7 Highly Effective Types of Content You’re Not Doing at the Moment

More and more business owners are jumping ship to promote their products and services through content marketing. 45% of businesses have increased their expenses for this marketing strategy, according to Content Marketing Institute. The rise is due to the Panda effect and how it shifts away from shady link building practices to effective link-bait that mobilizes readers to action.

However, a startling statistic with its growth is the lack of belief that the strategy will succeed. From the same report made by the Content Marketing Institute, only 36% of B2B marketers are positive that content marketing will help their businesses grow.

The number of growing practitioners of content marketing as opposed to the believers doesn’t add up. To make it work, people must thoroughly learn the system to believe in it. They must be aware of the best practices in this type of marketing so they can reap the benefits of their hard work. They should know that “content” is a broad term that covers more than just articles and blog posts.

When done correctly, content marketing is an awesome inclusion to your established strategy that will help you yield more visitors, leads, and sales to your business online. Below are some of the types of content marketing strategies you haven’t done on your website, but should.

Infographics

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This content type has become one of the more popular ones used by marketers to display information on their websites. As opposed to an article, infographics are more visual and therefore are easier to digest with a quick glance. Hongkiat has featured some of the most well-designed infographics on the web here.

When designing infographics, you must have done substantial research to warrant the fact and figures you intend to present. Don’t forget to include your sources of your infographics below so readers can check the validity of the info included in the file.

For those thinking of making an infographic for their content marketing but have no design skills, you can use sites like Piktochart, Visual.ly, and easelly that allow you to simply input the data and choose the kind of graph to display for a simple but effective infographics.

Webinars

Slideshows are one of the first formats used by presenters to communicate an idea in a conference or meeting. With sites like SlideShare that allow you to upload your presentations and embed on the page of your site, you can show your content presented in a step-by-step manner for effect. Think of slideshows as similar to an infographic, but is chopped into different pages.

For those who have no idea on how to create a highly effective slideshow presentation, let marketing expert Seth Godin enlighten you with its most important tenets in his post titled “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic.”

While slideshows features as few words as possible, you can accompany them with spoken word. This adds to the style of your content, just like you would be presenting in front of a live audience.

Videos

Video marketing requires more work and resources to consume on your part. You need to create a good script and video editor to achieve a professional look to your brand. Although this would be expensive, the results should be worth it. Ask Orabrush and Blendtec.

For more information on how to plan your video marketing strategy, refer to “6 Business Video Marketing Tips to Stardom.”

Podcasts

These are similar to video marketing, but are geared towards providing useful and actionable information for users instead of promoting your products and services.  The set-up for a webinar would be less intricate than video marketing – a single video camera, a white board, and a well-written spiel should do the trick. Refer to the embedded Whiteboard Friday from SEOmoz above. It’s all about delivering information in a clear, simple, and easy to understand format on a regular basis (it’s not called Whiteboard Friday for nothing!).

E-Books and Whitepapers

The great thing about e-books is that they can link your lead generation strategies to your content marketing. Writing an e-book and making it available for download by giving you their contact details accomplishes two things: you get to deliver high-quality and targeted content to people who are willing to give their e-mails away (which also shows how much they want the e-book) and you acquire their e-mail so you can provide them new content or offer them discounts to your products.

One of the most successful in doing this content strategy is Hubpages on its Internet Marketing Whitepapers and E-books page.

Memes

Being funny in business is underrated. Best Western Denver Southwest, a hotel situated near dinosaur heritage sites, furthers its branding with Dinomemes. The blog features dinosaurs in zany and quirky memes that gets its humorous point across. Its straightforward yet effective way of showcasing their passion for dinosaurs through funny memes help their business stand out from the rest of the serious and streamlined hotels in the area.

When doing memes, you can start by referring to Quickmeme for the funniest and most popular images used for witty captions.

Comics

Via xkcd.com – work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5

On publications, comics are normally used for editorials to illustrate the piece using metaphors and allegory. Tom Fishburne is a prime example of a cartoonist who employs the same idea of content creation for online sites.

For online marketing, you can create illustrations and develop a serial strip about your company and brand. Indirect examples of such are xkcd and Cyanide and Happiness, both of which have built upon a strong following through the continuous stream of fresh comics on a regular basis.

If your cartoons take a life of its own, you can use your cartoons on your merchandise as a source of revenue for your business, just like what Matthew Inman did with The Oatmeal on top of his marketing and web designing skills.

What other types of valuable content for marketing did we miss out in this article? Let us know by commenting below!