There are several types of content marketing you need to effectively align your brand with your customers. These include blog posts for thought leadership, videos for engagement, infographics for easy information digest, and case studies to showcase success. Email newsletters maintain regular communication with audiences. Interactive content like quizzes and polls boost engagement, while e-books and whitepapers provide in-depth information, establishing brand authority.
When it comes to content marketing, it can be difficult to know which types will make the biggest impact with your audience. That’s why familiarizing yourself with the options that are available to you before you start building your strategy is key.
In this post, I’ll be covering 10 types of content marketing. While it may be tempting to try and work all of them into your strategy, the simple truth is that depending on your industry, audience, and goals, they may not all fit. And that’s okay. You don’t want to invest resources into creating content that won’t serve your overall marketing efforts well.
Ultimately, it’s the type of content marketing that promotes your business effectively that you need to include in your strategy. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting with different types from time to time, of course, but when first getting started, test a few types and go from there before adding or removing elements.
Overview
1. Blogs
Having a blog on your website is essential. It helps customers when they are looking for answers, improves your search engine optimization efforts, and in general, provide a low-cost method for growing your organic traffic.
As you create blog posts, remember the following:
- Use a cluster model or pillar approach for organizing your blog topics
- Optimize the content for SEO
- Keep content focused and relevant to the product or service you offer.
2. Videos
Videos are a wonderful way to quickly engage your audience. Research shows 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through video. If that’s not enough for you, data also shows that by 2022, video will make up for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, 15x higher than it was in 2017.
Videos can take many forms – from explainers and webinars to video blogs, live streams, and presentations. You don’t always have to have a person on camera, which is helpful for the camera shy and those on a limited budget.
3. Checklists
Checklists are valuable for a lot of small business customers. They give a step-by-step method to solve a problem, and can be created in multiple formats to make them shareable on your social media platforms, or sent to your email list.
Want to make sure all your content marketing efforts are hitting the mark before they are released to the world? Create an internal checklist to use with your team so it’s easier to make sure your content always fits your audience personas. Use a tool like Beacon to make creating these things easier. It can also make ebook creation easier, which I’ll get to in a bit.
4. User-Generated Content
User-generated content, or UGC, is a great content marketing method because it gets your customers involved. People respond to other people like them, so it’s more likely to get them interested in your business.
It’s particularly useful for those in the beauty/fashion niche, because people post photos of their nails, hair, and outfits to their followers, often tagging the products used. When you’re tagged in a high quality image featuring your product, you can share it with your audience, too.
5. Testimonials/Reviews
Like UGC, customer reviews and testimonials are content that comes straight from your audience. If you’re in a niche market, testimonials provide a short clip about what makes your company stand out from the competition.
You can add customer reviews on your website or in emails… whether written or in video form.
6. Whitepapers
Whitepapers are often confused with eBooks, and the two are actually different. While both are forms of lengthy content, whitepapers contain more data and information. Whitepapers have more attention to detail, and serve as a big part of the research phase for the majority of buyers.
7. eBooks
An eBook really isn’t anything more than long-form blog content. It’s not a novel or a multiple-page ad for your business. Instead, they are a way to give your potential customers valuable information about something relevant to them and to your business. It gives them something for free, yet shows them your company’s expertise and knowledge about how to solve a problem for them.
8. Infographics
Are you in an industry where statistics are essential? Instead of potentially boring your audience with an information dump, use infographics to break it all down into more digestible pieces of content. The infographic is the perfect vehicle because it combines eye-catching graphics with processes or statistics that would be difficult to read and absorb in a standard text format.
With tools like Canva and Visme, it’s easy to create infographics without spending a ton of money working with graphic designers. And thanks to promotional options such as directories and social media, you can spread your message quickly.
9. Memes
Though they are a relatively new form of content marketing, you can easily create memes that are relevant to any audience in any industry. The key is an image that’s set to culturally relevant text and timed well. If you can time it right and align it with your social aesthetic, you will definitely see an increase in traffic.
And with tools like MemeGenerator, you don’t need to be a graphic designer or to hire one to get the job done.
10. Case Studies
Case studies are an effective way for those in the B2B space to demonstrate how their product or service will help future prospective customers. Using case studies allows a buy to see another customer’s journey from start to finish, and see what their results were like. By showing what you’ve been able to do for other customers, you’re more likely to convert someone to a paying customer. In addition to written case studies, you can use case study videos and video testimonials/reviews to really make the most of your content marketing efforts.
