Today I will talk about creating a successful content marketing strategy to help you reach your audience and boost conversions. What you need to know about content marketing. What is content marketing? Why is it important?
I will also share successful content marketing examples to provide context and inspiration.
The definition of content marketing is simple: It’s the process of publishing written and visual material online to attract more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, eBooks, infographics, videos, and more.
However, content marketing is not just publishing a thin piece of content and hoping people will find it. It’s about purposefully tailoring your pages, videos, eBooks, and posts to your target audience so that they find you the inbound way rather than the outbound way. You provide value to your potential clients which makes them want to connect with you rather than sell to them. No one likes to be sold to.
Today outbound marketing strategies aren’t as effective at resonating with and converting audience members as they once were.
Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a natural way (a.k.a. inbound). A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content — or telling a story. In doing so, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and tailored to your audience.
Let’s look at the various types of content marketing.
There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate in your strategy —some of the most common are:
1. Online Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.
Your objective should be to educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer intending to build relationships between your customers and you that results in increased loyalty. Show your audience how your products and services solve their challenges, and examples of how you have helped others make great content. If you create a sense of community around your brand you are well on your way to being able to monetize your content. They signed up for the information, they stayed for the community. That is how Jason Van Orden describes his experience running The Academy.
Online content marketing refers to any material you publish online, but more specifically, it refers to your web pages. A strong online content marketing strategy will help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and get you in front of the right people at the right time.
2. Social Media Content Marketing
With over 4.2 billion global social media users it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media marketing. There are several platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with and several ways you can create and share content on each of them (e.g. photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).
Social Media Content Marketing Examples: Apple
Apple’s Shot on an iPhone campaign encouraged iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Max users to share their very best photographs, using the phone’s macro function.
iPhone users captured images of the everyday, taking ordinary objects and making them into something extraordinary. Apple asked users to share their shots on social media using the hashtags #shotonaniPhone or #iPhonemacrochallenge.
Ten professional photographers and staff from Apple judged the online submissions and selected 10 winners.
The campaign was simple yet powerful. It encouraged users to experiment with their new iPhones, resulting in nearly 60,000 posts on Instagram alone.
When releasing a new product, launching a User Generated Content (UGC) campaign that encourages your customers to share their experience with the product is an engaging promotional tool with a high virality potential.
3. Infographic Content Marketing
Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand, graphic format. With a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you’re trying to distill an educational and/ or complex topic so all audience members can understand it.
An excellent example is “A Well-Balanced Blog” on LinkedIn
As the market becomes saturated with infographics, finding unique and creative ways to rise above the noise is essential. This LinkedIn infographic does just that in two ways.
First, it takes a thematic approach to the content. Rather than providing a matrix outlining when to post certain types of blog content, LinkedIn uses a visual metaphor to communicate the information. This helps make the subject matter more exciting and easier to understand.
Second, the use of photography is visually appealing. The infographic design takes on its own personality with photos of meats, vegetables, and grains. What could be better? We’re left with a great resource that’s amazing to look at.
To see the infographic Ctrl+Click here
4. Blog Content Marketing
Blogs are a powerful type of inbound content and allow for a lot of creativity regarding their purpose and topic. With a blog, you can do things like promote other internal and external content and blog articles via links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information.
Blogging Content Marketing Examples: Sisters from AARP
The Sisters from AARP is a community for Black women, connecting with them on health, wealth, relationships, music and movies, faith, and more. The site offers a safe place for them to come together and discuss these real topics touching all generations.
The Sisters of AARP won a Content Marketing Award for its exceptional content covering a broad set of topics and an established style and voice.
There is much to learn from this outstanding achievement and what it took to create Sisters from AARP. Content Marketing Institute’s article gives more information about this community.
AARP created this content for a specific audience using a particular voice—just think, “Best Friends at brunch.”
Make sure your voice is friendly and approachable. The Sisters from AARP is authentic, shareable, and friendly, almost as if you were ordering your next drink during a girl’s day out.
Their newsletter can be found here.
5. Podcast Content Marketing
More than 60 million people listen to podcasts across the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have begun creating and sharing their podcasts.
Podcasts allow for much creativity as they can be about any topic of choice. Additionally, you determine other factors related to the podcast such as the cadence of episodes, who’s on the podcast, where you advertise the podcast, and how long episodes are.
TEDTalks branched out into podcasts with TEDTalks Daily because they wanted to capture another subset of users who might enjoy stories about astronomy, homesteading, tree identification, personal finance, artificial intelligence, coding, and animal husbandry. Commuters on public transit might not be able to watch a video lecture comfortably while retaining a sense of their surroundings, but they can more easily do so with a podcast. And TEDTalks Daily serves up something new every day.
TEDTalks benefits by placing the brand in another app ecosystem — podcasts — and furthering its visibility, authoritative credibility, and name recognition. To listen to a podcast Ctrl + Click here.