H Is for Helpful: The Cheeky A-Z Guide for Content Marketing
Don't forget to help your customers and potential customers with useful information they can use to improve their lives. Ding so should be a part of every business' marketing plan.
Creating helpful content is the single best thing you can do for your marketing.
I’ll explain why.
There are still marketers who think of marketing as advertising or a way to trick an audience into trying or buying their product.
Sometimes they’re even successful, at least in the short term.
To do marketing right, be helpful.
You should always be thinking about how you help your customer with your marketing.
Now, I have a long-held bias here. As an editor, my job was to educate professional members with articles (and later webinars, blog posts, a website, posters, ebooks, etc.) that helped them do their jobs better.
As I used to half-joke, ain’t nobody reading this stuff for fun.
That doesn’t mean it had to be boring (we had some great ECM haiku and limerick contests) or read like a textbook, but it did have to be helpful (and useful; I’ll use those terms interchangeably).
Here’s my weak haiku attempt for a newsletter contest:
SharePoint is really
confusing. Free? Cheap? Hardly.
Where does it fit best?
See? Not fun.
Bias Reinforced By Research? Awesome!
I came into marketing sideways. Transitioning from magazine editor to community manager and then into an inbound marketing role. I had only a vague clue what marketing actually was (to me, it had always been PR and marketing folks pitching me ideas to talk about their company).
So like any good should’ve-been history major, I did some research.
Is there any better feeling than having a bias reinforced with research? (Who doesn’t love confirmation bias!) When I began my content marketing journey, I read a few articles that cemented this bias to being useful/helpful. Two stand out:
I can no longer remember the actual article, but I quickly discovered content marketing isn’t new. The Michelin Guide grew out of a desire by Michelin to sell more tires. John Deere continues to publish a magazine focused on farming, The Furrow, first published in 1895. Both focused on being helpful, the Guide by providing guidance to good places to eat and The Furrow by providing advice and trends in agriculture.
An article by Marcus Sheridan in which he explained how he saved his pool company by answering customer questions on his blog. For you non-content marketers, he went on to found The Sales Lion and now works with IMPACT, an inbound agency. He has expanded on his ideas in an excellent book, They Ask, You Answer. Which, yes, that’s the core idea. Take it and go (though the book is well worth reading). The dude is really incredible. He’s also still blogging about pools in addition to his “other” career as content marketer extraordinaire, www.riverpoolsandspas.com
The Michelin Guide is, of course, a global signal of excellence for cooking (though maybe less successful at selling tires today).
The Furrow is still providing farmers advice and carrying the John Deere brand.
Marcus Sheridan was able to trace $2 million in sales to a single blog he wrote about the price of a pool.
That’s It? Answer Questions?
Read about content and inbound marketing strategies and, nope, that’s not it. However, answering questions is the core of any content marketing initiative.
As an editor, I emailed a yearly survey to our readers (I’d still like to know who said, “That Duhon guy is an ass”). In it, I asked what topics they were interested in as a dropdown and also in an open-ended question (what’s keeping you up at night and what are you interested in; though I can’t remember the exact questions now).
Sometimes, the best thing in life is to not overthink. Every year, I ran 20 to 30 print and online articles lifted directly from reader answers.
Rats, I could’ve written “Ask, Then Answer” in the 90s! Oh, well, not as catchy as Sheridan’s phrasing anyway.
What’s Helpful?
That depends on your audience.
As already mentioned, answering customer and potential customer questions is helpful.
This list isn’t definitive, but here are a few general types of posts that can be useful:
Tips and tricks: how to do something
Straight-forward advice: here’s an issue, here’s how to solve it
War story: a personal story of something that went really well (or really poorly)
Opinion: stake out a position and explain why; an emerging trend,
Ask your audience: do they have tips or tricks or successes to share?
“What’s keeping you up at night?”: this is a column I used to run in the magazine, it’s exactly that — a point of pain that needs to be addressed
What’s it going to cost: yes, talk about pricing; everyone wants to know (even you when you’re looking for services, right?)
One key point here is to remember that your ideas can be delivered in multiple channels. For instance, a newsletter series could be turned into an ebook. The key points could be extracted to create an infographic. Short, 60-second videos focused on single points could give yet another way to reach your audience. Many people love podcasts.
Don’t limit yourself to a blog/newsletter.
Grow some wings and have fun!
Helpful Will Always Be In Style
Trends come and go. Being helpful to your customers is an evergreen trend.
Each of the roles I mentioned above were in the context of serving as a staff in a professional association with members who came to us looking for information they could use to do their jobs.
So that’s what I did. By talking with them, creating an editorial council, doing the previously-mentioned reader surveys, tracking attendance for webinars I hosted, and reading Google Analytics traffic stats; I was able to piece together a fairly good idea of the topics my audience was interested in.
Because I’m lazy, I decided that it was best to give it to them. It worked.
Readers loved the magazine (favorable impressions were in the high 80s or low 90s).
The webinars had a 99.5% rate of “I’ll come back.”
The online community grew to such a size that it was larger than the association’s main website. [Note: I didn’t do any of this alone.]
Being helpful works. The paragraph below is the intro to writing advice I had shared with our community expert bloggers in 2009:
I often joked that no one read inform (or e-doc or AIIM E-DOC Magazine or, lastly, infonomics) for fun. My job as an editor has been to deliver articles for my readers that help them do their job better. We should be USEFUL to our readers; not 100% of the time, humor and flights of fancy have their time, but for the most part we should provide ideas that get readers thinking about what they’re doing in a different way or helps them address their business challenges better.
In the editing biz, this is what’s referred to as an “evergreen topic” and, in this case, it’s evergreen advice. It’s not ever going to not be good advice. Never ever.
Google’s Helpful Content Era (a.k.a. Life After BERT)
You still can’t dodge Google when you talk content marketing. Google has always been an answer machine rather than a search engine. That continues, even as Google’s focus on AI summaries is in the midst of upending traditional SEO approaches. BERT was a 2019 update and explicitely focused on finding helpful answers to user questions (user questions being the search box).
From BERT to MUM to the Helpful Content System
MUM (2021) is 1,000× larger than BERT and works across text, images and video, it does nuance and intent better than its predecessor.
Helpful Content System (baked into the March 2024 core update) actively down-ranks pages that feel written “for search engines first.” It’s now part of Google’s core ranking formula—no separate “HCU penalty” to dodge.
Enter AI Overviews (née SGE)
Launched to all U.S. users in May 2024 and expanded to 100+ countries that October, AI Overviews sit above the blue links, synthesising answers and citing supporting pages. Get named in the Overview and you win the click.
What that means for you in 2025
Experience is now part of E-E-A-T. Google’s 2022 guidelines added a fourth “E” for real-world Experience, rewarding first-hand knowledge over recycled summaries.
Helpfulness is a ranking factor, not a slogan. The Helpful Content System demotes thin, regurgitated copy; original insights and clear answers rise.
Structure your data. Robust schema helps AI Overviews quote you directly, keeping visibility even when organic listings slide below the fold.
Accuracy beats clever hacks. AI Overviews can still hallucinate (they’ve famously argued the year is not 2025 and who can forget rocks as a pizza topping). Google is focusing on trustworthy sources—publish verifiable facts and cite them.
The takeaway hasn’t changed—just the stakes
You still can’t “optimize for the algorithm” the way SEOs once reverse-engineered Panda, Penguin, or even BERT. The smartest appoach in 2025 is the simplest:
Publish the most helpful, experience-rich answer on the Web to the question your reader is actually asking.
Everything else is built to find exactly that.
Helpful or Useful? An Aside
For the record, I usually talk about “useful” content instead of helpful. HOWEVER, for this series I had another word I wanted to use for the letter “u.” I quick dip into my handy-dandy synonym finder revealed, duh, “helpful” as a good alternative.
Be Helpful
It’s easy to get lost in the forest of content and inbound marketing because it seems like there are millions of trees. When you make creating helpful content your starting point, it becomes easier to decide what content to create, how to share it, campaigns and workflows to create, and the other 1,001 assorted tasks and decisions content marketers need to make.
Go forth and be helpful. It’s good for your customers.
Even better, it’s good for you.
Need, er, help creating helpful content? Drop me a line at bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co or message me here.
About the Cheeky A-Z Guide to Content Marketing.
There are groaning shelves of books and whitepapers you can read about content and inbound marketing. What’s missing from (some) of them is the stuff between the cracks. The dirty, nuts and bolts examples of things that can go wrong and the random things that can go wonderfully well. I decided to run down the alphabet a letter at a time and highlight personal lessons learned from creating content for 25 years and from applying those content creation lessons to content marketing over the past decade-ish. I hope you enjoy.
I could not have said this any better. Not will I try 😄 well done.