How can you make sure your marketing stands out in the age of content shock? How can you provide more value to your audience, and get them to pay attention to your messaging, in an over-saturated market?
One of the best ways to drive better results from your content marketing strategy is to diversify the types of content you’re creating.
Here are four top forms of content that will help you supercharge your content marketing strategy.
1. Create a video
Video is an extremely popular form of content online, if not the most popular. And it isn’t just a branding tool. Recent research by Eyeview found that 87% of marketers are seeing significant ROI from digital video. There are multiple types of clips that you can create, such as behind the scenes videos of your business, educational presentations, product reveals, business ads, social media updates or cool animated videos.
Likewise, in terms of tools, there are quite a few good options that you can use for creating your own professional-looking videos, even with little to no experience. You can use a web app like Promo by Slidely to create bite-sized video ads for social media. Promo is an especially compelling solution, given that it has a library of literally millions of premium video clips to use, as well as music, so that all you need to do is add your titles and logo, and you’re ready to upload it to the ad platform of your choice.
There are also plenty of apps that make it easy to broadcast live to multiple platforms, to create video slideshows, animated explainer videos or even multi-channel live broadcasts.
2. Hold a webinar
A similar option to online courses is holding a webinar. Webinars are much more widely used by businesses, as they offer lots of value and, as one-off events, are a bit easier to produce and to convert registrants for.
Webinars don’t just offer value to audiences, but also to the businesses or marketers that hold them. The biggest reason for this is that they are incredible lead magnets – when done right. In fact, one recent study found that as many as 20-40% of webinar attendees eventually become qualified sales leads.
To get started, first think of a good subject for a webinar, something that you know will interest your audience. Ideally your presentation should tackle a problem that is common in your niche. There’s a plethora of different webinar platform services that you can use, each with its own specialties. ClickMeeting supports editing captured videos for later repurposing, while BigBlueButton webinars can be embedded on any web page with ease. Next, you need to promote your webinar with a landing page, banners, social posts and emails.
Webinars are a great way of providing value to your audience – don’t turn the whole thing into a sales pitch though, or this will put people off.
3. Engage with interactive content
Interactive content is extremely popular with audiences, as it allows them to participate with the consumption experience. As a plus, it provides value in the form of entertainment, or, in other cases, interactive media can offer educational value.
Not only is interactive content popular with audiences, but marketers and businesses love it, too. A study from the Content Marketing Institute discovered that 81% of marketers believe interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content, while 79% have found that it also enhances retention of brand messaging, when used with other traditional marketing tactics.
Interactive content can be anything from quizzes and polls to games – basically whatever you want, so long as it allows users to control how the content unfolds. There are lots of tools that you can use here, including Qzzr for quizzes and SnapApp for calculators. Roll out a new interactive content item every few months at the least, in order to boost your engagement levels and entertain your audiences.
4. Spread your message organically with an infographic
I’m a big believer in infographics as one of the impactful forms of visual content. In fact, this year’s B2B benchmark report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that some 58% of marketers favor infographics as key elements to their mix of tactics.
“I would say there was a brief period of time a few years ago that Google scared people out of the market and questioned the ability of infographics to get links,” Nowsourcing‘s Brian Wallace recently told PRDaily, “but well-made campaigns continue to outperform.”
Most marketers find that infographics perform best on social media, as opposed to attracting a high volume of backlinks, but “reference guide” style infographics have been shown to yield shares as well as links. Do some original research into a useful topic that has legs, don’t skimp on design, and your visual is likely to drive major ROI.
5. Ungate premium resources as playbooks
This content format is one of my secret weapons. A hybrid ebook-infographic, playbooks take “comprehensive guide” content and package it as a standalone, compellingly designed microsite.
Among others, I’ve built out playbooks for Web Profits (about customer advocacy), Mailshake (about email outreach) and LinkTexting (about mobile app promotion). These assets have yielded dozens of high-value backlinks and qualified business leads, in addition to hundreds of social shares and Product Hunt upvotes.
While some marketers prefer to keep premium resources like these locked behind lead capture forms, I’ve found that they perform the best when available as ungated, free access web pages as well as downloadable pdf files for those who opt to submit their contact information.
Conclusion
Although the content marketing world is definitely becoming a bit crowded and saturated, there still are quite a few ways to stand out from the crowd. The above are all content formats that are proven to drive huge marketing engagement.