When it comes to marketing your business’s products and services, generating relevant content should be a vital part of your plan. Whether it’s a blog post, infographic, or even a video, a successful content marketing strategy that delivers fresh content on a continual basis can support your social media marketing, email marketing, SEO strategy, blog planning and more.
Maintain A Blog to Generate Fresh Content
Blogs offer an opportunity to include many different types of content directly on your website – from educational articles to news-worthy information. Blogs can be easily shared on social media and through email, allowing businesses to appeal to users at different stages of the consumer journey and attract meaningful website traffic. Blogs also allow businesses to link to existing product and service pages on your website, providing ample possibilities for promotion and positioning. With the ability to include important keywords and phrases that visitors are using on search engines, blogs can also have significant value for SEO. According to Forbes, websites that have a blog typically have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t. Notably, search engines prioritize pages with new content and lots of inbound links, all of which blogs help to generate.
Content that is relevant to consumers’ knowledge-needs will make it more relevant, result in higher rankings on search engines, and ultimately boost organic search traffic to your site. Also, by curating relevant content for your audiences, you set the stage for becoming an influencer within your industry.
For example, if you are a financial institution, distinctive blog topics may look like “Tips for Pre-qualifying for a Mortgage” or “How to Build Credit.” Both topics offer the ability to promote several different products on a bank or credit union website. But they also provide more relatable information, guidance and answers to the audience than a standard mortgage product page or personal loan page might contain.
When planning your content strategy, keep your content as relevant to your industry as possible. While it’s ok to capitalize on popular trends, like “National Donut Day” or “National Puppy Day”, find opportunities to link these topics to your industry, business, products or services. In order to drive your goals through content marketing and showcase desired products and services, create content that is product-specific, event specific, discount specific, editorial-topic specific or solution specific.
Get Creative With Content
Instagram and Snapchat are great examples of platforms that house visual and engaging content. Younger audiences are moving away from long-form articles when planning content for marketing campaigns and moving towards a mixture of articles and short videos, images, infographics and other creatives. Let’s dive into the different types of content to consider introducing to your marketing strategy.
Videos
One-third of all online activity is spent watching videos. Across all industries, video content marketing can help businesses attract and engage target customers, as well as increase the amount of time the average user spends on your site.
The type of videos you post should be consistent with the products and services you offer, as well as consumer needs and goals. Videos can be created using existing information and materials – from content to imagery. Do you have a big promotion or sale coming up? Make a short video explaining the offer and post it on your website for your viewers. If you have a new product that you find consumers have a lot of questions about, make a how-to video that you can share on the site and with users directly. Videos may seem daunting or time-consuming, but there are often simple ways to incorporate them into your marketing strategy.
Infographics
Often making complicated or boring content easy to understand, infographics are a great combination of educational and visually appealing content. Most commonly, infographics include visual data such as graphs, statistics and short blurbs of content, centralized around a specific topic. Infographics can offer a visual aid to explain product or service features/benefits, company information like mission and history, and more. If you’re interested in producing an infographic for your business, contact us, and let our team of talented digital strategists and designers get to work for you.
White Papers
White papers are a more traditional form of content marketing that is still relevant today for many industries. On a website, white papers are downloadable documents that provide helpful resources and insights on a specific topic. This is advantageous for users as it allows them to keep a local copy of your content. Since white papers are valuable for audiences, businesses can require that someone give their name, email and other identifiable information in a short form in order to access them. This “gated content” approach is an effective lead-generation strategy, collecting contact information that can be used for future marketing – from email newsletters to direct follow ups. White papers are also useful for measuring engagement, as you can track how many people downloaded them.
If you are B2B company, white papers can be beneficial for building thought leadership and positioning your business as an expert in your respective industry. Take a look at some of ZAG’s White Papers to see examples of this type of content marketing and obtain valuable digital insights.
Case Studies
Showcasing detailed success stories can be an effective way to provide real examples of how your business has helped customers achieve their goals. This kind of content is especially important for potential customers as they evaluate vendors to suit their specific needs. In addition to garnering audience trust, case studies often provide valuable insight into your company’s capabilities, processes and other important information. Not all customers have the same journey, so it is helpful to highlight your products and services in real-life to help build trust and leads.
Look at some of ZAG’s Case Studies and get inspired.
There are also of course many other different types of content marketing you can include on your website. Once you have identified your audiences and goals, think outside the box when it comes to curating content and integrating it with your website.
Share Your Content
By now, all businesses should be well versed in the benefits social media marketing and why it is an essential vehicle for brand awareness, customer engagement and overall content marketing. After all, the building blocks of all social media platforms is valuable content.
The unique content you create on your website is perfect material for distribution on your social channels, and even email marketing newsletters. Strategically sharing your videos, articles, infographics, case studies, white papers and more on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or through email to can help attract your target audiences at various stages of the consumer journey. It also creates backlinks to your site, which is favorable for SEO.
When deciding what social media platforms to use, think about your marketing objectives, target audiences, and promotional products, service or resources. Each social platform also has unique characteristics that offer specific benefits and access to different audiences. For example, Instagram is a great way to connect with younger generations while LinkedIn is best for business-related communications. A calendar can help to plan continual content month to month, laying out everything from the content for your social platforms and campaign landing pages to email marketing efforts. And, having all your content outlined in one place will help you to keep your content fresh, timely relevant.
Content marketing drives your marketing strategy. There are so many roads to take but it is important that you choose the one that is relevant to your business and online consumers. If you need help with any of your content marketing efforts, reach out to our team of professionals. We have the tools steer your marketing strategy in the right direction.