Marketing is a massive umbrella with many specific subtypes you can choose from. To build a robust marketing strategy, you need to utilize different types of marketing. Let’s narrow our scope to content marketing.
Content marketing aims to produce content that reaches the target audience and, as a result, generates growth.
With a well-thought-out marketing strategy, content marketing can help you increase brand awareness, create new opportunities for your business, and generate leads.
There are many different types of content marketing. Some include:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- White papers
- eBooks
- Case studies
- Content hubs
Content marketing includes the creating and sharing relevant and valuable content. Although there are plenty of benefits to content marketing, it mainly aims to generate new leads, focus on potential customers, and improve customer retention.
According to this study from Content Hacker, businesses that blog see 126% more leads than those that don’t.
Although there are plenty of benefits to content marketing, here are just a few that make a world of difference in your marketing efforts.
Develop Brand Personality
Implement a strong focus on content marketing in order to create a brand personality for your business. Through your content marketing you can connect with your audience and begin to form a deeper relationship. Choosing to be more formal, friendly, bubbly or elegant is up to you!
Satisfy Your Audience
Content marketing, especially when done effectively, stimulates traffic without being too forward with your target audience. When content marketing is done right, it satisfies both you and your audience. Reaching your target audience at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way is the goal.
Boost Traffic
The more useful and effective content you turn out, the more attraction you’ll receive from your audience. Producing strong content for your brand is the building block for growth. Simply put, the more content marketing you pursue, the more traffic your company will receive.
Experiment With Social Channels
The beauty of content marketing is that you have plenty of social channels at your fingertips. You have the chance to try webinars, videos, blog posts, podcasts–the list goes on and on. Test out various social channels to determine which ones are more popular with your audience. Once you know what channels they are most active on, you can market there.
These best practices will optimize your impact and allow you to strike a cord with your audience where it matters most. Target your audience more specifically than your normal run-of-the-mill content marketing tactics.
Personalize Your Content
Give your content a voice, better yet a personality that will resonate better with your audience. Personalized content makes your audience feel like they are seen and known, and in turn, also feel like they know you. Stronger relationships start with personalized content.
Provide Solutions
Publishing great content can only be as useful as your audience finds it. If your content answers your audience’s needs, they won’t look elsewhere. Answer their questions, and relieve their stress, that’s how you become memorable and create click-worthy content.
Revamp Past Content
Old content may become irrelevant and lose its attraction, but it doesn’t mean you need to trash the entire project. You can repurpose old content and not miss out on potential traffic. It’s a win-win, your content gets a refresh and your audience appreciates it.
Set Achievable Goals
Visualize the milestones you want to accomplish within your project and then you can move forward with purpose. Once your content has set goals, that is when your content efforts can hit the ground running and generate real growth. Use the SMART goals method to plan achievable goals that will move your projects forward.
Stay Consistent
Consistency is key. Leaving gaps where no new content is reaching your audience, results in loss of momentum and attraction. Publish consistently to keep customers engaged and wanting more.
Design note: Create a graphic that lists all of the H3s in this section, with a short description and icon for each.
Explore content marketing further and learn about different types of content marketing. Discover new ways to reach your audience and optimize growth for your business.
Furthermore, diving into extended content marketing examples can work to distinguish more of a specific approach. But for now, we will stay focused on types of content marketing.
Consistently Upload Blog Posts
Consistently uploading blog posts will become a staple in your content marketing. This will be a space you can return to and make recent updates regarding posts and information for your audience.
Here’s an example of how Krames incorporated blog posts into their content marketing. They opened the floor for customers to share stories, experiences, and insight.
Create Informative Infographics
If your content marketing consists of more complex content, creating infographics will relieve these issues completely. Infographics are perfect for simplifying hard to understand content into simple steps, and offers the opportunity to express brand personality through design.
Below is a snippet of Net Credit’s infographic about Slack. Informative content becomes easy to read and their design with fun colors gives us a sense of brand personality.
Publish Engaging Videos
Engaging videos can help entice your audience and promote products or services. It’s the perfect opportunity to explain how you can help benefit your audience without getting any wires crossed. The beauty in powerful, informative videos is that all the information your audience needs is right there, no need to bounce between platforms to find answers.
GoPro published a user-generated video showcasing how their product is perfect for people on the move. This video attracted tons of attention and promoted their brand to a wider audience.
Start A Podcast
Another type of content marketing that is worth looking into, is beginning a podcast. Providing your audience with another way to digest your information only increases your chances of being heard. Podcasts offer a deep understanding and a strong sense of trust, considering 80 percent of listeners can recall a brand advertised in a podcast.
Trader Joe’s generated traffic when they started their podcast by talking about the products their audience loves and giving them insight they wouldn’t find anywhere else.
Embrace Social Media
It’s no surprise that most, if not all of your audience uses social media on a daily basis. By embracing social media, you can market right where they are and generate foot traffic. Determine which platform is most popular among your audience and include your content marketing efforts there.
Here’s a perfect example of how a small company can make a big splash. Olive clothing increased traffic by reaching their audience on Instagram. They constructed a cohesive, aesthetic profile that attracted new followers.
This is the last piece I’ll leave you with, and we’ll have come full circle regarding content marketing. Put all the new, exciting knowledge to use and begin conducting your very own content marketing strategy.
1. Set Achievable Goals
Establish strong attainable goals that you can work towards efficiently. Your team can accomplish milestones one by one, and get the ball rolling so your content marketing strategy is unstoppable.
2. Find Your Target Audience & Choose Content Channels
Discover your target audience by analyzing your customer base and who drives the most traffic for your business. Considering who exactly your target audience is, you can infer what content channels they would be the most active on. Aim to combine your target audience with their favorite content channel and your marketing will skyrocket.
3. Stay Consistent
To attract and maintain a loyal following, you need to stay consistent. Inconsistency halts any and all progress. If you continue to ship valuable content on time, your audience will return like clockwork to absorb your content.
4. Analyze Results
Effectively analyzing your content tells you if you’re on the right track or if adjustments need to be made. Take the time to study conversion rates, change in revenue, and qualified leads, so there’s a strong understanding of the impact your content marketing strategy has.
5. Finalize & Repeat
Once you’ve worked out any kinks in your content marketing strategy, you can return to this process countless times in the future.
Publish innovative content, analyze results, and repeat. Work through these steps and your audience will follow.