The Many Faces of Content in Marketing
With over 100 different forms of content creation available, how confident is your business in creating, distributing and measuring key content strategies?
Content Marketing is more than just writing good content. It is first and foremost about understanding what content really means.
In publishing, art, and communication, content is the information and experiences that are directed toward an end-user or audience. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts".
Content is the subject matter or symbolic significance of something. That something is the product or service message that draws the attention of an end-user. Content is the way that marketing utilises the best of its assets to create eye-catching features to support business understanding.
Why Bother with Content?
As one of the most effective methods of growing audience engagement, developing your brand presence, and driving sales, content marketing is a mission-critical growth method for most businesses. Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions.
With content marketing, you can build trust with your audience, improve conversions, connect with your customers, and generate leads. Additionally, in today's age, customers expect high-quality, consistent content from their favourite brands.
What are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
Content consistency establishes your credibility, builds your trust, and strengthens your reputation. The key benefits are:
- Increase audience retention
- Better social media traction
- Establish trust with your audience
- Generate leads
- Improve conversions
- Enhance SEO efforts
- Build authority
What are the Different Types of Content?
Now, this is a question that there is no real answer to. With ever-changing landscapes, markets, products and platforms, the choice of what constitutes as content will always evolve. However, with a selective eye on what we can justifiably call content, my 101 types of content readily used for marketing promotion are in alphabetical order and as below:
- A/B Testing Results
- Affiliations and Partners Information
- Aggregation of Online Articles
- Animated Gifs
- Associations and Memberships Announcements
- Audio Recordings
- Background and Experience Information
- Blogs
- Book Summaries
- Brochures
- Cartoons
- Case Studies
- Certifications
- Charts
- Cheat Sheets
- Comics
- Comments
- Commercials
- Comparisons
- Contests
- Creative Stories/Writing
- Custom Software Description
- Customer Reviews and Feedback
- Data and Statistics Reporting
- E-Books
- Email Newsletters
- Embedded Tweets
- Event Information
- FAQs
- Files and Spreadsheets
- Flyers
- Free Guides
- Full Videos
- Giveaways
- Graphs
- Guest Posts
- History Information
- How-To-Guides
- Illustrations
- Infographics
- Interviews
- Lists
- Live Chats
- Live-Streaming Video
- Maps
- Media Mentions
- Memes
- Microblog Posts
- Micro-Videos
- Mind Maps
- Mobile Apps
- Music Videos
- News
- News Releases
- News Streaming
- Newsletters
- Online Games
- Personal Bios
- Photo Galleries
- Photos
- Pin Boards
- Plug-Ins
- Podcasts
- Polls
- Portfolios
- Presentations
- Predications
- Pricing
- Pricing Guides
- Product Demos
- Product or Service Information
- Public Service Announcements
- Q&A's
- Questionnaires
- Quizzes
- Quotations
- Ratings
- Research and Analysis
- Resource Pages
- Results of Polls, Surveys and Questionnaires
- Reviews
- ROI Calculators
- Sales Sheets
- Screenshots
- Screencasts
- Site Tour Videos
- Software Reviews
- Specification or Data Sheets
- Stupid, Fake, and Funny Images and Captions
- Surveys
- Templates
- Testimonials
- Timelines
- To-Do Articles
- Twitter and other social media chats
- User-Generated Content
- Vlogs
- Webinars
- White Papers
- Wikis
- Worksheets
Am I missing any? Feel free to tell me if I am, but I have the basis of what we call content covered above. Now the plan is to do something with it.