Content Marketing Bible: 8 Great Content Types to Produce

What Types of Content Should You Produce?

Our previous post in the Content Marketing Bible series focused on how to create a content marketing strategy.

Within that post, we briefly touched on different types of content to utilize for your content marketing strategy.

This post will expand on that and focus exclusively on different types of content to utilize. Enjoy!

1. Interviews

Why You Should Do It

One of the most underutilized content types are interviews. Interviews allow you to pick the brain of a person of authority on a specific topic and share their wealth of information with your readers -- what more valuable content could you ask for!

Benefits

Aside from the valuable insights you'll likely glean from the interview, here are a few additional benefits:

• Added Exposure: Authority figure will likely promote their interview via social media, gaining your content additional exposure.
• Easier to Produce: This content is less time consuming to create, as you can automate the process by sending a Google spreadsheet to your interviewee with the questions pre-written and simply format for publishing.
• Future Opportunities: Oftentimes, we post an interview on our website and the interviewee returns months later and asks if he could do the same! This gains your brand additional exposure through the guest interview to be posted on their website.

Example

A great example of an interview post can be found here when we interviewed Gretchen Sword of Bloomberg.com.

2. Blogging

Why You Should Do It

Blogging on a consistent basis is a great way to build up a steady stream of site traffic and leads to your website.

Benefits

Aside from a steady stream of site traffic and leads, you should blog on a regular basis because:

• Database Marketing: Blogging on a regular basis gives your readers a good reason to opt in to your email and CRM databases, which allows you to communicate with them further down the road.
• SEO: Steady content streams allow you to rank for search terms across Google, Bing & Yahoo that bring in the right type of site visitors (i.e. the kind you're writing for!).
• Customer Engagement: Think that comment thread at the bottom of your blog posts is just for show? No way! As you provide information, your customers and site visitors can actively respond and provide feedback to your brand.

Example

You're looking at one right now :-)

3. Guest Blogging

Why You Should Do It

Guest blogging allows your brand to tap into engaged content communities and provide your expert opinion. More importantly, it broadens your reach to additional customer segments who aren't current buyers ... but could be persuaded to be :-)

Benefits

Aside from acting as an expert resource, guest blogging provides the following benefits

• SEO: Providing an optimized piece of content offers you the chance to link back to your own website. Using the guest publications traffic, you can essentially 'rent' that link space for free as opposed to paying for keyword placement (i.e. paid search marketing)
• Exposure: Opening up your brand to additional exposure from new customers is a great way to bring in new site traffic, leads & brand evangelists as they learn about your products and services

Example

Take a look at the post below:

4. Images & Meme's

Why You Should Do It

Images are fantastic link bait  and provide brands with the opportunity to create a shareable piece of content.

Benefits

Additional benefits of producing images & meme's for content include:

• Linkbait: I can't say it enough - Images and memes are fantastic pieces of link bait and are extremely shareable.
• Additional Exposure: Similar to interviews, many images & memes build off of an already popular topic. That being said, the creators of that topic love to see their creation live on and will likely re-share your content!
• Great Short Form Content: Search engines definitely place value in long-form content, but if you are publishing content regularly you'll want to produce multiple formats to keep your community of readers coming back to consume your fresh, unique content.

Example

Earlier this month, I posted the following meme based on Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World":

For those who are not aware, Buffer is a social media posting application for networks like Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.

And within 24 hours of tweeting this, the image received more than 20 RT's, 5 favorites & multiple 'this is awesomes!' from Twitter users who found the meme to be fun!

5. Video

Why You Should Do It

Multiple studies from agency marketers as well as online giants like Google have proven one thing: Video assets increase users time on site, website engagement & conversion rate. That's why you should invest in video -- period!

Benefits

Aside from the obvious stated above, you should utilize video because:

• Great 'How it Works' Channel: Not everything is black and white...  sometimes, you need a little more explanation to describe how your product or service works.  Video accomplishes that task by engaging your website visitors.
• Increase Your Social Referral Traffic: Social networks like YouTube and Vimeo have the ability to generate massive traffic spikes to your website as well as multigenerational sharing, meaning shares on shares on shares!
• Increase Your Organic Referral Traffic: Submitting video site maps to services like Google Video can increase the number of search queries your video content appears for, bringing in more site visitors from organic search results. Example

Wistia, a video hosting & application service, does a great job of explaining how video improves site performance and why you should invest in their service.

6. Content Downloads

Why You Should Do It

One of the oldest tricks in the inbound marketing book is to provide a valuable piece of content (industry report, 'how-to guide', etc) in exchange for a site visitors contact information. Gathering their contact information gives you permission to reach back out to them with additional marketing offers in the future!

Benefits

Aside from building an email/CRM database through content downloads, this content type is beneficial because of the following reasons:

• 'Passalong' Sharing: Many print publications, like Time or Newsweek, report on a metric called 'passalong' sharing. That means when one person gets a subscription on their magazine, they tend to pass it along to an additional 'x' amount of people. Content is the same -- as visitors download content, they tend to share with others.** **
• Branding: Using services like SlideShare or LinkedIn Projects to host your content provides you with a public forum for people to see your content and learn about your brand. Guess what the last page/slide of every content download is? Contact information :-)

Example

Optify, a Seattle-based marketing automation company, regularly posts content that can be downloaded for free in exchange for contact information.

See an example below:

7. How-to Posts

Why You Should Do It

How-to posts provide you with the opportunity to get up on your soapbox and scream "We know how to do really cool things, and we're going to explain how!" They provide you with an opportunity to educate your site visitors and keep them coming back for expert advice.

Benefits

Aside from being self-promoting, how-to posts are beneficial because:

• Findable Search Engine Content: Millions of searches every day focus on one simple question: "How do I do..." Thanks to this it's easy to produce expert content by aligning with these exact search queries you will help your rank for long-tail keywords or phrases.** **
• Great Community Builders: How-to posts let your community in on some of your 'special sauce', so to speak. And guess what? That's valuable content and will encourage your readers to become repeat visitors to learn the latest-and-greatest you have to offer.

Example

Kerry Guard, our agencies COO, wrote a great post about implementing 3rd party tags into Facebook applications like ShortStack when she found that there wasn't much documentation online to troubleshoot issues.

And guess what? The post is one of our most popular pieces of content this year!

Take a look at the post below:

8. List Posts

Why You Should Do It

List posts are easy to scan and consume. What does this mean? It means that they tend to get shared a lot! :-)

Benefits

Aside from creating content that is shareable, list posts are valuable for the following reasons:

• Highlight Service Providers: Great list posts generally highlight things 'to do' or companies to work with. An example of this site that we recently posted was 3 Things to Do Before Launching a Digital Marketing Campaign, written by COO Kerry Guard

• Warning Posts: Reading a 'what not to do' post is sometimes more valuable than a what 'to do' post! Warning posts provide you with the opportunity to learn from someone else's mistakes

Example

Once again, you're looking right at a list post :-)

In Review

Just to be clear, there are WAY MORE than eight types of content you can add to your content calendar. The examples outlined above are some of the more commonly used & effective ways to produce content that helps achieve your brands marketing goals.