3 Types of Content Marketing Strategies
Useful, informative and inspirational content can bring loyal customers and be transformative for a business. Content marketing is one of the buzzwords in the digital marketing world, and for good reason. With different mediums and multiple types of content that work, depending on the audience, content marketing has multiple layers that need unravelling. Here are some of the different types of content marketing you need in your digital marketing strategy.
Many people think of content marketing as being just one area of digital marketing. In fact, it can be sub-divided into multiple categories that deals with different content types, and the mediums you place the content on. All of the different forms of content marketing collectively contribute towards the wider goals of this digital marketing method. For most businesses, this is to increase sales, develop better brand awareness, cultivate loyal and repeat customers, and place your business as an iconic leader in the specific sector.
With so many different types of content marketing to consider, it can be difficult to know where to start. While different approaches will suit different business types, these three content marketing categories are often the most effective.
1. Blog Content Marketing
One of the key methods of engaging audiences, blogs form the core of content marketing approaches. Blogs are fantastic for providing customers with good quality information that relates to your sector. They are ideal for engaging customers on a particular subject, while demonstrating different aspects of your business that you want to promote.
Good quality blogs can help you rank better in search engines such as Google, particularly if you have identified the key words and key phrases you should be using to gain business in this way. Working with an SEO agency can help you with this to ensure you maximize the effectiveness of your blogs.
The best way to plan your blog marketing is to create a blog calendar. This will enable you to ensure you plan a good spread of blog content each month, covering the different topics that are important to your business. It will also give you time to plan who will write the content, and whether this will be done by staff members or by people external to your business, such as copywriters or subject experts. It may be a good idea to find a writer who is just starting their career, so that you can help them out and perhaps get a better price on the content writing as well.
2. Social Media Content Marketing
Most people who work in the digital marketing sphere understand the power of social media. Content is the key to the success of any business on social media. It is not enough to simply have a social media profile for your brand and hope people follow just because they know of your work.
Spending time creating brilliant content for social media is a must-do. Understanding what works well for different social media marketing platforms is the first step, as content needs to be repurposed to suit the different audiences. For example, while Instagram works best with powerful imagery, an inspirational written description and the right hashtags, LinkedIn content needs to work for people who are scrolling in a professional context.
Remember that you don’t necessarily need to come up with totally original content for every social media post. While some content that is designed just for social media works really well, use some of your other content too. This includes content you have published in your blogs – a quote or snappy description of a theme explored in a blog works really well on some social media platforms. You can add columns onto your blog content calendar to map out which blogs would translate well onto different social media channels. Mapping content across many channels like this helps you get the very most out of the investment you make in content marketing.
3. Video Content Marketing
There will always be a place for written content, but customers increasingly want to see content in a variety of visual formats too. Incredibly, research shows that in 2022, people will be spending 100 minutes a day watching videos online! The power of video content marketing cannot be ignored.
Video content marketing for brands can cover different areas, including product demonstrations, how-to videos, case studies, interviews with experts and influencers, event videos, customer testimonials and general brand-building videos. The breadth can sound daunting, but the key is to look at what you do as a business, and refine this down to a list of video content that is most relevant to you.
Also remember that videos do not have to be shot by expensive film crews these days. Even smartphones or relatively low-cost equipment can create great quality videos. You’ll also need someone with video editing skills to put all the footage together. However, once you have a bank of footage, you’ll have endless ways to cut together different videos that are effective for your brand. And this can be used across all your channels to support your other content types too, such as blogs and social media posts.