The Types of Content Your Business Needs to Be Creating
Content marketing is a staple for businesses big and small. No matter what industry you’re in, you need to be creating content that provides value to your target audience. This content drives traffic to your website, builds a loyal audience, turns that audience into customers, and keeps your business at the top of people’s minds.
However, a content marketing strategy can be tough when you don’t know what types of content you need to be producing. Have no fear, Keystone Click is here to help! The following seven types of content are tried and true — we use them with all of our digital marketing clients.
1. ebooks
The first type of content is also the biggest and most time-consuming for you to create. However, they are also extremely successful. The reason that ebooks are so successful is that they are a form of “gated content.” Gated content means that for someone to get the ebook, they need to give you something in return, like their name and email. Once you have their name and email, you can start sending them other content they might find interesting. You can also run entire campaigns around ebooks because they are longer forms of niche information. You can create tons of emails, social media posts, and even videos right from your ebook.
2. Case Studies
Case studies can help your business organically build a rapport with your audience. They are social proof that your business is great and knows exactly what needs to be done to have an impact. Case studies are also evergreen content, meaning that they’re timeless, and can be reused and reformatted — just like ebooks.
They are also fairly simple to make. All you have to do is answer these questions: What was the original challenge? What process did my business undertake to solve the challenge? What was the outcome? Lucky for you, customers love to be talked about. It gives them a chance to showcase what they do to a new audience. Did I mention case studies are great for SEO? People are always searching Google for the answer to their challenges, and by creating case studies you are directly providing people with those answers.
3. Newsletters
Email marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing tools. McKinsey Company found that email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media. Your business needs to be creating and sending a newsletter consistently. “Consistent” is a keyword here. If your newsletter is consistent then it will act as a reminder of, “Hey! Our business is still here and will continue to be here whenever you need us.” You should include your blog posts, any thought leadership articles you find online from third parties, and any fun things you are doing as a company, such as volunteer work or competitions.
4. Interviews
When you think of interviews, you probably think of getting interviewed by the local news. While interviews as a content piece are a little bit like that, you should start thinking about interviews in today’s terms. Podcasts are a great form of interview content. You can start your own podcast and interview prospective customers to build a good relationship or you can push your name out to new audiences by being interviewed with the help of a website like MatchMaker. If you do end up either creating a podcast or being a guest on someone else’s, make sure to create a QA blog post out of it!
5. Blogs
Every business should have a blog. Blogs are thought leadership content pieces that establish you as an industry expert. The nice thing about blog posts is that they will continue to pay dividends. For example, we have a client that posted a blog in December of 2019. That blog brings in 6% (actually a lot) of traffic to their site and is consistently one of the top-viewed pages. You should make your blog posts easy to read. Try your best to avoid using industry jargon that your audience may not understand. The best practice is to have your blog posts be a minimum of 800 words. This is because anything less than that and Google won’t consider it worthwhile to rank, and the whole point of creating content is so people will find your business.
6. Infographics
Infographics are a great — and underused — form of content that is extremely effective in grabbing people’s attention. Typically, infographics are a mix of words and images. Oftentimes, they are used as visualization tools to show processes or tips that include a heavy amount of data. You can have infographics in your blogs and share them on social media. If you’re not sure how to create an infographic, check out Canva for some free templates that will give you a fantastic place to start.
7. Videos
Videos are king! If you’re not already creating some kind of video and sharing it on your business’s social media, stop what you’re doing right now and create an introduction video about your business. Video is easy to consume and consistently outperforms text and images across all social media platforms. When creating a video make sure that you have good lighting and sound quality. Both of these factor into what is considered to be a “good” video on social media. (Here’s another tip: unless you have something really important to say, keep your video short and sweet. 15 to 30 seconds is about the average time that someone will spend watching a video before their attention span runs out!)
Start by integrating one of these types of content into your marketing strategy. When you master one of your choosing, move on to the next until all seven of these types of content are a staple of your content marketing strategy. If you need help creating any of these types of content or want to learn more about creating a successful content marketing strategy, contact us and we’d be happy to talk about your business needs.