The marketing of today contains far more content than ever before. From blogs to expert articles and consumer reviews, a huge component of successful marketing in today’s business world is content marketing.
Many individuals understand content marketing as consisting of written content that is developed, produced and distributed by the business. Written content is certainly a component of content marketing, however, there are many other successful content marketing avenues to consider as well.
Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is focused on utilizing written content related to your business, service or product. You must be certain that your original written content is of great quality. This may have you questioning what can be used in original content. The most common areas of content include expert content, user-generated content, and branded content.
Expert content is just that; content produced by experts. These are articles and reviews written by credible sources and unbiased journalists. These articles and reviews are often written by journalists as the result of your PR work. However, you are able to make use of expert content that was not written specifically about your business, product or service.
User-generated content consists of making use of the reviews, testimonials or any other written content of satisfied customers. Product reviews on Amazon or social media posts are very easily accessible user-generated content. This type of content is genuine and unbiased which makes it a very appealing marketing source to potential consumers.
Branded content is content that is created, developed and produced by the brand. This would include all content that the brand created to market itself; blog posts, articles, research, books, etc. Branded content is very popular as brands need to educate their consumer population about their business, product or service.
The Versatile Content Marketing Strategy
The idea of a versatile approach is very simple; choose different, engaging content to complement your written content. The versatile content approach makes use of many different supportive content areas. This approach would utilize written content, audio and video content as well as graphics (infographics or supportive graphics) in conjunction with the original written content.
The versatile approach can also include the combining of expert content, user-generated content, as well as branded content. Combining excellent written content with strategically placed multimedia content will create a marketing piece that draws attention. And, drawing attention, draws leads, and leads draw business, etc.
Why a Varied Content Approach Effective
The versatile content strategy not only stimulates a consumer’s intellectual side; but it makes use of the visual, audio and creative side. Making use of audio and visual content helps to draw attention to your original written content.
The Nielson Study suggests that utilizing a single form of content marketing is not significant enough to cover all of your marketing needs. Rather, using a mix of the three (expert content, user-generated content, and branded content) as well as other types of visual or audio marketing is more effective in terms of gaining attention from potential consumers.
How to Utilize a Content Marketing Strategy
The Nielson study also emphasizes the importance of educating your consumers as well as building their trust. The educating piece is pretty simple; you know about your company, business or service and you are able to produce content to inform others about it.
But, how do you build trust?
By making use of expert testimonials and articles as well as reviews from satisfied customers that support your product/service/business. The combining of all three content marketing areas produces an effective approach to engage, educate and build trust in your potential consumers.
Examples of Versatile Content
As previously mentioned, one method of obtaining effective written content is making use of content produced by satisfied customers.
Customer testimonials and customer reviews serve as great, original sources of written content.
Accompanying customer testimonials with photos or a video about your company’s dedication to customer service would make an excellent content marketing piece. This is the type of piece that will engage your potential consumers both intellectually as well as visually.
Creating a blog post about your product and including reference links to satisfied customer reviews or expert articles is another example of using a versatile approach to content marketing. Adding a photo of said product even improves the attractiveness of the marketing piece.
Get to Work
Content marketing serves as an extremely popular and successful source of information for your consumers. The beauty of versatile content is that it gives you the opportunity to blend these different areas; expert, branded and user-generated content approaches as well as make use of creative multimedia approaches.
The options for this content marketing strategy are really only limited by your imagination.So get to work!
