Dixons Carphone’s great content marketing overlap

A FirstWord motto is that content marketing (done correctly) is journalism. Yet there are a number of differences between publishing as a brand and publishing as a business.

One of these is duplication. These days it is unlikely you will find a B2B publisher running more than one title in the same sector. But for companies, there is nothing wrong with this. It is even a good idea.

Dixons Carphone is a typical example. It owns two of the biggest retailers of consumer electrical goods in the UK: Carphone Warehouse and Currys PC World.

Consequently, it has a number of content-rich sites, all of which write ostensibly about the same thing. Yet they fulfill different roles. They include Knowhow, The Lowdown and TechTalk, which is what we will look at now.

TechTalk

TechTalk is one of two Currys sites featured here. It offers what could be termed pure content, in that there are no subsidiary services attached to it. As the title suggests, it largely offers product news, features and reviews across a range of sectors from computing to kitchen appliances.

Importantly, TechTalk obviously has a full-time team working on it. There is plenty of content each day featuring topics as diverse as mobile security, a retrospective on the iPhone or wearable technology.

Our first thought was to compare it with Stuff – as the two appeared surprisingly similar. The only immediately disappointing thing was the lack of comments.

So how successful is it? After running some analytics tests it appears the site got around 1m visits in December, with the majority coming from search or, to a lesser degree, from Currys and PC World.

The site has a bounce rate of 80 per cent with people spending just over a minute on it. This would be bad news on a normal site until you see where people are going. More than 70 per cent of them go to Currys.co.uk, taking them one stage closer to a purchase.

As The Fast Show‘s Louis Balfour would say: “Nice”. When content is done well it can easily justify the investment.

Dixons Carphone’s great content marketing overlap is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.