If you’ve been monitoring what the marketing teams of B2B and B2C companies are focusing their energies on right now, you’ve probably drawn some insights that most are now working on a formal and more robust content marketing strategy. As much as 58% are boosting their budgets for content marketing in their bid to achieve content marketing corporate goals ranging from lead nurturing to greater brand awareness.
This and similar other stats and information from reputable sources all point to the increasing value of content marketing for business. It would only be logical for small and medium business to follow the lead of more established businesses, but it doesn’t mean they should also load up with big marketing guns that could eat up huge chunks from their marketing budgets. What they can do is to make use of these innovative types of content that deliver results – and they can start with the following ideas right now.
1. Blog Posts
One of the best types of content is blog post. In fact businesses of all sizes recognize how important blogging is for their business. Just posting once or twice per month can generate a business up to 70% more leads compared to competitors who don’t have their own blogs. Doing so would give their businesses a chance of generating a favorable ROI by as much as 13 times compared to having no blog.
Blogs are great content marketing tools that would do some great good for your brand. You really don’t need to have award-winning pieces, articles or blog posts to have a great blog. What’s important is that your blog lets you connect and engage with targeted audiences through your content. It\’s about giving them what they want, what they are interested in and what they would spend time on to read and consume. That’s what makes blog a powerful content marketing tool for promoting your brand.
2. White Papers
When people hear the term “content marketing”, the first things that would come to mind is content promotion through articles and blog posts. While these items provide the backbone for your content marketing framework, they are not the only materials you can use for getting the results you want.
One example is the white paper, basically a report that makes innovative use of text and graphics for providing targeted audiences with quick guides and instructions that will help them solve problems or make decisions. A great white paper that goes viral can really establish your brand as an authoritative source of reliable evergreen information that they can use and in the process generate high-quality leads for your business.
3. Infographics
Previous CJG articles explained how important it is to make use of visual elements with your content particularly in generating positive responses and engagement from targeted audiences. You can however generate even more positive impact by combining the power of visual and text elements through Infographics. These ingenious graphical tools can help you present relevant ideas in a more efficient form that is easier to digest.
As much as 99% of the message you want to convey to your targeted audience through visual information is absorbed by their brains, that’s why 30% more people will most likely choose and view an infographic that reading through a basic text article with no visual elements. With Infographics, your content creation efforts can gain as much as 300% greater visibility as the visually appealing and informative nature of infographics are very effective in getting and holding the attention of your targeted audiences.
4. Videos
To cap the visual-centric strategies for content creation, why not go for the motherload and make use of videos? Content created in short, informative and utterly entertaining video form can be more effective in creating greater awareness for your brand than mere photos. Ooh, you might have heard the “a picture can paint a thousand words” adage a thousand times before but you may not have realized yet than a single minute of video can generate much more than that – 1.8 million words for that matter.
Video sharing sites like YouTube are gaining tremendous traffic at a staggering one billion unique visitors each month. That opens a tremendous opportunity for creating a content through video. If you have not started doing so now, it’s probably high time that you should as video would be the most dominant form of consumer traffic in the Internet by the year 2017.
5. Animation
With many marketing channels available right now, it is now doubly hard for marketers to reach out to targeted audiences with their content. The virtual airwaves are flooded by as much as 27 million content items of various forms uploaded and shared by online users each day. Unless you become more innovative in your content marketing schemes, you will surely have a hard time getting through to your targeted audiences.
Visuals like photos and videos can help your content get noticed, but sometimes you may need that added ooomp! to make your content more noticeable. For this purpose, you can leverage on the use of animations for delivering your messages. Short but comprehensive animated explainer videos, whiteboard animations, and other non-linear presentation forms are fun and innovative ways that can capture readers attention – and entice them to learn about your brand more.
6. Webinars
People attend seminars to learn new things or acquire ideas how they can solve their problems or do things better and more efficient. In most cases, people actually spend a decent amount and listen to their favorite speaker or a team of workshop providers and learn something new. In the online world, the equivalent for seminars is the webinar and is considered as among the top most effective technique.
People naturally shun away from stuff that are purely promotional or is out there simply to sell or market something they really don’t need. People on the other hand attended webinars to learn, which is an indication of their interest and need in relation to a particular subject. You can supply this need by giving additional value in terms of learnings and knowledge you can present through a webinar.
7. Presentations and SlideShares
In a B2B marketing scenario, one business usually present what they can offer through offline presentations involving slideshows and other equivalent presentation materials. You can however, leverage this content format – whether you’re targeting customers in a B2B or a B2C market – through online presentations or slideshares. Up to 45% of B2B marketers believe this type of content is effective for generating favorable results for their business.
Usually, presentations like these are hosted in content-sharing sites and presented in PowerPoint slideshows, pdfs or any other equivalent presentation form using slides. Some of the more popular presentation platforms available is SlideShare, but you can also get good mileage marketing on other sites like Scribd and Authorstream.
8. Press Releases
While the face of journalism has drastically changed with the advent of online channels, the power of the press and media remains potent in changing or influencing consumer opinion about brands, products or services. The tools have changed and even journalists and press people have embraced these changes. In fact, up to 92% of journalists use search engines when researching materials for a new story or building up on an existing one.
That’s where the power of press releases come in. Press releases that got the attention of anyone from the pool of journalists using search engines everyday will definitely receive better promotion that will give your content marketing efforts that extra mileage it needs.
9. Podcast
Podcast (which is usually composed of human voice) is one of the best ways to convey meaning than mere words according to Top Rank Blog. Podcast is a type of content that is converted into an audio from text contents. It’s similar to radio broadcast but usually in a recorded format that you can listen to in your mobile, pc or tablet.
In theory, creating podcast to help your content marketing efforts might be a good option, but be aware that it’s not applicable to ALL businesses according to Ryan Hanley. So know your options and weight it carefully before using podcast as a content marketing tool. Top Rank Blog offers a very comprehensive post on its pros and cons, examples as well as best practices of podcast content marketing.
10. Mobile Centric Contents
Finally, with as much as 90% of US adults owning a mobile phone, it would be very inappropriate if mobile is excluded from this list. Forecasts point to mobile web as the trend of the Internet in the very near future and by next year people will already see mobile web overtaking other online platforms. With up to 78% of local mobile searches for a particular product or service resulting in a purchase, it is imperative that business owners and digital marketers to place importance to mobile centric contents such as mobile apps and so on.
Other types of content for your consideration:
- Email Newsletters
- Funny pictures or meme’s
- Motivational pictures
- E-books (comprehensive)
- Electronic magazines
Content rules and will continue to remain seated on its throne next year and years after that. With content at the helm and the core of your digital marketing efforts, looking for innovative and effective means of promoting your content should be at the top of digital marketers agenda – and they can surely get a good head-start with these 10 items (+bonuses) we shared above.