As an online business owner, you’re probably well aware of the saying “content is king.” If you blog regularly for your site, you’re already one step ahead. Regular blogging is undoubtedly one of the best ways to build your brand image and position yourself as an authority in your industry.
A steady stream of fresh blogs are great, but to really make your site soar, you always need to be exploring new and different content opportunities. Big ticket content pieces can take up a lot of time and resources, so you want to make sure your team can handle a bigger content project. You’ll be taking a risk by pouring your resources into a content piece. But, there’s no reward without at least a little bit of risk online. Let’s think outside the content box to create something remarkable.
Emails
Emails may seem like an odd place to start. Plenty of people claim that email marketing once had its place in a marketing plan, but those days are gone. Spammy, impersonal email blasts have run their course. As consumers get smarter and their needs evolve, flooding their inboxes with poorly written emails is a bad move.
Good quality, personalized, inbound focused emails have a ROI (Return On Investment) of 4,300%. That’s a staggering number – and something your business can’t afford to miss out on. Emails are one of our easiest, least time consuming items in terms of content creation. For an email marketing campaign to really be successful and effective, you should consider a marketing automation or email automation software. But, in terms of content, emails are a breeze.
You simply need to draft a few emails focused around campaigns, promotions, sales, or anything else your customers want to hear about. Then, you make them pop with personal language and lots of great incentives. The time spent on drafting a few really great emails is well worth the ROI.
Useful Guides
If you’re familiar with inbound marketing, you know consumers need to be presented with different types of content depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey. Content creation isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool anymore. It’s about presenting customers with the right information at the right time. Building out some useful guides and resources to help move your customers further down the funnel is a worthy investment.
These guides can be bigger content pieces like whitepapers, eBooks, checklists, and anything else your ideal customer would find useful. For example, buyers that have just discovered your site and your products or services are only in the “Awareness” stage of the buyer’s journey. Here, you want to give them more information about what you do and why they need you. Creating something like a really well designed eBook around a topic they care about will help them move further down the funnel.
These guides are meant to go far beyond promotional material. Remember, you’re trying to gently grow and nurture a relationship that may turn into a conversion. There’s far more long-term value in a really helpful guide than a whitepaper or eBook that’s grossly overly-promotional. The point of a piece of content like this is to make consumers aware of their problem, and position yourself as a possible solution.
Visual And Interactive Content
Content that is highly visual in nature tends to do better and get more shares than the guides we mentioned above. This isn’t to say that both types of content don’t have their place in your marketing plan – there is simply a time and place for each. Humans are visual creatures. So, the use of visual content can help to attract audiences that you may not have been able to before. Visual and interactive content comes in the form of videos, infographics, interactive catalogues, etc.
The impact of visual and interactive content is huge – shoppers who viewed a marketing video are 147% more likely to convert than those who did not.
Creating an infographic that compares and contrasts products, or creates a type of checklist is a visual way could help buyers that have moved into the consideration stage of their journey. The possibilities are really endless when it comes to visual and interactive content. Oftentimes, the more creative you are with your visual content, the better it will do.
It’s clear that the impact of out-of-the-box content, from emails to guides and visuals, can really go a long way for businesses. Remember, to create great content, you have to listen to your audience. If you provide your followers and potential customers with content that they need, your content becomes that much more successful.
Today, content is created to solve a problem and move buyers further down the funnel. If you step outside of your comfort zone and your content box, you might just create something great.