When Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went dark in an outage on Oct. 4, 2021, memes, GIFs and late-night hosts had a lot of laughs. But for marketers who rely on those platforms to distribute and archive their content, the day was anything but fun.

While having a presence on third-party platforms such as social media is necessary, if your organization creates content—whether it be videos, articles, infographics or otherwise—an owned, dedicated channel is just as essential.

Here are the top five benefits of an owned content hub:

1. You make the rules

With a site that you own, you are not beholden to decisions made by a third party, such as:

• Monetization models that charge brands for posts
• Changes to algorithms that can alter how users find or interact with your posts
• Unpredictable and indefinite outages
• Limits on character counts

2. All-in-one destination for your audience

If you are currently sending your audience to multiple places on your website to find content, you’re doing them—and yourself—a disservice. They’re likely not finding what they need, or if they are, they’re missing the opportunity to discover all of the content you offer that could be applicable to them.

3. Drive traffic to your website—not someone else’s

Of course, you should reach your audience where they are on channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. But if all you are doing is posting, and you aren’t driving traffic from these channels to your own property, you aren’t fully capturing that audience for your brand.

4. Build and support your brand

With a dedicated content hub, you can do more to build and support your own brand, rather than solely promote the brand of a third party (i.e., Facebook or YouTube). The fact is, we operate in an oversaturated media market. The answer to stand out among the noise is a branded content hub.

5. Generate and track leads

By providing a central destination for all of your content, you can optimize your audience’s journey by offering relevant and engaging content. And by tying traffic on your content hub into your marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, you can track leads and assess return on your content investment.

Want to see content hubs in action? Check out how some of our clients are making their content work for them.