How the Hub and Spoke Strategy Can Help You Drive More Content Leads

When I first joined Contently seven years ago, I got a crash course in B2B marketing.

I was fresh off running a failed news site—one of those late 2000s editorial ventures that sounded cool in theory, but didn’t actually have a stable business model. Working for a software company brought a bit of a learning curve.

“We need to do some industry-specific e-books to drive leads,” my boss told me.

“Totally,” I’d reply, nodding aggressively. “Let’s drive those leads … to the bank!”

Even if I didn’t totally understand the funnel yet, I did know how to research and write. So, I’d compile as much first and third-party research as possible, interview smart people, and write reports with pun-heavy titles like “Banking on Content.”

Coming from a digital media background, I hated the PDF—a format that’s only optimized for one thing: printing. So, I’d repurpose each e-book into formats that were actually readable. I’d make three or four different blog posts out of excerpts from the report and include CTAs to download the full report. Whenever possible, I’d offer one or two of these excerpts as a guest post to another marketing blog, to widen our audience.

I’d also turn the key findings into infographics, and turn that infographic into 5-6 new social graphics to engage our audiences on Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the long run, these divisible pieces of content drove way more e-book traffic and leads than the original landing page.

It turns out there was a name for what we were doing: the hub and spoke strategy. As we explain in the lead gen section of our content strategy course, it’s a smart strategy to turn your meaty research and reports into smaller pieces of content, tailored to your various distribution channels. These divisible pieces of content are the spokes that drive traffic back to your “hub” content.

So how do you figure out what your spoke content should be? To help, we created this Hub & Spoke content strategy worksheet to complete with your team via a silent brainstorm, followed by a team discussion.

To make this all super meta, this post is actually a “spoke” piece, intended to inspire you to sign up for our lead gen content strategy course. So please do that. It’ll help you drive more leads, and it’ll make me look good.