Types of content to produce

What is content marketing?

So, what even is content marketing in the first place? To put it simply, content marketing is developing, publishing, and distributing valuable, useful, and relevant content to your target audience. The content can consist of social media posts, newsletters, blog articles, and more. Despite the wide variety of content types, you can utilise, the main goal of content marketing remains the same – to showcase your brand’s expertise in a certain subject area or industry, as well as nurture long-term relationships with your core customer base. This means that most content needs to align or address topics, needs, pain points and solutions that your target audience is looking for. As a result, with your company sharing valuable information with those interested, your audience is more likely to choose your brand and convert into a paying customer.

Do you need different types of content?

While it is not exactly obligatory to use different types of content for your content strategy, most brands opt to do so anyway. This is because the internet is a very wide and diverse place, so seeing just one kind of content from your brand may quickly bore your audience. In fact, by exploring the different properties of each content format, you can make sure that your brand message manages to engage and hit more people that make up your target audience. It can also optimise the type of brand message and information that you are trying to deliver. Companies that may not have enough manpower to create various content types can outsource their workload to an online digital marketing agency.

Blog posts

Blog posts are considered a cornerstone and ubiquitous in content marketing. Most blog posts help to build brand awareness and engagement with your target audience. In fact, it has been shown that having a blog on your company website that links to your industry, product or service helps to attract potential customers that are in need of answers or solutions to their problems. Blog posts can also help to improve your business’s SEO, and they can be a cost-effective way to boost organic traffic to your site.

Of course, when writing a blog post, it is best that you keep in mind a few points:

• Ensure that your content is SEO optimised
• It helps to use a pillar or cluster model when organising the topics of your blogs
• Keep your content relevant to your product, service or market

Video

There’s no doubt that videos are becoming more and more popular nowadays. After all, who doesn’t love watching short videos on interesting topics? Videos can be used to engage an audience quickly. According to research done by HubSpot, 54% of audiences say they want to see videos coming from brands they support, which is more than any kind of content out there. Additionally, with people spending at least 100 minutes watching videos every day, 48% of customers also say that they rely on videos to show what they are interested in.

The great thing about videos is that they are a very versatile medium. You can use them to create a wide variety of content that engages your audience.

Infographics

A lot of ideas you may want to present to your audience can be complicated and complex, making it difficult to get the information across. One way to present this information in a simpler and digestible format is through infographics, with the visuals being used to highlight and emphasise certain statistics and data. Not only can they be fun the create they are also eye-catching and visually captivating. They are also quick and cost-efficient to produce.

In fact, research has shown that data can be easier to recognise and understand when it is presented in mediums and formats similar to this. Moreover, infographics can make your product or brand seem more reputable and authoritative, especially when hard data is involved.

eBooks

eBooks are a fantastic way to showcase information as well as to present yourself as an industry authority. If you have never created an eBook before, you can think of it being like a long-form blog content. However, aside from being long form, they also do more than blog posts. This is because in order for most people to access an eBook, they first have to provide a company with some personal information, like their name and email address, in order to download the eBook. With that information, companies can easily put it in their contacts in order to better contact and nurture their leads.

eBooks also allow you to dive deeper into a certain field, meaning that you can demonstrate your expertise on a topic while also providing value to your target audience at the same time. In fact, if your eBook provides information on a particularly under-covered topic, it can lead to more interest in your company, which can ultimately improve your bottom line.

Case studies

Case studies tend to be more effective for leads who are looking to learn more about your business. This is where case studies come in. Through them, buyers and audiences see the entire customer’s journey from start to finish and see how the product or service can be used and applied in other situations. This is because case studies can give your audience a real-life scenario of how someone like them can use what you are offering to solve their problems. This allows you to portray your brand as the expert, or the solution that they need.

Much like blogs, case studies are usually long-form content. As such, they provide a great opportunity for you to add more keywords without feeling like it has been stuffed. In order to maximise their impact, make sure that your case studies focus on a particular issue your target audience can relate to, include real data and statistics wherever possible, and accurately portray how your business solved the issue.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers tend to be misunderstood, but they are not actually eBooks. While both types of content are long-form, whitepapers are mainly packed full of data and information. If your audience is usually looking for fact-based research to back up any claims your business has made, they will expect to find it in a whitepaper. This is a great place to put all your research and establish yourself as a leader in your industry.

A solid whitepaper focuses on detailing specific problems and outlining why your business offers them the best possible solution (with data and statistics backing it up).

While whitepapers are not often light reading, you can break up the monotony by including charts, graphs, and other visually appealing images to make it more attractive. Despite being so information heavy, a study found that 71% of B2B readers often relied on whitepapers when it came to making purchasing decisions.