Beyond Blog Posts: 5 Ways to Take Your Content Strategy to the Next Level
As a content marketer, your main goal is to educate, entertain, and ultimately persuade your audience to believe in your brand. Marketing strategies are continuously evolving, which makes it critical for your brand to stay up to date with the most modern tactics in the industry.
While blogs are a traditional approach to a developed content strategy, the majority of brands are adopting this outlet, turning blogs more into a necessity, rather than a differentiating factor. That’s why it is now imperative to develop your content strategy beyond the scope of blogging and integrate a variety of content mediums.
Don’t Limit Yourself To A Blog
Think of a blog as the building blocks of your content strategy. It’s a space on your website that allows you to inform and captivate your audience, all while showing your consumer what your brand is all about. However in today’s competitive landscape, your brand is also competing against thousands of other companies, all showcasing a similar blogging strategy.
So how do you differentiate yourself and gain a greater audience? While producing relevant and engaging content is always recommended, that’s just not going to be enough with all the content that is already fighting for your consumer’s attention. What you need is to further your content strategy beyond the restrictions of your blog.
Related: How to Deliver Value at Every Stage of the Customer Journey
Aside from blogging, try implementing a content strategy that will provide your brand with optimal interaction with your consumers. You want your audience to find a connection with your brand, or some way that they can relate to what you are selling. In order to do this, try tapping into different creative outlets that will allow you to spread your message.
Below we’ve rounded up the top 5 ways to take your content strategy to the next level. With these new and improved strategies, you’ll be able to reach a larger audience and create more engagement for your brand.
Create An Eye-Catching Infographic
With 65% of the population consisting of visual learners, we as marketers need to find a tool that will resonate with this majority, and then add it to our content marketing toolkit. It’s a lot easier for our brains to process an image compared to a chunk of text, and that’s why visuals are a necessity when it comes to marketing.
One of the best ways to grab your consumers attention is through infographics. This outlet combines both graphics and content to create a comprehensive visualization that is not only easy to follow but also informative. When an infographic is created well and can appeal to a larger audience, it can turn into a highly shareable piece of content, increasing exposure as well as your brand’s online presence.
Get Creative With Video
Visual content is the dominating leader when it comes to engagement. Think about it- Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and all other social media platforms are all focused on visual content. One outlet for visual content that performs exceptionally well is interactive videos. Videos are a relatively new approach when it comes to a content strategy; however, it’s an outlet that offers unlimited possibilities. From Interviews to Q&A’s, a video can cover any topic, in any place, at any time.
Build Interactive Quizzes
One of the most interactive strategies when it comes to content are quizzes. The beauty of quizzes is that they can be as engaging, entertaining, or branded as you want them to be. The purpose of the quiz isn’t to shove your product into the consumers face, it’s simply to create engagement, while also generating brand awareness in the process.
Related: Designing Online Quizzes That Make Money & Drive Leads
We have all stumbled upon the“ What does your horoscope say about you?” quiz that we’ve scrolled past on Facebook. In some cases, they might have even sparked an interest and unknowingly convinced you to take the quiz yourself. That’s the beauty of a quiz: even if an individual has no idea what your brand is, they still might be inclined to participate, which will then expose them to your brand.
Best of yet, you can learn some valuable information from your customers through these simple quizzes. By strategically choosing your questions, you can record valuable information that can help to improve your marketing efforts and product as a whole. Quizzes are not just a tool for entertainment; a marketer can also benefit by tracking and measuring the analytics gathered through different social media platforms.
Engage Your Audience With A Value-Packed Webinar
As you can infer from the name, a webinar is a seminar on the web. While videos and quizzes are quite popular in the content marketing realm, webinars are still an overlooked resource.
Webinars are the perfect tool for informing your audience on a particular subject. Think of it as a lesson plan. Your audience is searching for answers on a particular subject, when they come across an engaging webinar that’s easy to follow. One of the main benefits of implementing webinars into your content strategy is that you can have a consistent flow of engagement, even after the live session has finished.
Best of all, this tool allows the audience to personally interact with the brand by asking questions and participating in a live discussion. This allows the brand to interact with their audience like never before and also helps to establish themselves as an authority within their industry.
Highlight Case Studies
Case studies are an excellent way to inform your customers of your product while also establishing significant value. A case study reports data on the product and focuses more on the customer rather than the company. They also have the ability to tell a story, which is one of the best ways to draw your customer’s attention.
Related: The Importance of Content Marketing – How to Create an Integrated Campaign
Before diving into the world of content strategies that stretch far beyond a traditional blog post, make sure to consider one important thing. Not all businesses are the same, which means different strategies will work for different brands. Find which platforms your target audience responds to best, and focus on those specific outlets. You don’t need to use every content strategy under the sun if it doesn’t apply to your overall brand. Focus on what matters and put all your efforts into a few specialized strategies.
