This fundamental principle of content marketing has been a key part of HubSpot’s marketing playbook. Our “planet”, comprised of our website and blog, continues to fuel our company’s growth at a higher rate than any other marketing tactic. You may find it odd then, that about a year ago, we very quietly walked to the edge of our home planet and stepped off.
Getting behind the idea of publishing off-site
We started ReadThink, an offsite publication on Medium.com. This month marks the one year anniversary of ReadThink and I wanted to share a little bit about what we’ve learned: why we did it, where we stumbled, and — because benchmarks were hard to come by when we were getting started — what our numbers looked like throughout the year.
Grab your space helmets. Here we go.Let me make this very clear: you do not own your audience. Regular monthly visitors, big subscriber lists, well-trodden conversion paths give us the illusion that we own the attention of our audience — but it is only an illusion. Attention is fleeting, and must constantly be earned.While a lot of content discovery still happens through search, more and more people are consuming articles directly from platforms like Medium, Facebook, and podcasts.
Medium has done a remarkable job with editorial curation and a loyal readership has followed, with a lot of this being driven by mobile. According to 2016 research from eMarketer, 86% of time spent on mobile devices is spent in apps rather than internet browsers. Apps like Medium have become new discovery platforms for content....
How HubSpot used off site content strategy to drive readership on Medium.