30 + Types of Content

It’s time to learn types of content and how to use them

Knowing and incorporating the different types of content into your digital marketing strategy can help your brand stand out. The right combination of content types paired with strong creative execution will elevate your brand so that you’re telling your brand story consistently and efficiently, ultimately creating a brand experience for your customers. 

Let’s break it down 

Broadly speaking, we can categorize the different types of content into:

• Written Content

• Visual Content

• Interactive Content

• Video Content

• Audio Content 

Before we take a deep dive into each of these categories, let’s understand the values of each board category to you strategy.

Types of Written Content

1. Blog Post | Blog posts are consistently a top performer in this category. Blog posts are essential for effective SEO (search engine optimization), they increase your thought leadership/expertise status, help build networking opportunities, and act as a lead generator for your business.

Create blog posts when you want to inform your audience, increase brand awareness, highlight your company’s knowledge of current industry news, or build a long-term track record of providing helpful, valuable content. Below is a list of blog types to get you started. 

• How-to & Story Blogs

• Education/Explainer Blog post 

• Storytelling blog post 

• Q&As Interviews

• Company News

• Product News

• Quotes

• Stats

• Round Ups

• News Release

• Comparisons

• Listicles

• Step-by-Step Guides

• Best Practices/Tips

• Checklists

2. White Papers | White papers are effective for businesses wanting to prove industry expertise. Like e-books, white papers can be offered as a free digital download, or can be published online as PDFs for improved search engine optimization. Use white papers when you want to solidify your reputation as a SME (subject matter expert) or when you want to offer a specific opinion that is best delivered in long format. Unlike a blog post or thought-piece offered as a guest post, white papers should be educational and backed up by hard evidence and statistics.

3. Ebooks | E-books are powerful lead generators for brands hoping to grow their email marketing subscriber list or boost engagement opportunities for their sales teams. E-books can be offered as a free digital download, provided as gated content to premium subscribers, or offered on marketplaces. They help to establish brand authority. Use e-books when you want to offer in-depth or background information, when your audience isn’t time-constrained, or when you want to move past the building awareness stage and help guide potential customers deeper into your sales funnel.

4. Customer Success Stories | We’re more likely to buy something when we know a real customer has faced similar challenges and benefited from a product or service. Customer success stories show how your company performs in the real world. Salesforce has a clear link on its homepage, taking users to dozens of customer stories.

5. Case Studies| 89 percent of marketers say that case studies and testimonials are the most effective content forms for influencing purchases. Like customer stories, case studies prove that your solutions work. Case studies are especially useful for conversion rate optimization. Providing case studies as a component of your content marketing strategy can help convince customers to try your product/service and are also helpful for long-term search engine optimization.

Use case studies when you need to prove value, highlight differentiation points against your competitors, or showcase your company’s sales history within your industry. A testimonial on the front page of your website is a teaser; a case study delivers the real results behind a testimonial teaser.

6. Product Content and Guides | These help to address the specific concerns of bottom-of-the-funnel leads. They will also feature keyword phrases with less competition, which is great for SEO. On-site guides and demos show prospects what you do, how you do it and help them to imagine using your products. Publish a set of product guides on your website that is free of jargon and salesmanship.

7. Testimonials | According to a study by Dimensional Research, 90 percent of people surveyed said online reviews influenced their purchase decision. Reviews, ratings, and testimonials provide more evidence from genuine customers that your company delivers on its promises. Promoting these content assets to leads in the bottom of the funnel gives them one more reason to take further action.

Try This: Create a web page devoted to testimonials that show specific benefits to prospects.

8. Comparison Sheet | Making side-by-side comparison easy for potential buyers is another great way to gain customer trust and make buying decisions easier. Sometimes, a simple chart is the best way to present helpful information. You can use charts to compare your own products to one another or to those of other companies.

Try This: Limit products or features compared to five or six, and separate different entries with contrasting colors and clear spacing.

9. FAQs

An FAQ page on your website can be instrumental in advancing potential sales. You can answer questions about your industry, products, services, and more. These are not just helpful to potential buyers; they can save your staff time by reducing the number of routine questions they get asked.

Try This: To make your FAQ page more accessible, separate your questions into different categories, and update it regularly to keep it relevant.

10. Awards

It’s always a good idea to remind your audience of your credibility and expertise. One simple way to do this is by showcasing your awards and achievements.

11. User Generated Content

User-generated content is great because it provides social proof to potential customers, and it’s free.

Whether you use Instagram to show off customers wearing or using your product or collect customer success stories to share on your website, try to incorporate at least some user-generated content into your content strategy.

Try this: Figure out who your most engaged customers are, then send them a survey asking about what challenges made them seek out a solution such as yours, why they chose to work with your company instead of another alternative, and how they are benefiting from your product. You can then turn that into a success story.

Types of Visual Content

In this digital era, it’s important to embrace all forms of content to help your brand stand out. Text-based content will always play a part in digital marketing, but creating and promoting visual content can bring huge benefits when you get it right.

There are three main advantages of using visual content:

It’s more attractive. Press release distribution company PR Newswire found that including photos, videos and other visual media in press releases attracted 77 percent more views than text-only content.

It’s more accessible. We can process visual information 60,000 times faster than textual content.

It’s more memorable. According to Brain Rules by Dr. John Medina, you’re six times more likely to remember information if visuals are attached.

Images | According to a study by Venngage, images are the most frequently used type of visual content. While people may overlook a block of text, an image can communicate your message in a few seconds. You can find free stock photography images on sites like Flickr and Photobucket, but to make your social media and blog posts more memorable, create original images.

Video | Cisco predicts that videos will make up 80 percent of all global Internet traffic by 2019.

Evernote has always made good use of video on its website and across social media. The brand’s detailed explainer videos educate users about their tools, and its website also features various videos of customer stories.How-to product videos, behind-the-scenes coverage, customer testimonials or employee interviews are a good place to start. Try to include a call to action that encourages viewers to take the next step, depending on your marketing goals.

Infographics According to the Nielson Norman Group, infographics are “liked” and shared on social media three times more than any other type of content.

Pointvisible’s Content Marketing Statistics and Trends: 2017 Edition is a great example. Using bold graphics, they demonstrate the importance of content marketing using detailed stats and facts, but in a visual way that’s easy to follow.

Pull together some stats and interesting facts promoting the benefits of your company, and create your own infographic using tools like Canva or PicMonkey. You can then distribute this via your website, social media channels¬ and email.

Related: 5 Reasons Why Your Readers Will Love Your Infographics

Memes | Memes are ideal for Twitter and Facebook and are easy to create. Think about your target audience and what they’ll find amusing or inspiring. Grammarly is a great example of a company using memes well. Their Pinterest page also features sharable “Grammarly cards” that promote their tool and the importance of good grammar.

GIFs | GIFs are perfect for sharing fun, light-hearted content. Twitter has made it easy to add GIFs to tweets, with a built-in option that lets you attach a GIF based on your chosen phrase

You can also create your own GIFs with GIF Maker by Giphy or And Then I Was Like, which helps you turn webcam video into a shareable GIF. You might already have video content that you can repurpose into a GIF.

Screenshots | With a screenshot, you can show your audience how your product or service works. You could also add marketing copy or a testimonial to the screenshot for added credibility. Have you read a testimonial or review from an industry forum about your product? Why not take a screenshot and include it in future content?

Magazines | One of the more recent types of visual content that has been gaining popularity are online magazines (“e-magazines”). Similar to the physical magazines we’re all familiar with, online magazines look to combine big, powerful imagery with interesting stories and snippets.Red Bull, Harry’s and Fujitsu are all examples of companies that come out with their own magazines.

Types of Interactive Content

Many readers enjoy entering contests, especially if there’s a valuable prize. They’re a great way to encourage user-generated content and increase brand engagement. You can also collect email addresses because you need to inform the winner, right?

Online supermarket Ocado created an essay contest, asking customers to write about their fantasy restaurant, offering a Michelin-starred dinner party as a prize. The contest was promoted on social media and their blog.

Try this: Woobox helps you create sleek contests, coupons, deals and more, via social media and landing pages.

Polls | As well as being great for collecting audience insights, polls are quick to read and hard to ignore.

The career website The Muse used Twitter Polls to ask users what would make their workday better. Most people chose the “better boss” option and the company used the results to inspire a subsequent blog post.

Try this: Easypolls is a simple tool for creating polls that you can customize and embed on your website.

Quizzes | More and more companies are using fun Q&As in their marketing, whether it’s asking users what type of animal they are or which city they should be living in.

Art equipment suppliers Aaron Brothers created a color quiz asking users “What’s your color?” It generated around 500 leads that they could hopefully convert into customers at a later stage.

Try this: Qzzr makes it easy to create great-looking, customized quizzes that you can embed on your website or share on social media. It also gives you stats on user engagement.

Calculators | Assessments give users more personalized recommendations or results based on how users respond to a series of questions. They’re also a great way of collecting data from potential buyers.

Types of Video Content

Product Demonstrations | Product demo videos are a fantastic way to show your product in action while also making potential customers feel like they are getting an exclusive inside look.Demos tend to highlight key features and answer common questions to get shoppers to see how they can get value and move them closer to buying.

Vlog | If you’ve been creating high-quality content for your blog, why not put it in a video format as well to give your audience a wider variety of ways to consume your insights. These are some of the easiest types of videos to produce and they tend to get high engagement. If you’re not sure where to begin, take some cues from some of the top YouTube celebrities who have been able to capture and hold the attention of wide audiences.

Company Culture | A major goal of content marketing is to showcase the vibrant, human side of your brand. One of the best ways to do this is to give viewers a peek at your company’s employees and culture. You don’t need to have a quirky, Google-esque culture to make this work.Company culture videos can include interviews with employees, company parties, birthday celebrations and more. The key is to show that your company isn’t a faceless entity but a mosaic of real people and personalities.

How-To Tutorials | People tend to be visual learners and how-to tutorials are some of the most sought-after videos on the Internet.

In fact, the number of YouTube searches for tutorial videos soared by 70% in 2015 alone.

Providing helpful instructions and tutorials builds long-lasting customer loyalty and it also reaffirms your credibility and product knowledge.

Webinar | A webinar can be a highly effective way to engage with your audience, especially for marketers in the B2B realm.

In fact, a report from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 66% of B2B marketers cite webinars as one of their most powerful content marketing strategies.Since webinars require users to register, they can also act as valuable lead-generation tools. As an added bonus, the content from a webinar can also be repurposed into blog posts.

Advertising

A video advert should use the first 3 precious seconds to draw your audience in with something inherently eye-catching. It keeps viewers invested with an emotional core. Your ad should offer something valuable, otherwise viewers won't waste their time. Appeal to their emotions — be entertaining, inspiring or educational. It's tailored specifically to the audience. One of the key benefits of video ads is how carefully you can target them. Make sure you're tailoring your content to your target audience's state of mind and stage in the marketing funnel.n It has a clear Call-to-Action. Don't waste the goodwill you've built up. Make it clear what you want your viewers to do after watching your ad, and easy for them to do it. encourage them to get involved! It's no longer than it needs to be.

Educational | These videos present educational material for specific topics, history,theories, and practices can be learned. The format may vary. It might be a video of a teacher speaking to the camera, photographs and text about the topic or some mixture of these. 

Types of Audio Content

Podcast | A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient, integrated way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices. 

Promo/Ads | Think radio ad or now days podcast ad. Every promo should have once call to action in it. Preferably at the end as listeners tend to remember the last thing said. What do you want the listener to do? Give them a direct URL (preferably your own domain) Give them a real link to type. Only one call to action is effective per promo. Keep it only as long as it needs to be. The optimum is 30 or fewer seconds, but has some variations in length—10, 30, or 45 seconds. 10 seconds is less disruptive to a podcast. Always remember that “skip forward 30 seconds button” on most podcast players and value your listener’s time. Don’t announce “I’ll be back after the break.” It’s a podcast; where are you going? It’s not radio so there’s no need for your promo to be exactly 30 seconds long. This was a requirement in radio as often different ads would go out on different transmitters and they all had to sync up.

Ok, you have the content blueprint, now get to work! Feeling overwhelmed? No worries, set up a consultation with us today. Our team has experience and expertise executing the above content and more. Let’s figure out your content strategy, execute, and start seeing results in your business today.