In the world of information technology and the internet, content marketing provides such a generous amount of exposure—any business would be foolish not to consider it.
Quick Links
In fact, 3 out of 4 B2C organizations are very pleased with the success of their content marketing strategy. The competition is tight nowadays, and content marketing allows even smaller businesses to go toe-to-toe with bigger corporations.
Companies are always looking for ways to develop their content marketing strategy. However, to improve your strategy, you must first know what types of content marketing there are and how to make them work effectively.
Here are 8 of the most common types of content marketing. In addition, we’ll elaborate on why content marketing is good for your business and how to create your own content marketing strategy.
Why is content marketing good for your business?
The best thing about content marketing is that it generates a lot of exposure for a business.
After all, the main purpose of marketing is to cast a spotlight on your company or, more specifically, your product or service. Content marketing allows you to target a particular niche audience.
This is where social media comes in. Social media is extremely prevalent, to a degree that feels ubiquitous. For example, did you know that almost 80% of Americans have some kind of social media profile?
In any case, not only does social media allow a company to reach out to its customers and show off its products, but it also allows a company to form a more personal bond with customers. This way, they create the ultimate form of trust in modern business—a brand and a following.
With branding comes trust—trust in the quality of your product, the quality of your service, and the longevity of your venture. Think of all the big brands in any industry. Ford, Gucci, Makita, Amazon, Google, McDonald’s, Visa, Tencent—all these brands are known across the world and have armies of fans buying their product. These brands do it all through shrewd, high-quality content marketing that drives more and more people to their flock of loyal followers.
Finally, there is one more thing that makes content marketing such a lucrative investment for businesses: it’s relatively cheap. Compared to other, more traditional forms of marketing (like billboard ads, TV ads, or cold calling), content marketing can be affordable while offering impressive returns on investment.
In fact, content marketing is one of the most viable forms of promoting oneself for smaller companies just starting out in their industry, mostly because in-house teams can do it and for little cost. Additionally, there are already tools available for calculating content marketing costs—just look at this social media marketing pricing calculator tool.
It’s perfectly effective for small and up-and-coming businesses to lean almost exclusively on content marketing to promote their products. They likely have no money to buy time slots on TV or billboards, making them appear more genuine and individual-focused than large brands that have to tackle thousands of customers.
All in all, there is no reason for any company not to engage with content marketing. Between all the exposure, branding, and leads, content marketing is just too cost-efficient not to consider using it to further your own business.
How to form your content marketing strategy
Now that you know how lucrative it is to run a content marketing strategy, how do you create one?
In most modern content marketing guides, the first step is selecting your channel.
By this, they mean you should find a channel your target audience frequents. You’ll have the best chance of reaching the most relevant people and generating the highest quality leads.
Naturally, your channel will also dictate the types of content marketing best suited for it. If you decide to go to Twitter or Facebook, you won’t hit people with walls of text—instead, you might create a mix of short, catchy posts and video content that promotes your business.
Alternatively, if you start a website, you’d be smart to start a blog where you can post articles on topics concerning your industry.
Blogs are a great way to establish yourself as an industry expert. If written properly and backed up with good SEO practices, posts will rank very high on search engine result pages (SERP), driving good traffic to your website.
Now that you’ve got your channel of choice down and content marketing type, you should focus on creating a content plan.
This will include not only the content itself but also a posting schedule and content maintenance, which refers to the practice of updating content to keep it relevant in the long run.
Of course, keeping track of all this yourself can be hard. Should you see yourself expanding and unable to keep up with your traffic, you should consider hiring a content marketing agency. These guys will take over your operation and ensure your content marketing strategy stays on point and relevant as time progresses.
After that, all that’s left is for you to find a way to promote your content. Usually, you’ll adjust your promotion strategy to your chosen channel. If you’re looking at Twitter, you’ll want people to share your content with their followers. If you’re creating content for YouTube, you’ll want people to “like, share, and subscribe, and hit that notification bell” to encourage the YouTube algorithm.
Finally, keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind no matter what channel you prefer to use.
This involves keyword research to target specific user intents, optimize images, write meta tags, write meta descriptions for your content, and engage in technical SEO to improve your website loading speeds and overall user experience.
By following these practices, SEO will ensure your content gets noticed and starts generating organic traffic immediately, Then, you can promote your content further and, by extension, your business.
Types of content marketing
Finally, we reach the meat of the article: the types of content marketing.
There are many ways to create content, and you don’t have to engage with all of them. But having a basic knowledge of many content types will allow you to branch out and optimize your existing content.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are the quintessential content on the internet because they are the easiest to create and the most receptive to SEO practices.
Your blog posts can tell stories, create guides, review products, and talk about your experiences—essentially, you can use blogs to talk about anything you think is relevant to your business or your industry.
Blogs are the best way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. And if your content is good enough, your articles will increase organic traffic to your website. However, ensure you know how to convert your blog traffic, or you’ll end up with high bounce rates, which you want to avoid.
Finally, blog posts are malleable and versatile when it comes to repurposing content. A blog post can turn into a social media post with a bit of trimming or a video with the post as a script.
Thus, blog posts are and will always be the best starting point for anyone looking to get into content marketing.
Videos
Thanks to the proliferation of YouTube and TikTok, video has become one of the most popular types of content marketing.
The popularity of video content is simple—video is easy to digest. It’s also much more colorful and visually striking than a simple blog post.
Videos can range from short, 30-second ads that show just a glimpse of your proposal to 60-minute essays explaining things in-depth, with a call to action at the end.
However, contrary to blog posts, creating video content is both more expensive and more complex. You’ll need good editing software, possibly good quality video-making equipment, proper knowledge of script writing, and a whole lot of guts to appear in front of a camera or to put your business in the spotlight.
You can, of course, always hire professionals, but they come with their own costs. Once you start growing, you’ll probably need a DAM system to keep track of all your digital assets.
Infographics
The need for backlinks and accruing actionable, reliable sources to back up claims has created a market for statistics websites. These websites collect data from various authoritative sources and offer them as easily available statistics that can reinforce points when writing about relevant topics.
Now, these websites create blog posts containing various stats and often create infographics.
Infographics are posters presenting statistics more visually, i.e., presenting stats as graphs, pie charts, and other easily-digestible visual forms.
This makes infographics easily shareable and very versatile, as they can appear in videos, blog posts, social media, etc.
Social Media
Social media is a potent tool in any marketer’s arsenal.
Through social media, you can talk to your audience directly, creating a familiar bond on a more personal level with your customers.
We’ve already discussed how brands use social media to further their goals by creating followers. A strong community formed around your brand is one of the best long-term strategies for growing your business. You’re building a loyal customer base and enabling easy onboarding for new customers through community engagement.
Creating content for social media, however, requires some deliberation. One has to be in tune with their audience to select a tone of voice and tailor content for a particular audience. This is why most companies turn to professionals like an Instagram growth service to figure out the best time to post on Instagram, SEO practices for Facebook, or how to get retweets on Twitter.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers are very closely tied to social media marketing, as social media is their preferred playground and way of spreading their influence.
Shrewd brands use influencers with exceptional efficiency in building brand awareness and creating a following.
That’s because an influencer can be anyone—a famous Youtuber, a movie star, a prominent sportsperson, an Instagram model, or a TikTok star—anyone with any online following can spread your message further.
Influencer marketing works because it is, at its core, a form of word-of-mouth marketing.
People are more likely to trust a familiar person (a friend, a family member, and, in this case, a famous person). Influencers are people their audiences look up to, respect, and spend a lot of time with, even if that time is through a screen.
Emails and newsletters
Email marketing is often used by companies in order to direct people’s attention toward their other content.
Email marketing is, basically, an evolution of cold calling. However, unlike cold calling, emails can appear more personal.
With the advances in automation and personalization, the two can be combine to create a powerful email marketing strategy.
Through personalization, you can identify the kind of content each customer likes to consume and curate your content just for them. This curated content usually appears in the form of newsletters.
Automation then allows you to send out emails with that curated content as soon as it’s available. Furthermore, it can be adjusted to send out emails at regular intervals, thus always keeping your customers in the loop.
Emails can also confirm your customer is interested in your product. SaaS services often communicate with their customers via email, often sending their pricing proposals to clients so they can ensure the price is agreed upon. This helps form a tighter bond with the client, who is sure to appreciate all the attention you’re giving them.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a cross between video content, influencer marketing, and social media. They’re very popular with people completing mindless tasks or commuting to work with time to listen to (but not read) a lot of content over a prolonged period.
Hosting podcasts for industry experts in your niche shows your willingness to spread information about your industry. It also creates interest, as people who follow experts in your shows are likely to tune in to your podcasts and perhaps even look at what you have to sell.
Of course, podcasts, just like video content, require a bit of prep. From cameras and sound equipment to finding the best podcast hosting platform, you will have to invest a significant amount of money to make them work.
Reviews and Testimonials
People tend to trust other people more than faceless brands. That’s why many companies, especially B2B and those in the service industry, promote good reviews and testimonials. They provide social proof that customers can trust the company’s quality products or services.
For example, a restaurant with bad reviews and a low score can easily fall into obscurity. Bad testimonials in B2B can hurt your company and prevent you from getting more leads in a marketing sector with low lead numbers but high customer loyalty.
This is why businesses go out of their way to provide exceptional service and tout any glowing review as proof of their excellence.
Content marketing boosts influence
Remember that there are many more types of content marketing out there, but they all boil down to the same thing—making your business known and creating a reputation.
Branding is essential for any business’s success, and a good content marketing strategy might just be the missing piece to create a brand and propel you to long-term success.