How Tile Mountain is a Shining Example of the Perfect Content Marketing Strategy

Last year, we performed a large analysis of the tile industry to see how the brands within are performing online.

With content marketing being a huge part of online brands, creating fun, exciting assets can be difficult with such an industry. However, one brand stood out from the pack and was creating interesting content for their audience.

Who was this brand I hear you ask?

Tile Mountain.

Below, we breakdown their strategy and uncover what they’re doing to generate awesome content that gets the attention of their dream customers and Google’s ranking algorithm.

Meet Craig – Engaging Video Content That ACTUALLY Helps

Within the handyman and DIY space, having detailed tutorials is key to helping people with their projects. Not everyone is an expert with things like tiling, so having a guide can be incredibly beneficial.

Now, following a blog is great but what could be a more effective way of learning?

Video – that’s the answer.

Tile Mountain have been utilising video content throughout the site to educate and entertain their audience.

They even have a professional/celebrity on their channel. This not only keeps the videos practical but also adds a sense of authority and expertise to their content.

Something both users and Google love to see.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the video tutorial page:

 

When watching a few of these videos I actually found myself getting sucked into the tutorials. I’m a fan of DIY and given my family has a history in construction/building, I actually found the videos enjoyable to watch.

And if I’m finding these videos fun and informative, you can bet their audience is as well.

 

A Sneak Peek at their YouTube

Their page has a big ‘subscribe’ button in the top right. This is an excellent way to ‘cross-pollinate’ their audiences. Subscribing is a good way to capture a small section of your audience without having to capture too much data. Something potential customers might be wary of.

These videos get thousands of views.

Check out this one about installing splashback tiles:

220K views is a lot. I imagine this video still does well, ranking highly in both YouTube search and recommended videos.

Even with Craig gone though, some of their videos do exceptionally well. Their ‘how-to’ pieces seem to attract the most attention. I imagine these pick up a fair bit of traction from the DIY space.

Interestingly, they haven’t published in a year. This baffles me considering they were doing particularly well. Maybe they didn’t have the time or ran out of ideas. Who knows?

One way they are using the videos efficiently is by featuring the best ones on their site. From a Google and user point-of-view, this is a great way to establish trust, expertise, and authority in the market.

 

Mountains of Content to Aid the Customer

At Salience, we’re big fans of content hubs and informative articles. Anything to help the customer make a buying decision, and to help with the implementation of the product, is worth having on a website.

If you’re looking to appear more trusting and authoritative in your industry, having content like this is a good way to go.

Tile Mountain clearly picked up on this and has fleshed out their site out with content galore! They have a ton of helpful guides on tile installation, care, repair, inspiration, and much more.

Check out the main category here:

(Look, there’s our pal Craig again!)

 

Installation Guides and Downloadables

Looking after your customers both before AND after the purchase is important. Too many brands focus on just the former and ignore the processes that occur following a purchase.

What occurs after the purchasing of tiles can be used by the savvy marketer as a means to further bump up the trust and expertise the site has when it comes to tiles.

Tile Mountain must be aware of this also.

They have a ton of informational and practical guides on installing tiles and maintaining them. These are broken up into different tiles as well, including variations such as flooring tiles, walls tiles, etc.

When you click through to these categories, you’re given further options:

All these guides are excellent and position Tile Mountain as a brand to trust and rely on.

 

Downloads and PDFs for Convenient Reading

As well as content, they also have downloadable PDFs and guides which users can use to help with things like tiling walls and outdoor adhesive.

These are linked to from a few articles and offer another way to engage with the site and brand. As you’ve seen, Tile Mountain are adding value everywhere they can.

 

What Do the Results Look Like?

At this point, some of you reading this will be wanting to know the results from all this. Why should you actually care about making this kind of content?

The reason is two-fold.

Firstly, these articles rank for informative and helpful keywords that both bring in traffic and help funnel people to completing a purchase.

Let’s take a look at the number of keywords their “/blog” category ranks for:

As you can see, the blog alone is ranking for close to 12K keywords, bringing in 7K in organic traffic.

Now, when it comes to Ahrefs (the software that allows us to see these metrics), this is a conservative measurement. I’m sure if we took a look at their analytics platform, this number would be greater.

Secondly, Google looks at the entire site and all it’s content when ranking main pages. For example, as Tile Mountain sells tiles (unsurprisingly), creating a ton of supplementary content that supports the main money-focused categories can give them a positive boost in rankings.

Although correlation is not causation, they appear to be ranking for a ton of strong terms in the tiling industry.

Look at all these top terms. The content they have on-site has to be having an impact here!

There’s a bonus third reason as well:

Backlinks!

Some of these articles have accumulated a fair few backlinks. Their tile trends piece in 2017 picked up 18 referring domains, some from domains like Elle Décor. And this post received over 20, one from Wiki How!

Clearly, making this content has provided a ton of benefits to Tile Mountain.

 

A Few Touch-Ups I Would Want to Make (Evaluation)

Now, although the content hub is great, there are a few things I noticed that could do with some tweaking.

The big one for me was the structure and organisation of the blog content. It’s in a strange location and when you go into the content hub, it can be difficult to find your way back to the main homepage.

If I had some difficulty, their customers will be too.

Secondly, I feel the downloadable content isn’t utilised to the best of its abilities. I feel it should be made more prominent and used as a content upgrade for the articles it supports.

What I mean by this is using the downloadable content as an objection handler when someone doesn’t have the time to read the entire guide.

These downloadables could be offered as a means to ‘read later’ and you could even have a form in front of them to capture leads on autopilot.

 

Summing it all up

There’s no denying that Tile Mountain is a fantastic example of how tile brands should be using content to further their marketing efforts.

There are so many benefits to producing content like Tile Mountain has. You can’t afford not to copy them.  Of course, they still have a few issues to solve (from my point of view), but at the moment they’re definitely smashing it and doing a good job.

If you would like us to look at your brand in a similar fashion, pulling it apart and seeing where you could improve, get in touch with one of the team on 0800 122 3530.