There is no big secret behind the purpose of content marketing. It aims to help your business reach out to a target audience and demonstrate how your service can solve people’s issues. To put it simply, you create content to attract potential leads and turn them into your customers.
Content marketing embraces different types of content that are more or less applicable to a certain business niche. And your goal is to know what formats of content would work for your product for a hundred percent.
In this post, you will find out four types of content that help you out in your marketing efforts.
Let’s start!
1. Blogging
Blogging is the very first content marketing strategy that website owners tend to rely on, and it drives organic traffic to a site perfectly. It helps rank high in Google for the niche-related keywords. Visme follows the same path and works on their blog constantly.
You might wonder what you will have to apply in your content marketing strategy to gain outstanding results. Stick to these three steps and boost the growth of traffic on your blog drastically.
Find out what topics your target audience wants to read on your blog
Organic traffic can never come to your web-resource if you don’t cover the topics people want to read. But how to find the topics your target audience would be interested in?
There are a few ways that you can use to explore topic ideas. You can hang out on your competitors’ blogs and analyze the content they produce. This way is quite time-consuming, while you must be ahead of your competitors.
The second way suggested is using the free Keyword Generator from Ahrefs with its awesome “Questions” report. Just add whatever keywords you want and get the list of questions people type on Google. What’s more important, you will have an opportunity to see monthly search volume stats per these suggested questions.
Explore the suggestions and choose those ones that seem promising to you. Plus, don’t forget to draw your attention to the search volume metric.
Think about content type carefully
It is strictly important to guess what type of content would work for your target audience. For instance, you want to rank for “how to create a marketing plan.” Your first thought was to write a step-by-step guide with all tips included. And you are right. According to what Google suggests, the type of content that covers this topic is “how-to guide.”
On the other hand, such a query like “on-page seo techniques” can be covered in a few different types of content.
As you can see, there are “how-to guides” and “list” articles on this topic.
To sum up, practice shows that you can work on creating four standard types of content: list articles, step-by-step guides, beginner guides (with all additional information included), and expanded definition.
Blog post promotion
Just for the record, there are over five million posts are published each day. Can you imagine how it is almost impossible to find your post among the others? Your blog post is doomed to fail without further promotion. So, how to promote your content?
- Email a list
- Share your content on social media
- Notify other bloggers (resources) you’ve referred in the content to
- Submit your post on online communities
- Promote your content with paid ads
- Build backlinks to your content
Use these six tips as a content marketing strategy to promote your blog posts effectively. In order to make sure your content promotion activities are combined and automated, you can use online marketing tools.
2. Podcasting for Content Marketing
Podcasting has already become a very popular format for spreading the word about the business and just for sharing some useful information. Moreover, during the time of a world pandemic, your participation in some podcast would be a nice opportunity to remind about the brand and promote your content verbally.
The question is how to find niche-related podcasts?
You can go to Google and type “top {your niche} podcasts” query.
You want to be interviewed on some popular podcast for a good reason. But if you don’t have this experience yet, you should start with the small podcasts. Or you can explore someone in your industry (even your competitors) who has already been a guest on different podcasts.
For example, Payman Taei, the founder of Visme, has appeared on multiple podcasts. And if you want to find these podcasts, you put a query “{name} podcasts.”
When the podcasts you want to be interviewed on are found, the next step is to pitch yourself. Before pitching you must listen to a few past episodes on this podcast. It will help you understand what topics have been discussed and suggest something fresh on the agenda.
3. YouTube Video Marketing
Thanks to YouTube, video marketing stands out of the other types of content nowadays. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Hence, you must be there for sure. Visme has been publishing video content on YouTube since 2015. Now, there are over 7 million views and 81K+ subscribers on the channel.
YouTube is a perfect opportunity to introduce your content from another angle. Visually. YouTube video content marketing is one of the content marketing trends that works like a charm. You might be interested in how to run a YouTube channel successfully. Here are two short but actionable steps you should take.
Suggest topics your target audience wants to find on YouTube
Let’s assume that you have just started your channel on YouTube. You don’t have any subscribers. You don’t have any video uploaded. But your goal is to skyrocket your channel promptly.
One of the most straightforward ways to find topics that your target audience would like is by exploring your competitors. That’s true. But the thing is that this content won’t be unique. Therefore, you need to find a solution in this case. You can use a free YouTube keyword tool from Ahrefs that will help you figure out the juiciest keyword ideas. For example, you want to create a video on “street workout.”
The tool suggested 100 keyword ideas you can take into account.
Work on video optimization
If your channel suggests videos on topics that tend to be more informative than engaging, you must always work on the eye-appealing side of your video content. Even if you decided to produce a video on a SaaS content marketing topic, it should be super visually appealing.
There is a question that might arise in your head – how?
First and foremost, you should get into the habit of scripting videos right before recording them. Secondly, design the thumbnails for each video, take care of sorting the videos in the “playlist” tab per topic, use the features that YouTube offers like adding watermarks, write engaging video descriptions, and make sure you optimize audio.
4. Create Free Online Courses
As the saying goes, one lives and learns. Everyone likes to study. Especially, if knowledge is free of charge. Hence, you can use this tendency for your benefit.
How? Create an online course. If you ask Google to show “{topic} free online courses”, you will see that lots of companies use this strategy in practice.
It would be fair to ask – how to create an online course that would resonate with a target audience? Obviously, creating an online course can’t be compared to writing articles. This task involves various separate activities that can be performed by the entire team of professionals.
But before you start thinking about what course to create, you must realize if you will need additional help. It is cool if you are Jack of all trades but let’s be realistic at this point. You won’t be able to handle everything alone. You might need to hire a freelancer (or a few of them), who are experts in different disciplines. When the team will be organized, you can start the process.
The course must solve the problem – detect it
If you decided to create an online course, you must understand the problem behind it. And this problem should be solved with the service or product your company offers. Keep in mind that it is strategically important to build a chain “course –> problem –> service as a problem solver.” Eventually, the course will help promote the service your company offers.
Let’s review the example of how it should be put into practice.
Tons of people are not tech-savvy when it comes to building visual presentations. These people are afraid of everything related to design. It seems quite complicated and less possible to be taught to. Despite the fact, having the skill of creating presentations is very important in business. Therefore, we created a free presentation course that is based on our own experience and knowledge in building presentations completely.
To detect the problem your target audience has, you must understand your buyer’s persona. And one of the best ways to do this is by researching online communities where people discuss topics related to your service or product.
Work on creating the course
Creating an online course is a wide topic that deserves to be covered in a separate post. Therefore, you can review lots of tutorials on how to do this.
The only thing that is worth adding here – people don’t take free online courses too seriously. There is a tendency that 90% of those who sign up for the course never complete it. That’s why you need to think about a plan “B” for such a case. At Visme, course takers will receive a Visme Versity certificate of completion.
It is up to you what to offer as a reward for your future students. Afterwards, don’t forget to promote your online course. Online course promotion is similar to how you promote blog posts.
What Type of Content Marketing You Should Choose
Before you decide what type of content to choose for yourself, you should review some content marketing statistics. These stats can help you prioritize the practicability of using a certain format of content.
You won’t be able to embrace all content formats simultaneously. Therefore, start with blogging or a video content marketing strategy. Creating an online course requires a solid base of material to be prepared and it is time-consuming.
So, how to choose?
First of all, you must see what type of content your target audience likes the most. For example, if you cover the topic related to email marketing and you want to create a piece of content on how to sell with email, you should be focused on a blog post. If you are a karate instructor and want to teach some kata, your content format should be video.
Taking participation in podcasts for those people who are not good at writing but skillful speakers. As you can see, it depends on many subjective factors. Choose your content format direction and move ahead.
To Sum Up
This guide has familiarized you with types of content marketing and explained how each of them could be useful for your business. Stick to the pieces of advice you found in the post, apply them in practice, and grow your business. Here are some additional resources that can help you grow your brand and business:
- Top 4 Benefits of a CRM
- How to Close the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
- Shoppers vs. Buyers: How to Facilitate the Sale
- Why Using a Simple Email Drip Campaign Will Help You Win New Business
- What is Customer Acquisition Marketing Strategy?
If you are looking for additional ways to grow your business, get in touch with the 360Connect team!