Using Cornerstone Content to Your Best Advantage

07 Jul Using Cornerstone Content to Your Best Advantage

Cornerstone content is the core of your business – it is the unique knowledge that only you can share with potential customers. Creating excellent cornerstone content can be one of the first steps in the Know-Like-Trust funnel, building a relationship with your audience. Today we’ll discuss what cornerstone content is, how you can build it, and the ways you can slice and dice it to leverage it to your best advantage and keep customers returning to your site again and again.

What is cornerstone content?

Cornerstone content is the best, informative core content on your website. It is where you can show your expertise on a specific topic, and share all that hard-earned knowledge you’ve worked to acquire. While it may feature products that you sell, cornerstone content is more about giving information to those who visit your website, establishing you as a credible source that they will want to consult again in the future. The benefit of most cornerstone content is that it is also evergreen. When you create an informative, well-researched, expert piece of content, it is something that people will want to read today, tomorrow and in the future. That means return visits to your site.

When you’re working on creating cornerstone content, think about what you can offer your audience that no one else can. Sure, you could write a quick tutorial on how to master the knitted cast on or assemble a quick jelly roll quilt, but what is the expertise that you and your crafty business provide that is unique to you? What questions do your customers commonly ask you? What problems can you solve for your customers? And once you solve those first few problems, anticipate what they’ll want next and include that as well!

What does cornerstone content look like?

When we create cornerstone content for clients, it often takes the form of a blog post. There we can include various media elements (short, informative videos and a variety of well-shot photos) and write a compelling narrative that engages the audience and answers their questions. For our crafty clients this might be a written explanation of a technique broken down into simple, achievable steps. We might include a video tutorial and/or additional photos illustrating how to master the technique and what the optimal results look like. 

One of the reasons that blog posts are our preferred platform for cornerstone content is because they become a page on your website that can be indexed and searched. If you’re taking care to create content that includes keywords and phrases, and provides answers to commonly asked questions, then you’re likely to be ranked higher in search results and offered more often to searchers. While videos and images can attract attention through searches, having a blog post with optimized SEO will draw audiences to your website. If they consistently find what they’re looking for (and more!), they’ll be more likely to browse your website and spend time discovering all you have to offer, including your products and services.

Note: If you’d like more information on how to jump start your website SEO, check out our free guide to Improving Your SEO in 5 Simple Steps.

How can I leverage cornerstone content to my best advantage?

Once you’ve spent a bit of time creating a great piece of cornerstone content, it’s time to share it with your potential customers. If you’ve created a blog post, you need to share it far and wide, beyond just posting it to your blog. We call it slicing and dicing the content, and this is where you can make a single piece of content really work for you. For a single blog post, we like to:

• Create 1-3 social media posts (Facebook & Instagram) sharing the blog post. Use different photos/media for each post, and share a different point from your article. Did you share your top 10 finishing techniques? Pick three from the list and share a single tip in each post. Be sure to optimize your posts for keywords, and always include a call to action (in this case, “check out our blog post to learn more!”). Include a link in the post to Facebook, and use a service like Linktree or Linkin.bio to share a direct link in your profile on Instagram. And don’t forget to add relevant hashtags to your Instagram posts!
• Did you film a technique video? Edit the video into short clips and share those as Stories or Reels on Instagram. Share the whole video natively on Facebook and IGTV, and reference the full blog post with a link to where they can find more information.
• Create a few custom graphics for Pinterest to promote the blog post and the technique video. Share one of those short clips as a Video Pin. Create an Idea Pin outlining the steps in a technique, using some of those photos you added to the blog post. Again, optimize your posts for keywords and include a relevant link and tags when possible.
• Optimize your video on YouTube. Be sure your YouTube channel has a header image, and a link to your website and/or social media channels. Add a compelling description to the About section. Then add your video, with a keyword-rich description, hashtags, and a link on where to find more information (the blog post!). Create a custom thumbnail for each video that includes your branding to create a more consistent look and feel for your channel.
• Refer back to the post again in the future. Even though you may feel like you’ve heard about the post over and over, you are getting new followers each day and algorithms won’t share every post with every follower. After the initial promotion, be sure to include your content in future social media posts. Those top 10 finishing techniques? Promote that post near the holidays, when folks are finishing holiday gifts and would love some tried and true tips for making their gifts extra special. If your cornerstone content is evergreen, you should be able to re-promote it any time it feels relevant. If your cornerstone content becomes outdated, update it! And then promote it again, noting that you’ve updated some past content to remain relevant.

We hope we’ve given you some ideas on how to create cornerstone content and leverage it across your social media marketing to make it work harder for you! If you’d like help in creating cornerstone content or repurposing it in your social media strategy, contact us today. We’d love to help!