Planning Hero, Hub & Hygiene Content

When you plan your overall content marketing strategy, it is helpful to think about how you will
approach each one of the three content types (Hero, Hub, Hygiene).

For Hero Content:

Hero content typically centers around big, tent-pole events. For instance, your company may
plan to launch a new product this year, and you plan to develop content specifically for that
product launch, like for instance a special page on your site, and an announcement on your
homepage. Other big events you may be planning could be: Live-stream event, a large annual
conference, the launch of a new TV campaign, a contest you organize, etc. All of these events
would mean a special effort in building content.

An example of Hero Content for Udacity would be all the content the company creates for its
annual Intersect conference. When the conference is on, Udacity changes its homepage and
provides live streaming. They write about the speakers, the big announcements, etc.

For Hub Content:

This is content you plan to publish on a regular basis. It is also referred to as "push content", i.e.
content that you ‘push’ out there because you believe it could be of interest to your customers.
You want this content to be engaging and helpful for your customers. This could be content you
publish in your blog, but it could also be videos you create for your Youtube channel. It is a good
idea to think about the different themes that will appeal to your customers. Ask yourself
questions, such as: what interests them, what would they like to hear about?

*An example of hub content is the content on the "Whole Story" blog from the grocery store
Whole Foods Market. This blog provides content that is interesting and helpful for customers,
like recipes, on a regular basis.
For Hygiene Content
Hygiene content is content that tries to address a question your potential customers may have. If
you are in a good position to answer that question you can create a piece of content that does
exactly that. It may be content that you host on your blog, or on your Youtube channel or on
your website. This type of content you create on a very regular basis, and in some cases you will
do it to react to trends you see in the marketplace. Later in this course, you will learn how you
can find popular searches. That can help you to understand the content that could be useful to
your users. Demos, troubleshooting and how-to content are popular forms of hygiene content.

Here is an example of how-to content from www.thetiebar.com, a site that sells neckties. Their
content on ‘how-to tie a tie’ ranks very highly for the ‘how-to-tie a tie’ search, and it is thus a
very helpful piece of content to draw people to their website.
Putting it all together in your content marketing strategy
When you think about your company’s content marketing strategy, it is a good idea to put a plan
together that lists the different types of content you plan on using and the direction you think
they can take. The framework below from Youtube.com is an example of what that might look
like for a given company or brand. Note that Youtube originally came up with the Hero, Hub,
Hygiene content categorization. They describe it in detail in their Creator Playbook for Brands.