Content marketing has had a great year. It was the most important digital marketing trend in 2015 and 70% of content marketers created more content last year than in 2014.
You may have dabbled in content marketing with blog posts, videos, or infographics, but let’s make sure it’s a top priority this year.
Here are five inspirational content ideas to implement to get out of the rut:
1. Design an Offer:
Think outside of a blog post and create a gated piece of content that you can leverage for lead generation. You create something of value (an e-book, white paper, or webinar) and users have to fill out a form with some basic information (name, email address) in order to download it. Designing an offer is more time consuming than a blog post because you must create something of unique value, otherwise no one will be motivated to give you an email address. However, it is also much more effective at generating strong leads. You may only receive 50 downloads of your e-book, but you can be sure that those 50 people are genuinely interested in your service of product.
2. Add Content to High-Performing Pages
It’s easy to forget about seemingly “lowly” pages like FAQs, Contact Us, or About Us. However, if you create those pages and just forget about them, you’re missing out on a powerful content opportunity. These types of pages are often some of the highest trafficked on a site and provide a platform to communicate and engage with a ton of visitors. Look at your website analytics and see which pages are generating the most visitors (weed out the blog posts or other marketing pages; we want to find the unassuming, non-marketing pages like the FAQs). Then, think about what kind of content you can add to these pages. For example, the “Contact Us” page could have a video of your CEO or could link to a bunch of press interviews. Your FAQs could link to related case studies or could promote a downloadable e-book about your service or product.
3. Repurpose Existing Content
Don’t reinvent the wheel in 2016. You’ve already created a bunch of great content in 2015, so build off existing assets rather than starting from scratch. Take your best performing blog post and add more text and visuals to turn it into an e-book. Or, turn an in-depth blog post intro a series of daily or weekly emails. The key to successfully repurposing content is to look for evergreen topics, ones that will be relevant any time of the year (for example, a post about asking for a promotion is evergreen, but a post about asking for a promotion during your annual review is not, since no one thinks about an annual review in March).
4. Think Visual
Content marketing is becoming more and more visual, and 2016 is the year to fully incorporate infographics and videos into your strategy. Visual content can be processed faster by the human brain and it grabs your audience’s attention in an already saturated environment. We all scan social media feeds and blog posts, and it’s almost always a picture that catches our eye (most of the time, we’re not even reading the words). Creating visual content doesn’t require an experienced graphic designer or hours learning Photoshop. With sites like Piktochart and Canva, you can quickly create infographics and images with pre-built templates and a drag and drop interface.
5. Choose Quality Over Quantity
We all have a tendency to pump out content as fast as we can. It’s a common misconception that posting on your blog every day will miraculously boost engagement or your SEO ranking. While frequency does matter, you should always choose quality over quantity. Two, 1,000-word blog posts a week will drive more traffic than a short, thin post every day. Take the time to create a content calendar and thoughtfully come up with in-depth, valuable articles.
How to Apply This
Make a goal to tackle one of these each month, in 5 months, your content marketing game will be stronger, more effective, and generating more qualified sales leads.