There is a misconception that content doesn’t matter; if my business is good enough people will flock to it. This mistake is hurting businesses around the world, small and large, from all industry types. It’s time to start putting time and effort back into your content.
5 minute require reading time
By Luke Sharkey / Growth Marketing Manager
For any business, content marketing becomes the primary choice to introduce products and services to people. The importance of the marketing choice goes up year after year, and it has reached a stage where it can’t be neglected by any industry.
You can’t believe it, let me tell you some facts. Research shows that nearly 90 per cent of B2B businesses uses content marketing to generate leads. Technavio market research reveals that the total industry valuation of content marketing will be US$412.88bn by 2021 from US$195.58bn in 2016.
If you want to use content marketing as a powerful weapon for bringing new audience and customers to your business, you should follow some set of rules or strategies as part of your campaigns.
First of all, your contents should be available on all the platforms where your potential customers search for information. Most common platforms where people search for content include organic search results, social media, YouTube, podcasts, and discussion forums. Make your content available on these platforms and connect with the maximum audience.
Secondly, you have to produce and publish diverse types of content to address the needs of your audience across borders. It is highly critical when you want to attract a diverse range of people with your content.
Let’s discuss why is it important to create a diverse range of contents based on the needs of your audience
What Makes Diverse Content Critical For Your Business
Diverse types of content in different platforms can establish trust for your business. Various types of content improve the visibility of your business and products across the internet ecosystem. This means that your customers get information about your products and services from multiple sources, in various forms. It can positively work for the audience and make your business trusted for them.
Your audience gets the opportunity to choose the appropriate type of content based on their needs. For example, some people wish to read detailed, long-form content, whereas many others choose short posts or tailored contents. Also, many people prefer the installation procedure of an electronic device in video format, compared written instructions or an installation guide.
Customer conversion in inbound marketing is a multi-step, long-term process that comprises three steps: attract, engage, delight. While a short video, an image, or a social media post can make people in your audience fans, you should have more detailed and complex content to convert them to be your customers and delight them. Various types of content have critical roles in the customer journey to make them your loyal, long-term customers.
We have discussed the major benefits of having different types of content in your content marketing strategies. To get more insights, let’s talk about the major content types that help you to improve the visibility and audience appeal online.
Blogging
Infographics
Infographics are one of the best forms of content to communicate precise information to the audience. With a single image, you get the opportunity to provide a ton of information in an easily digestible and visually engaging way.
Infographics come with the ideal shape and format of content that can get more shares and engagement online. It can easily be posted on social media and reach millions of people with minimal effort.
Infographics combine both impressive visuals as well as informative content to engage the people who like either form of content. Most infographics are interactive compared to images. They also have an excellent lifespan and produce greater engagement even after a few years after being published.
When creating infographics, always make it simple and try to show things visually as visuals capture the attention of your audience more than written content does. Also, use a catchy headline and avoid crowding of information – leave plenty of whitespaces to encourage your readers to stick on the content.
You can also focus on creating your infographic in the appropriate size, where it doesn’t look too small or long. Also, ensure that the information in the infographic has a good flow and not confusing the readers.
Video Content
In content marketing, you can’t ignore videos at all as most people choose to watch videos over reading text. If videos are not part of your content marketing, it’s high time to put your leg into videos.
Studies show that video content gets four times more engagement than an article. By 2020, video content will represent over 80 per cent of the total web traffic. Start creating lucrative, relevant, high-quality content to leverage the audience who prefer video over text.
The easiest way to use your videos to content marketing is to upload them to YouTube. Later, you can embed the videos to your website content, blogs, third-party posts, and more. As part of your video content strategy, you can also upload the same video to your social media channels and attract new audiences and engage with existing customers.
At the end of every video, you can add a CTA to take your audience through the sales funnel. After a highly engaging and interesting video, who can skip the page without even noticing the business/brand name? Compared to texts and images, you can create video content in more creative ways. A great video can connect with people across borders, across languages.
However, to provide the best results, you should have a proven video content marketing strategy in place. All content should be centred around a story and shouldn’t be meant for sales. Follow the general rule of content marketing – produce content for giving value and information through the art of storytelling.
Make your videos short and to the point. Do you know one-fifth of video viewers leave the video within 10 seconds? Therefore, your video should connect with the audience within 10 seconds. Humour and videos are interrelated; try to include humour to make highly engaging video content.
Also, optimise your videos to make them highly visible in search engines. Give engaging titles, proper descriptions, and tags to relevant keywords to take the video to the people who are searching for it. After all, the performance of your branded video content also reflects the popularity of your products and services.