Content Marketing 101: The Power of Differentiation

What is the Internet? Of the infinitely possible definitions, one that speaks to connectivity and sharing rings true: The Internet is a conversation.

Within this conversation, relationships blossom between people and between people and businesses. The best online businesses understand that relationships matter. Build a relationship with your customer, and you will have a customer for life.

The online men's clothing company Bonobos understands this simple fact. Bonobos' pioneering approach to engagement transformed the company from a scrappy startup to an incredible asset for Walmart, which purchased Bonobos in 2017 for $310 million.

Writing about this purchase for Forbes, Pamela Danziger described the acquisition as "paradigm-shifting," and not simply for the value of the brand itself. With Bonobos, Walmart also acquired significant "human capital" in Andy Dunn, Bonobos' CEO.

Danziger quotes Dave Knox, the author of The High Stakes Game of Business Between Startups and Blue Chips, the "guidebook for navigating the changing business landscape," who calls Dunn "a prominent thought leader in the next generation of retail."

Read: "Why Walmart-Bonobos Is A Bigger Deal Than Amazon-Whole Foods"

Dunn himself described his brand as a DNVB--a digitally native vertical brand founded on the Internet and "aimed squarely at millennials and digital natives."

Many DNVB brands exist--and fail.

"Here is what most DNVB entrepreneurs get wrong," Dunn writes. "The world doesn't care about your DNVB if you aren't delivering a better product and service bundle than traditional competition.

The world doesn't need your DNVB — unless your product as foundation is differentiated."

Read: "The Book of DNVB"

Dunn's story of carefully-executed differentiation should be instructive for all brands. Beyond its great-fitting pants, Bonobos has created a steady market for its clothing by selling its own unique and often quirky brand.

Content Marketing 101: The Power of Differentiation

Most online businesses fail at differentiation. Some businesses sell genuinely unique products but fail to market the product's uniqueness. Many businesses, of course, sell similar products but fail at differentiating other vital factors, like cost or service. A failure of differentiation is a failure of communication.

If the Internet is a conversation, the businesses that fail are like boring people who avoid conversation, or worse, people who drone incessantly about "the seven things you're not supposed to talk about," like how you've slept or your day-to-day health. Ho-hum!

If you own an online business and you're trying hard to create a market for your product, you might begin by asking yourself a simple question: What am I adding to the conversation?

The answer to this question might be the make or break factor for your business.

If you're not adding something new to the conversation, after all, why are you talking?

Differentiation and SEO: Duplicate Content 

In the world of SEO, one of the most egregious conversation failures is duplicate content--"substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar," according to Google.

Of course, many sites necessarily use duplicate content as a business matter. In 2013, Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts (now retired), explained that a lot of duplicate content is benign:

"We do understand that lots of different places across the web do need to have various disclaimers, legal information, terms and conditions, that sort of stuff, and so it's the sort of thing where if we were to not rank that stuff well, then that would probably hurt our overall search quality..."

So not all duplicate content is harmful. The problem, as Google notes, is "multiple pages [on your own site] with largely identical content," or worse, content copied and pasted from other websites.

Copied content is everywhere. Many sites sell the same products with the same product descriptions without offering any additional helpful information that might inspire a sale. In these cases, differentiation is vital--especially if you're an affiliate. As Cutts explained:

"Hopefully you've got a different page from all the other affiliates in the world, and hopefully you have some original content – something that distinguishes you from the fly-by-night sites that just say, 'Okay, here's a product. I got the feed and I'm gonna put these two paragraphs of text that everybody else has.' If that's the only value add you have then you should ask yourself, 'Why should my site rank higher than all these hundreds of other sites when they have the exact same content as well?'"

In the end, duplicate content will harm your business. As Search Engine Land noted in its article on duplicate content and machine intelligence, the dangers of duplicate content include loss of ranking for unique pages that unintentionally compete for the same keywords; inability to rank pages in a cluster because Google chose one page as a canonical; and loss of site authority for large quantities of thin content. 

In a way, then, the danger of duplicate content equates to Dunn's notion of what most entrepreneurs (and, by extension, online businesses) get wrong: a failure to differentiate.

Content Marketing with SEO Sparta 

If you're looking for an SEO company company that understands how to promote websites with relevant content, contact SEO Sparta in our local offices in Bucks County, PA. SEO Sparta combines traditional marketing methods and organic SEO--emphasizing natural website optimization--to design thoughtful, inspiring, and effective content marketing campaigns. 

(Cover Photo Source: Merriam Webster)

If you are interested in transforming your website into a money-making tool or are interested in exploring opportunities to outperform your competition, we encourage you to contact SEO SPARTA.

We combine traditional marketing methods and organic SEO--emphasizing natural website optimization--to design thoughtful, inspiring, and effective marketing campaigns.

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