- No two digital marketing campaigns are alike. Your content strategy depends on your unique message, audience, and goals.
- 61% of content professionals are challenged with knowing what’s most important to their audiences.
- Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, reflect often, and make necessary pivots to ensure you’re still headed in the right direction.
If there were one right way to do SEO, the folks at RMG might be out of a job. Brands could simply follow a few tried-and-true steps and see their rankings soar. The reality is that SEO is an ever-changing landscape in which success depends on unique ranking factors depending on your industry, message, audience, and so much more – not to mention whatever Google’s algorithms are up to at any given moment.
If you ask us, that’s all part of the fun of content marketing. But it can create headaches for the brands trying to keep up. Soon you can find yourself managing a blog and two or three social media channels, wondering if you should also start a podcast and, oh yeah, maybe crank out some infographics?
No! Well, not necessarily. Content marketing is about building trust and authority with your audience by delivering high value to specific customers. It’s about quality over quantity. In fact, by simply throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, you could actually hurt your rankings.
So before you start recording that podcast, here are our content marketing tips for determining the best types of content your brand.
Considering the most common types of content
BLOGS
Good at: Building trust, demonstrating authority, providing information
Good for: Anyone
Probably the most popular avenue for content marketing, blogs have been around seemingly since the dawn of (internet) time and don’t seem to be going anywhere. When done right, blog content writing is an extremely valuable way for brands to build trust with and inform audiences while communicating value and authority to search engines.
The best part? With enough knowledge and content writing talent, you can blog about pretty much anything. That makes blogging a good idea for virtually any kind of business.
For more content marketing tips for blogs, read our piece on giving your blog the SEO treatment.
VISUAL CONTENT
Good at: Providing information creatively, personalizing your brand, supporting the user experience
Good for: Brands with complex products or services, brands with stories to tell, thought leaders
Visual content includes, but is not limited to, any of the following:
- Videos
- Infographics
- GIFs and memes
- Photos
There’s no end to the benefits of visual content. It can break up the monotony of text, cut through the noise during the endless scroll, and provide information about your product or service, enriching the user experience. Even something as simple as a photo from your most recent company get-together can put a face to your brand and help build rapport with your audience.
Of course, the more original your visual content, the more resources you will need to create them – it’s more labor-intensive to create a video or infographic from scratch than to share that hilarious Game of Thrones meme.
USER-GENERATED CONTENT
Good at: Building community, building trust, telling stories
Good for: Lifestyle brands, local businesses, brands with strong community ties
Consumers these days, especially millennials and Gen Z, trust each other more than they trust brands. That makes user-generated content a powerful tool for communicating the integrity of your brand to potential new customers.
Doing UGC right without damaging your reputation or community relationships takes careful planning, though. Learn more in our blog, Weighing The Pros and Cons of User-Generated Content for Marketing.
We’ve just scratched the surface of all the types of content you can create for your audience. Others include:
- Whitepapers – These pieces of longform thought leadership content usually require much more in-depth research than a typical blog, drawing on current studies and data to provide a comprehensive picture of a particular trend or challenge in a given industry.
- Case Studies – Case studies demonstrate the success of your product or service for a particular customer. They require a solid base of success cases and testimonials but can be powerful ways to demonstrate value.
- Webinars – Similar to videos and infographics, webinars are great for supplementing other kinds of content for more in-depth understanding of your product, service, or industry. They can require heavy resources to prepare and undertake, but can go a long way in improving user experience and creating a community around your brand.
- Podcasts – Podcasts can create a better product experience, inform customers about a particular issue or industry, personalize your brand, and reach a wide audience. They can also be easier and cheaper to produce than videos.
Choosing the right types of content for you
Okay, there are tons of options when it comes to creating content – but which ones are best?
That depends on several factors unique to your business. If you’re a monthly subscription box service, for example, user-generated content like unboxing videos could do wonders for your brand. A whitepaper on the subscription box industry, on the other hand, would probably put your audience to sleep.
To determine what types of content will work best for you, you’ll have to start with some soul searching. Search Engine Journal recommends asking yourself the following questions:
- “What goal will this content help my brand reach?”
- “Will this piece of content accomplish anything measurable for my brand?”
- “Who is going to care about this content?”
- “How will I know this piece of content was a success?”
We’d also recommend considering what your competitors are doing. Are they producing the kind of content you’re considering? A “no” doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t either, but this is a good barometer for what’s expected in your industry vs. where there are opportunities you could seize with new or better content.
The answers to the above questions should help you think more deeply about your goals, what KPI’s you’ll need to use, and possibly most importantly, your audience and their interests. According to Content Marketing Institute, 61% of content professionals are challenged with knowing what’s most important to their audiences. How can you provide your audience with great content they’ll want to read and share if you don’t know what they care about?
Setting up for success
So, you’ve narrowed down what types of content you’ll include in your next campaign. Great! Here are a few more content marketing tips to help you get off on the right foot:
- When in doubt, shoot for a mix of timely and evergreen content.
- Prioritize originality. Neither readers nor Google likes thin content or duplicate content.
- Stay organized with content calendars and creative briefs.
- Promote your content on social media.
- Monitor success with relevant KPIs, such as bounce rate and time spent on page.
Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, reflect often, and make necessary pivots to ensure you’re still headed in the right direction. Most importantly, pay attention to what your audience cares about and write from a place of sincere passion. It will come through!
Still in doubt? Get in touch with the content marketing experts at Redefine Marketing and we’ll help you put our best content marketing tips to use. It’s what we do!
