Content Types
According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2B Content Marketing Report, 60% of the most successful marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
If you want to improve the success of your content marketing (or overall marketing in general), you need a plan. This marketing plan outlines the stakeholders of different tasks, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and so much more.
Whether you’re creating a content marketing strategy for the first time or you want to learn how to revamp your existing strategy to increase performance, this post is for you.
We’re going to walk you through the types of content your plan may include, why content marketing is so important and how to create your own content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that involves the creation and promotion of content. The purpose of this is less about direct sales and more about brand awareness and audience education.
But what do we mean when we say “content?”
There are so many different types of content that can be created based on your marketing goals and the resources you have available to your marketing team.
The most common type of content marketing is a company blog. This gives you a space to regularly share brand new content that provides your insights and helps generate more traffic and awareness to your website.
However, you shouldn’t stop at just blogging. There are so many different types of content that can be a great part of your strategy.
The first step in determining how to best use content marketing for your business is to understand the different types of content you can create and distribute.
While there’s an endless number of content types you can create, these are the ten most popular and that tend to bring in the most success.
This should come as no surprise — you’re reading content on a blog right now!
This is because blogging was one of the first and continues to be one of the most prominent types of content marketing out there.
A blog tends to have a few different purposes:
Just like any other marketing tactic, your marketing funnel should still be top of mind when you plan out your blog content. There are different types of content for awareness, interest and conversions, and it’s important to include each type within your strategy.
Another facet of content marketing is email marketing. This is one of the most important pieces because you own your email list, and that’s a valuable list of contacts.
These are people who were interested enough in your business or your content to hand you their email address for marketing purposes. Whether they signed up via a signup form on your blog or website or did so in exchange for a lead magnet, you need to keep up with nurturing these leads.
As you build your email list through lead generation strategies, you need to start sending out consistent marketing emails. A good cadence is once a week or so.
Here’s an example of an email we sent out to our email list sharing some color psychology tips.
You want to be strategic with your marketing emails, and you likely want to segment your list out into different categories.
For example, a freemium software may choose to segment their list based on non-subscribers, free users (that they hope will upgrade to a paid plan), premium users, and Enterprise users.
There may be some emails that each list receives (i.e., educational content) and there should definitely be some emails that are catered to each specific user segment:
Those are just a few examples of how you might segment out different email content so that your business reaps the most benefits from each of your target audiences.
Another great content type that you don’t want to sleep on is video. There are so many different types of videos that your business can create as a part of its video marketing strategy (an important subset of content marketing).
Video can be one of the more complicated content types to create because you need more tools than you would for a simple blog post.
First, someone needs to write your video script or create your storyboard. Then, you have to find an actor or host. You’ll need a video camera (or even high-quality smartphone camera) to record your video. And finally, you need someone to edit it.
This is similar to the approach we take for our Make Informational Beautiful videos:
However, that’s not the only way — not by a long shot. In fact, you can create a number of short video clips right inside Visme.
Some of the types of videos you might want to create (whether you go through the full video production process or use a quick video maker like Visme) are:
Determine a handful of video types that you plan to create as a part of your content marketing efforts and start building out your video content calendar.
Ebooks are a great content type for providing longform, valuable information to your audience.
In fact, these are often so valuable that they’re used as lead magnets or even as digital products to help your business increase its passive revenue.
Here at Visme, we’ve created a number of ebooks over the years, each one bringing in a number of new leads for our email list. (Are you starting to see how a good content marketing plan brings everything together?)
When you create your ebook, you first want to start by brainstorming a good topic. What is your audience interested in?
Discover some of the best topics by doing a bit of research:
Once you’ve found a good topic, write your ebook content and turn it into an easy-to-read ebook design. You can then place it on a landing page (like we have here) for users to download or purchase before reading.
To create your own ebook, consider using a template like the one below to help bring your content to life.
An infographic is the shortened terminology for “informational graphic.” These tend to be long graphics chock full of data, statistics and other important information about a topic.
And they’re an incredible content marketing tactic.
Why is that? Well, infographics are great for building backlinks, they’re perfect for sharing on social media sites like Pinterest and LinkedIn, and they can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, perfect for sharing valuable information in a visually appealing format.
For example, here’s an informational infographic template that you can customize right inside Visme:
However, there are also statistical infographics, hierarchical infographics, anatomy infographics and a number of other types of infographics. It just depends on the type of information you want to visualize.
Infographics are one of the best ways to generate more earned traffic to your website. Just be sure to include your website in the infographic’s footer as the creator/source of your information.
Another great, but underutilized, content type is a presentation. While these are often used for other purposes, like sales, investor pitches, etc., they can be a great format for content marketing.
One way to use this content type is by creating a presentation, downloading it and then uploading it to a file sharing site like SlideShare:
Owned by LinkedIn, SlideShare is one of the only sites out there specifically for aggregating presentations online — and it’s certainly the most popular.
Another way to utilize presentations, especially interactive presentations, is by embedding it within a blog post for additional learning material.
Here’s an example of a blog post where we tried this out, and it’s been a great way to engage readers with an additional, unexpected type of content.
A webinar is similar to a presentation (you’ll often be presenting a slide deck), but it’s done live and online.
Attendees can register online and get a link to the webinar via email—it’s a good idea to set up this process using webinar software—then watch live in real-time. Most webinars end with a live FAQ so viewers can type in questions they have for the webinar host (you) to answer.
At Visme, we have a weekly Visme 101 webinar that shows new users how to learn the ropes of our software, but we also regularly host webinars that focus on other educational topics.
As you may have guessed, this is another great lead generation tactic to help you grow your email list and customer base.
Consider creating your own webinar series. These can be informational in nature, or you can use virtual events as a great way to launch new products, services and features.
Here’s a webinar template you can use to create your own slide deck:
An online course is a pretty hefty content type, but it can be a great way to provide value to your audience.
For example, we have a completely free presentation certification course that’s meant to help our users (or anyone, really) who need to create presentations do so easily, while also creating a stunning, high-quality presentation and delivering it flawlessly.
Find a topic that’s hyper-relevant to your product or service and build an online course around it. This is a great way to take potential customers to the next level, converting them into loyal, paying customers who are thrilled with your brand.
You can break your online course into different chapters, sharing in-depth written content, video lessons, or a combination of the two.
We’ve touched on lead magnets a couple times in this post, but let’s do a deeper dive into this kind of content.
Lead magnets are an essential part of any content marketing program, and they present themselves in a number of different ways. Some we’ve already covered, like ebooks and online courses.
A few other lead magnet types are:
The goal of a lead magnet is to generate more email addresses for your email list that you can nurture and follow up with. The goal is to stay top of mind so your new leads eventually sign up for your service or buy your product.
Here’s an example of a lead magnet (as well as a template you can customize in Visme to create your own):
Another great type of content is a podcast. However, this will take a lot of work to deploy. You may want to consider hiring a dedicated person or team to help create and produce your company’s podcast.
A podcast is a great way to provide in-depth information about topics in your industry. And while many podcasts are run by creatives rather than businesses, this can still be a great type of content to add into your content strategy.
For example, social media scheduling tool Buffer produces two podcasts: The Science of Social Media and Breaking Brand.
Both are great ways to (a) get their name out there and (b) provide their users and others in the marketing industry with exceptional content that makes people want to trust them.
If you decide to launch your own podcast, you’ll need to consider:
All of these are essential elements to creating a new podcast.
If your company hasn’t yet launched a content marketing strategy, it’s time to do so — yesterday. There are a number of benefits to content marketing that nearly every business can take advantage of.
A few of these benefits are:
Say no more, right? You’re ready to build that strategy. Read on as we walk you through all of the steps to create your own successful content marketing strategy.
Now that you know the major types of content you’ll want to create and why content marketing is so important, let’s dig into the important part: creating your content marketing strategy.
If your business has never ventured into content marketing before, don’t worry; the time to start is now. If you’re looking to revamp your content strategy with new (or better) types of content, following these steps can also help you.
We’ve got a quick seven-step process for building your own content marketing strategy, so let’s dig in.
What are your business goals? What are you hoping your content strategy will help you accomplish?
Creating SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) goals is a great method for ensuring your goals make sense and aren’t too out there.
Or, if you want to start with some more basic goals, you might simply want to:
Any of those goals make sense for your content strategy. But SMART goals can help you to determine specifics, like increasing web traffic to 100,000 visitors/month or growing your email list to 500,000 contacts.
Then, once you reach your initial goals, you can revisit your strategy and make new goals based on your success.
The next step is to make sure your content strategy aligns with your target audience and what they’d want to see from you.
Your first step will be to create a buyer persona so that you know exactly who you’re marketing to. You can use a template like the one below to get started.
In this customer persona template, create different bios with the likes, dislikes, pain points, demographics and more of your target audience.
This helps you to write with those people in mind. What specific problems do they have, and how can you answer that with your content? You don’t want to create content blindly, so be sure to keep your persona(s) in mind each time you launch a new piece of content.
If you’ve previously created content without a documented strategy in place, you’ll want to conduct a content audit to make sure your past content aligns with your persona and your new strategy.
From here, you can get a good birds eye view of your existing content and decide if anything needs to be updated in order to fit with your new content direction.
Create a spreadsheet with links to each blog post, video, ebook, etc., and leave comments on what, if anything, needs to be updated.
The next step is to decide which channels to use for content distribution. This is how you’re putting your content out into the world so you can increase awareness of your business and generate new leads and customers.
The most common options are social media, your website, your blog and your email list.
Decide which social media platforms make the most sense for your business. For example, B2B organizations may consider Facebook and LinkedIn as their top channels while B2C companies may look towards platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
Look into platform demographics and select the ones that have audiences matching your target audience.
Also pay attention to the types of content published on each platform. Do they match the kinds of content you’ll be including in your strategy? If so, that’s probably a channel where your content will perform well.
Next, start brainstorming topic ideas. Think back to your customer persona. What problems do they have that your business can solve?
Use a mind map like the one below to help you. Put each of your main business offerings into the center, then start brainstorming different idea branches from there.
For example, let’s say your business offers social media scheduling. Some topic ideas you might come up with are:
And you can create a new post for each specific social media platform that your software works with.
Plus, you can break this down even further with a mind map for your content.
The next step is content creation!
It’s time to start creating outlines, writing your posts, editing and publishing your new content. To make the biggest impact, try to publish blog content no less than once/week.
Here at Visme, we publish 4-5 new posts and update 2+ older posts each week to get the biggest bang for our buck.
Figure out what you or your content team can handle and go for it.
But don’t forget about other types of content as well. While blog content will likely be your most frequently created content, you may also want to send out a weekly or monthly newsletter or publish a quarterly ebook.
Decide what makes sense for your strategy and put it into a content calendar so you know when it’s time to start creating.
Just like every strategy, your last step is to monitor and adjust. Pay attention to your website analytics and conversions to see which types of posts are most popular and see if you can create similar content.
Alternatively, pay attention to the posts that simply don’t perform. Even if you thought that was going to be a great strategy, they simply aren’t resonating with your audience, and you don’t want to invest resources into them.
Keep in mind that content marketing is not a fast-acting strategy, especially if you’re focusing on generating organic traffic.
It can take weeks or months for your posts to rank, and even longer than that to start seeing new conversions. That’s all in the name of the game.
But you should start to see an upward trend of traffic and be sure to keep sharing your content on social media, in your email newsletter and anywhere else you include in your strategy.
Create your own free Visme account and start creating stunning visual content that your audience will love.
Your last step is to take action and actually create your own content marketing strategy. And you can easily do so with this pre-made content marketing strategy template.
If you don’t have one yet, you can create a free Visme account and fully customize the above template to fit your personalized strategy as well as your branding.
Ready to start creating your own content marketing strategy? With these steps and content types, you should be well on your way to a successful and well-rounded marketing plan.
Visme can help you create your content marketing plan, as well as all of the various content types you may want to create. From blog graphics to ebooks to lead magnets and more, Visme has the perfect template to get you started.
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About the Author
Chloe West is the content marketing manager at Visme. Her experience in digital marketing includes everything from social media, blogging, email marketing to graphic design, strategy creation and implementation, and more. During her spare time, she enjoys exploring her home city of Charleston with her son.