If you are considering content marketing for your business, it can be hard to know where to start.
You probably have read about content marketing, and know that it is part of a winning digital marketing strategy.
But you might also be asking:
What is the best type of content marketing to try?
Which type of content marketing will bring the best results?
Does using different types of content marketing help your business?
Should you focus on video content, social media, blog posts, or interactive content?
There are many different types of content marketing you can try, and depending upon your marketing strategy, some are more useful than others.
In this article, we will look the four different types of content marketing and how they can be used effectively to promote your business or personal brand.
We will also aim to answer some of the most important questions about the different types of content marketing:
What are the most effective types of content marketing?
How can you track the results of different types of content marketing?
Should you talk about your specific products and services in your content?
What topics should you avoid in your content marketing?
Keep in mind that all content marketing types require an investment of time and money, and some of the benefits are intangible.
To get the most from any type of content marketing, you must be patient and persistent, and be willing to keep testing new approaches.
The Biggest Mistake with Content Marketing
Most companies mistake sharing information about their products and services as a type of content marketing.
Talking about your products and services too quickly, or too much will cause people to want to avoid your brand.
While most companies will want to focus on their own brand first, there are some guidelines to content creation you must follow to make sure you giving people what they want.
To help you choose which type of content is best for your market, let’s look at the four different types of content.
Four Types of Content Marketing To Grow Your Business
1) Emotional Content (News, Entertainment)
All human beings are driven by their emotions. Whether we admit it or not, our emotions are a huge part of all our buying decisions.
How we feel about something dramatically affects whether or not we will take action or not. When it comes to content marketing, you must find ways to appeal to the emotions of your customers whenever you can.
Humans love any online content that shares emotions. The typical forms of emotion-based content you will see are:
- News stories and current events
- Entertainment and humor
- Controversial or conversational topics
All of us spend the majority of our time on social media consuming one of these three types of emotional content.
This is why most political ads, charities, and and sort of medical advertising using imagery and messaging that creates emotion.
As a business, if you can find ways to align your brand with emotional content, it makes you stand out from the crowd.
One of the very best ways to use emotional content in your marketing strategy is to look for the pain points of frustrations that you customers have. Talking through their challenges, fears, dislikes, complaints, and anything that relates to their emotions can help them to trust your brand more.
An important point here however is not to lean too heavily into negativity in your content marketing. Trying to deliberately cause controversy or problems will only make people dislike and mistrust your brand.
2) Utility Content (How-To, Guides, Tips)
You might have noticed that since the invention of the web, humans have been sharing information to help each other. In every single area of interest, you will find someone offering useful information, tips, how-to guides, and advice.
Utility-based content is incredibly valuable for businesses. It helps the person who is considering buying to grow trust with you.
While that topic doesn’t appeal to the masses, it has magnetic appeal to those people aspiring to be better dancers. And better yet, when those dancers need to purchase shoes, they immediately trust the business that has shared the information.
Look for ways to be helpful to your audience. Create video marketing that can guide customers to make a better buying decision. Design visual content to show a simple breakdown of how to best use your product or service to solve problems.
The main goal of utility content is to shorten their learning curve to making a purchase decision by giving them useful, insightful content.
3) Number Driven Content (Research, Statistics, Data)
If you want to change people’s minds or get them to trust and buy from your brand, it’s crucial to appeal to the rational, logical part of their brains as well.
Using data and number-driven content can help to add credibility to your business.
These facts are all from the same statistic but shared in four different ways. You can see how easy it is to grab a piece of data and then use it in your content to back up your ideas.
Add some basic statistics into your content where you can, or even create some posts specifically listing industry statistics that help people make a decision.
4) Story-Based Content (Examples, Case Studies)
The human brain finds stories irresistible. In fact, as soon as you hear the words ‘let me tell you a story,’ your brain immediately starts to go into a more relaxed and attentive state.
When you are listening to a story, you are more open to persuasion, and you will have higher retention of what is being shared.
Content that contains a story, or even a case study of some kind, will have a higher interest level than pure theory.
While it’s not always possible, if there is a way to include tangible examples or stories in your content, it will add a lot more value.
Find examples from your customer history than you can share as case studies and stories. Make them relatable and genuine, and people will not be able to resist paying attention.
What Does Your Customer Want?
The easiest way to figure out which kind of content format you should share is relatively easy.
A simple Google search for the main phrases and keywords you want to be known for will show you the top-ranking content.
Look at the first five listings on Google and see which of the content types (Emotion, Utility, Numbers, Story) they are using. You will likely see a mix of content types, but one of them will probably stand out among the top five.
You can either try to emulate the top posts by copying the content style, or you can try to do something different to try to stand out.
Either way, make sure you are creating something valuable that your audience is searching for.
Combine The Four Content Types for Impact
Finally, remember that you can use a variety of different types of content and also different mediums (video content, audio content, written content, visual content) to keep people engaged.
The better you can appeal to the human traits and tendencies in your content, the more likely it will be shared and attract new attention for your business.