Business blogging, for both large and small business, has struggled in the past to find a trend it can incorporate in to its ongoing SEO and content marketing strategy. There is, after all, only so many times you can write an article telling people you are having a sale on garden gnomes.
For blogging to have any long term impact on your overall SEO and content marketing the strategy that I recommend is one I call “chunking”, or, “Chunk up Marketing.”
Apart from anything else, chunking is fun to do. Which matters, since for many businesses, blogging is as boring as bat spit.
What is Chunk up Marketing?
In the world of writing, chunking is the practise of breaking up large amounts of texts in to meaningful sections that make reading and comprehension easier. This article is an example. In the world of psychology (Neuro Linguistic Programming in particular), chunking is the process of moving either up, down, left or right of a problem or circumstance in order to see it from a new angle.
When applied to marketing – which is what I am doing in this article – chunking is the process of viewing your business, niche or industry from a different angle in order to develop new marketing and growth strategies. It also helps a lot with your ranking.
Example: Venetian Blinds
John Webster, the owner of a major American Blind company (so the story goes) woke one night in a cold sweat. He realised that, given the rate of expansion, his company would have saturated the market within the next four years.
If this happened, his company would no longer have an in-demand product. What should he do? He called his board together and laid it out before them. He insisted that nobody leave the meeting until they had developed a solution.
Eventually, some young man in the meeting said casually, “Well, maybe we aren’t in the Venetian blind business. Maybe we are in the lighting business.”
The comment caused a light to go n in the old CEO’s head. If they were in the lighting business, well, that just created an entire new world of opportunities.
What happened in that meeting is an example of “Chunking Up.” It is a way of remaining within a niche, but approaching it from another angle in order to create new products, new marketing, new advertising strategies and more.
The Principles Involved
Chunking, when applied to marketing moves in one of three directions. Up, down or sideways.
- “Chunking up” means moving from the particular to the general
- “Chunking out (sideways)” means moving to a parallel product or service
- “Chunking down” means to move from the general to the more particular.
Chunking up in our example above led to a company selling all kinds of fixtures that adjust the lighting in your home.
Chunking out led to Roman Blinds (a product on the same level as Venetian Blinds, but which looks different and functions different – though achieving the same end result.
Chunking down might include things like Aluminium Venetians, Wooden Venetians, plastic Venetians, Green Venetians, etc.
Example: Apple Macintosh
Apple started out selling computers (or computer software). One day it dawned on them that they weren’t a computer software company. They were in the communications business. After all, isn’t that what their computers accomplished – various forms of communication. They chunked up.
From that lofty height they were able to look back down, and what did they see? Their software in another form of communication. They chunked down and now we have iPhones.
A little further on and they chunked out from phones, and the world was given an iPod – Music. Another form of communication.
All of this occurs within a niche industry. But depending on which direction you head, you will come up with very different things. Apple might just have easily chunked up and landed in the computer hardware industry or the gaming industry or the security industry or the military.
How Utilise Chunking with Your Online Marketing
Now it’s your turn. What kind of industry are you in. Chunk up and have a look. There may be multiple answers, but start chunking up until you I find a concept that is congruent with your brand, personality and product.
Here is how you can start with this brilliant, yet simple marketing strategy for your content or blog.
- Grab the single most important or key product or service from your business
- Chunk up. What is it an example of? Generalise it.
- Chunk out. What products or services are parallel to yours? Maybe you could collaborate.
- Chunk down. What are the more specific types of this product. List them.
Example: Red Bull
A good example of what chunking – or chunk up marketing- can do is Red Bull. Red Bull sell drinks, that is all. But look at the content strategy they have employed for their business blog marketing.
What’s their angle? What are they marketing? They are marketing entertainment. More specifically, they are marketing high risk entertainment.
What’s it got to do with drinking bubbles and sugar? How did that happen?
What they have done is said, “What business are we in?” The short answer is, the drink business. But some bright spark has then moved sideways and said, “drinking Red Bull should be fun. It should be exciting.”
Chunking up, someone has then said, “Hey, we are in the “have a good time industry.” Our drinks are a form of entertainment – they are enjoyable. Red Bull is all about the buzz, the thrill – so let’s entertain, thrill and give our target audience a buzz.”
And so we have awesome, yet apparently unrelated things like this:
Don’t get flanked by Red Bull. Your’s may not be the thrill seeking media. It may be research, humour, practical, poetic or inventive. It may involve video or 2,500 word papers with black and white diagram.
A lot of that should come down to your personal disposition, nature and passion. Whatever the characteristic of your content or blog marketing, grab a pencil and site down and start chunking until you find an angle you can commit to and build on.
Don’t try and implement every conceivable tactic or angle in your content and blog marketing and don’t fall back in to thinking that the only thing you can write about are your products and services.
Your target audience will soon know exactly what you sell, once you start giving them a consistent stream of content that suites their tastes and fits organically with your brand or industry.
Go head. Chunk.
Thanks for another fantastic article. I have a presentation next week, and I’m going to use some of this in my presentation.
info.