Coming up with and executing content marketing ideas doesn’t have to be a long, grueling, or expensive process. When creating a content marketing strategy, you should plan on creating marketing collateral that aligns with your company goals. While there are a variety of the types of content one can use, each has its own strength, purpose, and goal. These four content marketing ideas work well for startups and small businesses since they are effective, applicable among many different industries, and relatively easy to create and circulate. With a bit of help from a marketing strategist or a marketing team, you can begin creating and using scalable, cost-effective, and evergreen content to market your business online.
Blogs
Why blog?
Your company’s blog can be one of the best content marketing assets you have. Blogs are the center of your content marketing ecosystem, fueling your organization’s SEO and social media. They are excellent vehicles for educating potential clients on areas in which you provide assistance and the solutions you can provide to them. They can be widely distributed via your company’s social media platforms, through submitting guest blogs, and within targeted online communities. Because blogs can be shared in a variety of online spaces, they can be consumed by a wide variety of users.
Blogging SEO.
Blogs need to be useful, targeted, and focused. Your blog also supports search engine optimization (SEO), which attracts users to your website based on what they search for online. You want to make sure your blogs are keyword-rich, but avoid stuffing as many keywords into a single blog as possible. While it’s a good idea to use keywords that potential customers may use to search for your company, don’t try to cram in keywords that don’t match the topic of your blog. You’ll want to blog frequently and consistently, so only utilize keywords relevant to the topic at hand and save your other top keywords for later blogs.
Blog topics.
To attract leads and support sales with your blog, provide useful information about your product or services. Write about the problems that your product or service solves, best practice for using them, and link to other blog posts or pages within your website to enable visitors to further investigate your business and what it does. Remember to keep your blog educational though, not explicitly promotional. People like reading about how to solve their problem, not reading an infomercial transcript.
Podcasts
Why podcast?
Podcasting is an often forgotten, underrated form of content marketing. Podcasts aren’t just about disseminating information; they provide entertainment to consumers as well. Think of them as if they were a radio show. Listeners tune in for the music, but stay for the entertainment value of the radio hosts.
How to create podcasts.
Keep podcasts to about 45 to 60 minutes. Any longer and you risk losing your visitors’ attention. As with blog topics, podcasts need to be informational and not explicitly promotional. Set goals and topics for each episode and figure out how they can all tie into each other and fit into a larger content picture. Ideally, structure your material so that it interrelates, thus incentivizing users to subscribe or return for more episodes.
Videos
Why create videos?
Videos can be used for content marketing in a number of ways. You can create standalone videos for brand storytelling, which are evergreen pieces of content that detail your organization’s values, origin, mission, products, or services.
How to use videos.
These types of videos are typically showcased on your company’s website or are pinned on social media for easy access. Similarly, videos can be placed on landing pages for email campaigns and other areas where potential customers are seeking initial information about your company. Videos can deliver a stronger, more interactive, engaging message than text. One excellent way to use video content is to send a video out as a promotional piece using your mailing list. Whether you’re advertising or promoting a new service or product, a sale, or an announcement about your company, videos help increase the rate at which recipients open your promotional emails.
Infographics
Why use infographics?
Infographics have exploded in popularity among a number of businesses. These visual tools are intended to attract attention, provide information, and be easily understood. Given that most people learn best through graphic representations, they can be much more effective at conveying information than text. Materials that are supplemented with visual elements generate 94% more views than plain text or content without graphics.
Search engine ranking and viewership.
Infographics can also help increase search results. When your content is shared or embedded, if your infographic includes your contact or website information, it will generate more backlinks to you. The result is more inbound links, which can boost your search rankings and lead to a higher probability of your company receiving business. Like videos, infographics also help increase your audience, subscribers, followers, and users. Adding easily digestible material to email campaigns, social media posts, blogs, and landing pages catches viewers’ attention and generates more likes, comments, follows, and shares than plain text updates.
These four simple yet effective content marketing ideas require little more than a bit of initial effort toyield positive results for your startup or small business. By creating and utilizing blogs, podcasts, videos, or infographics you can implement strong and constructive content marketing strategies that will help your business attract consumers.