Discover How

Your customers, leads, and audience members want valuable content from your business. And that content needs to reach audience members in a way that feels natural and organic versus being disruptive.

By honing in on effective content marketing, you can do just that and as a result, increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader, and more.

In this guide, we’ll give you a birds-eye-view of content marketing, types of content marketing, content marketing examples, and how to get a strategy going.

Content Marketing

Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective at resonating with and converting audience members as they once were.

Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural (a.k.a. inbound). A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content or telling a story. In doing so, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and tailored to your audience.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. It can boost factors like brand awareness, sales, reach, interactions, and loyalty.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing can also help your business with the following:

• Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
• Boost conversions
• Build relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty
• Show your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
• Create a sense of community around your brand

Now let’s look at the various types of content marketing.

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate in your strategy — here are some of the most common:

1. Social Media Content Marketing

With over 3.6 billion global social media users, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media marketing. There are a number of platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with and several ways you can create and share content on each of them (e.g. photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).

Featured Resource: Social Media Content Calendar

2. Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand, graphic format. With a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you’re trying to distill an educational and/ or complex topic down so all audience members can understand it.

3. Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful type of inbound content and allow for a lot of creativity in terms of their purpose and topic. With a blog, you can do things like promote other internal and external content and blog articles via links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information.

Featured Resource: Start a Successful Blog

4. Podcast Content Marketing

In a 2020 survey, it was found that 37% of U.S. adults listened to a podcast within the last month. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have began creating and sharing their own podcasts.

Podcasts allow for a lot of creativity as they can be about any topic of choice. Additionally, you determine other factors related to the podcast such as cadence of episodes, who’s on the podcast, where you advertise the podcast, and how long episodes are.

Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast

5. Video Content Marketing

According to HubSpot research, over 50% of consumers say they want to see videos from the brands they interact with. Additionally, video marketing can boost conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with audience members. You may choose to share your video content on social media platforms, landing pages, or on a co-marketer’s website.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack

6. Paid Ad Content Marketing

Paid ads can help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in all of the places you want to be seen — paid ads are especially beneficial when paired with inbound marketing. There are many places you can share paid ads including on social media, landing pages, banners, and sponsored content.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

Next, let’s look at some content marketing examples that are associated with those types of content marketing we just reviewed.