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Video Transcription

Hi. My name is Amanda Milligan. I’m the Marketing Director at Fractl, an agency that helps brands build their organic growth. Today I’m going to talk to you about one of the strategies we use for our clients, and it’s called tangential content. If you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry.

Odds are you might have already done it and not even known. Today we’re going to talk about what it is, why you should include it in your strategy, and how to come up with content ideas that are tangential.

What is tangential content?

So to start, what is tangential content? It’s not used a ton, this phrase, but we and some others I think have kind of adopted it because there wasn’t a ton of language around it.

So the word “tangential” means lightly touching or peripheral. So not really as related is basically what the word means. Tangential content then is content that is not directly related to your product or service offering. In other words, it’s not very on brand. Maybe the opposite of tangential content is very topical content.

So we create both topical and tangential content at Fractl, but they each serve different purposes, which is what I’ll get into. But just to give you an example of the difference between the two, down here I have two different articles you can create for let’s say a dating website. So a topical article for a dating website might be here are seven profile red flags to watch out for.

So the reason that’s topical is because we’re actually talking about a dating site or a dating app, and so is this article talking directly about things to watch out for on a dating profile. So it’s really relevant to the actual offering that you’re making as a brand, and it’s helping even users. So it’s targeting your direct audience and then also some people who might use other apps.

Tangential content in this category might look like, “couples voted these seven places as the most romantic cities in America”. So now we’re not talking about dating apps anymore or any dating websites. We’re talking about partners and relationships. It’s still relevant in the grand scheme of this niche, but it’s not directly related to the product or service.

So this is just an example of how topical and tangential can look a little different. Another example I like to use is for Porch.com. They are a home improvement website. We’ve done all kinds of content for them that fall in both buckets. So for topical content, we’ve done the cost of home improvement over the lifespan of living in a house, and we’ve done tangential content like how to cook with your family or backyard games or something.

So I’ll explain a little bit more over here how to come up with ideas like that. But you see this all the time in marketing even if you haven’t recognized it or known what to call it. We actually did a study very recently where we looked at the finalists for the Content Marketing Awards. We excluded agencies, but we looked at a bunch of brands, and we saw that, I think,