What Your Content Can Learn from Guy Fieri

Fact: I don’t want to like Guy Fieri.

For the uncleansed, Fieri is the star of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” that jalopies from town to town sampling restaurants that don’t make the visitor’s bureau brochure. He’s also a hot mess of hair gel, fist bumps and bowling shirts. An unholy trinity for foodie snobs and wannabes everywhere.

Alas, I respect Guy Fieri.

But not because he says things like, “I wanna be the ambassador to Chimichanga Flavor Town.”

No sir. Although an actual Chimichanga Flavor Town would be amazing, it’s because his show can appeal to viewers on so many different levels all of which suck me in into an entire episode. How he does this witchcraft, I don’t know, but you can try to harness this power to make your content better.

How? To be more targeted and relevant to your audience on some level that gets them to click or sucks them in to stay just a little bit longer. Below I’ve outlined three main reactions people have when watching Fieri and how you can use them as a template for your content.  The more targeted the message, the more likely the visitor doesn’t bounce and actually clicks in the direction you want.

I’ve added exclamation points so you can pretend Guy is saying these himself.

The show is timeless, bro! [FISTBUMP]

No, your kids won’t be watching reruns of DDD. The show is timeless because Guy never changes. The format never changes. His hair never changes. I have no idea if the episode I was watching is from three years ago or last week.

Don’t give away that your content is dated.

People use the term evergreen content all the time, and it doesn’t just pertain to removing the date on the page. It also means the look and feel of that page, article, video or taco inhaling. Pretend your content has to be relevant for a year (or more) and update it accordingly.

Dude, that’s my hometown, yo!

The show makes it local for everyone. In a given week, even with one episode each weekday, most episodes have three separate locations. This means that Monday-Friday, the show can conceivably highlight 15 different locales. Maybe you live there, maybe you’ve been there or maybe you want to go there.

In content marketing, as many others have said before me, you have to think like a publisher and ask if you are giving your clients the content they want to read. To do this, review your existing content analytics and learn what topics/formats have been most successful and start integrating those into your editorial calendar.

You can also make it more “local” by reviewing the long-tail terms that are driving traffic but you may not be focusing content on.

I’ve never been to El Paso, but those sandwiches look money!

The topic may not be laser-targeted, but it talks about something I tangentially enjoy or am curious about so I watch.  Or, for content, I click.

So instead of writing about just healthcare marketing or just paid search, write about paid search in healthcare marketing. While it sounds limiting, you’re actually converging two much larger audiences who may be tangentially willing to read your article, blog post or webinar. So maybe you didn’t get people with the El Paso part, but you nailed the sandwich demographic.

This is why good content marketers have to excel in writing headlines, page titles, title tags, meta descriptions and snippets that get to the point and make very clear what that post/page/article is about. It’s not enough to rank well, as you only have as long as the potential reader wants to spend reading your email, the SERP or teaser to convert them.

Your content as a whole, should also appeal to visitors in a variety of ways so that in whatever form it can appear, you’re going for the clickthrough. Always, and every time.

Why? The era of tweaking sites for SEO success is over. We’re dawning on a new era of search marketing and the ability to produce sustainable SEO content (and results) must include a serious content marketing and content development plan. Otherwise, your SEO strategy is full of quick wins and cannot be replicated long term.

Chimichanga Flickr photo courtesy of Scorpions and Centaurs