target the same audience, producing similar content. That’s where big rock content can make a difference.

If well-produced, the material can highlight your company and make it a reference source for users. So, whenever they decide to look for answers to their problems, they will look on your channels first.

Increase brand authority

The process described in the last topic also helps your brand to develop more authority in the market. This brings more benefits than the mere increase in the number of visits, as the domain’s authority is a determining factor for SEO.

Thus, you can view big rock content as a starting point for even more advantages in the long term. 

After all, with good SEO practices, your pages will occupy higher positions in the SERP rankings, enhancing their organic reach.

Promote better experiences

The focus of your strategy should always be the client’s experience. All adjustments and campaigns should have as one of their objectives promoting increasingly better experiences.

After all, this is one of the most relevant factors in the 4.0 consumer’s buying journey.

It happens that promoting excellent experiences is an increasingly difficult task since the internet has a vast amount of information on almost any subject. Therefore, your brand needs to differentiate itself, or it will not be remembered.

Big rock content allows you to stamp your company on the top of the consumers’ minds. Since the format is versatile, you can innovate and create unique and memorable experiences.

If successful, the initiative will draw the audience’s attention to everything else you have to say.

Repurpose your content

Reusing content is an effective practice that can even help your company reduce expenses. An ebook, for example, can become an interactive page. A webinar, in turn, can be divided into posts on your IGTV, and so on.

As one of the premises of big rock content is its great extension, the chances of repurposing the material are several.

Thus, in addition to generating diverse experiences for customers, you can supply your different channels with quality material.

 

How to develop your big rock content?

Now that you understand why you should invest in big rock content let’s move straight to the point. 

Next, you’ll see some tips on how to develop this process. Check it out! 

Brainstorm ideas

What conversation do you want to own? What are your audience’s biggest questions? Answering these issues is the first step to an effective process.

Nothing better than brainstorming sessions to arrive at creative and effective answers. Gather your marketers and motivate them to give their opinions on the subject.

Of course, brainstorming should not only consider the participants’ intuition. It’s critical to have data to support the different arguments and indicate the most viable paths.

At best, the two questions above will have related answers. If this is not the case, you must find a way to unite the theme you want to explore and the buyer persona’s interests.

Establish a plan

Planning is everything. Once you’ve decided on the most appropriate topic, and identified the most pertinent questions for the audience, define the rest of the process.

At this stage, it’s important to develop an editorial calendar to guide all involved in the project. Besides, choose the format of the big rock content, which can be anyone.

When making your choice, the good idea is to plan, in parallel, how you will repurpose the content in the future.

Use visual resources

Regardless of the format you use, don’t underestimate the importance of visual resources. You can use gifs, photos, videos, infographics, slides, among others. There are many options.

These resources help attract and retain the attention of the audience, as well as enrich their experience and facilitate their understanding.

Use the best tools

Producing content for the internet is a task that requires certain skills. Many companies simply don’t have a skilled staff or the necessary structure to produce their own materials. Therefore, it’s essential to rely on the support of specialized tools.

Besides offering the easy creation of several types of material, including interactive content, such tools can also connect your company to experienced professionals. Thus, take some time and get to know the best tools available.

Big rock content can be the missing element for your strategy to take off. Now that you know its benefits and how to develop it, invest in produce it and increase your results.

How about getting to know techniques to enhance your company’s results further? Check out our guide to strategic Content Marketing!