The Many Ways You Can Use These Content Marketing Ideas
You can use all these content marketing ideas on various platforms in your content distribution strategy or any new marketing channel you might discover in the future.
Most ideas will be suitable for small businesses and larger ones, a startup company, or an established one, B2B or B2C.
Think of these ideas as content marketing themes to drive your creativity within every idea or category.
You can use these ideas in multiple ways too:
- Long-form content for a business blog to improve results from search engine optimization
- Images and infographics for sharing for social media marketing,
- Video content for YouTube
- Use for online advertising, especially for:
- Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, and Display Ads from Google Ads
- Or for print media
And through creative thinking, you can modify a couple of content pieces into multiple ones that fit different audiences, different sales funnels, and their stages or turn into entirely new digital marketing strategies your company can utilize.
Not all ideas work for everyone. When considering goals and results, a lot of testing needs to go into your content marketing strategy itself before doubling down certain content types.
You want to make sure a piece of content produces the things you want and desire first.
But when you figure out through experimentation, the content types that work, you have a solid foundation for growing your business with content marketing.
Learn the benefits of content marketing as a whole.
The Content Marketing Ideas
- Expert articles and guides
- Job listings as content
- Community-driven content
- Guest Blogging
- Case studies and whitepapers
- Customer and business partner showcases
- Product Development updates
- Company news
- Industry news and trends
- Expand product and service sales pages
- Share exciting data
- Interviews and Surveys
- Use Influencers for Content Creation
All companies will have their approach to how they create content and to whom. A content strategy should be different if you’re looking to grow organic traffic to a website. If you’re an established business that wants to attract PR opportunities, the strategy will be different.
But that’s not to say that you can’t use all the ideas depending on your needs. The differences are in the goals you set for the content.
Don’t expect to drive a lot of traffic through company news, as it’s rarely ever engaging enough for results, and it’s rarely searchable.
On the other hand, expert articles and guides can bring a lot of targeted traffic to your business, and with an effective sales funnel, you can increase revenues.
Now for the ideas!
Expert Articles and Guides
Every company is an expert in something and always solves specific problems to target audiences. Through expert articles or guides, you can target long-tail keywords that would otherwise be harder to attain as you can’t optimize for them as easily.
And, therefore, gain more organic traffic from potential new customers.
By showcasing expertise through articles, guides, and other forms of content, you can build authority within your industry, making it easier for a customer to make a better judgment call on where to buy next.
And according to Hubspot, blogs and articles are among the primary three forms of media that companies use in their content strategies today.
Job Listings As Content
Did you know that job listings are highly searchable on Google and also highly shareable on social media?
Suppose you have any open job listings in your company, instead of only relying on job listing websites to post your employment opportunities. In that case, you should create job pages on your website.
Make sure these pages are always live, even if said job listing isn’t currently available, but also make sure that you’re upfront with visitors if you’re hiring or not.
By making these pages and attracting traffic to them through important job-related keywords, you can attract applicable talent through your website.
And potentially always have leads on potential employees when you need to hire again.
You can add current employee experiences to these pages naturally to drive even more conversions towards new hires.
Community-driven Content
Community-driven content is always a great idea for content production. As a business, it’s hard to sometimes think outside of the box of your industry or product lines. Having an engaging community around your brand is always beneficial, and not just for sales!
But as content, your community can produce many great ideas on how to speak about your brand more casually, which then you can use for the content of different types.
Or you can have a platform in which the built community can freely express themselves, like a forum or social media group.
Then you can, as a business, highlight the best content they create in your marketing strategy.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging means that a third-party would publish a blog post on your website.
Through guest blogging, you can drive content creation through third-parties willing to create these guest blog posts.
Having a set of guidelines helps you create a better ecosystem of guest blogging on your website. Always have clear rules and themes that suit your brand when it comes to guest blogging.
You don’t want to start publishing anything on your website even if you’re seeking more content, and the content always has to be relevant to your business as a whole.
Learn more benefits of guest blogging.
Learn guest blogging strategies to get you started.
Case Studies and Whitepapers
Similarly to expert articles, through case studies and whitepapers, you can easily present the problems that your audience struggles with and provide practical solutions to them.
You can either create case studies about your business experiences, react, and share other case studies related to your industry.
If you currently use whitepapers as part of your online advertising strategy, consider turning the whitepapers into readable pages on your website. The same goes for case studies as well.
That way, you can gain organic traffic to them as long as you optimize them for search engines.
Customer And Business Partner Showcases
You might have some of your best customers already showcased on your website, but you can deeper into how you showcase them.
Customer and business partner experiences let others see what type of business you’re and how you engage and help your customer solve their problems.
For example, you can either create a blog about interviewing the customer or business partner.
And when showcasing other businesses, you help promote them as well, which in turn, can make it so that they will share your business too!
Here’s a guide on finding business partners if you want to scale the process of finding them.
Product Development Updates
Depending on the business and its product cycle, you can include product updates into your marketing strategy.
Let’s say you’re a software company releasing updates regularly. You want to showcase these updates to increase the time spent on your software or attract new customers through the new features. Product development updates are an excellent idea for content.
But you need to realize that not every update is attractive to the whole target audience. You might want to segment your users into groups, so you only show relevant updates to those who want to hear them.
For example, you can create support channels in social media for updates and use them for these content types.
Company News
News about your company creates an opportunity for the creation of exciting and shareable content.
Whether you’re attracting PR or social mentions, you can create engaging content around your brand’s news.
But as relevancy is crucial for engagement rates, company news, while interesting, it may not be engaging for your customer or the end-users as a whole.
For example, having your company news mixed up with your expert articles isn’t probably the best idea as the people reading them won’t be the same.
It would help if you separated news to where it matters most, and depending on your companies situation, you will probably have a very different audience reading company news.
But company news doesn’t have to be boring. Think about them as a starting point for a more exciting piece of content that could match customers’ preferences.
Industry News And Trends
Rather than relying on your company news to generate relevant content, you can use industry news and its newest trends as a source for great content.
For example, you can use industry news as the main idea for a piece of content and then reflect on how it impacts your business or how it impacts your customers.
With the tools Google Trends or Pinterest Trends, you can discover upcoming trends within your industry easily and create content around them. With a little bit of timing, you can attract new types of customers before your competitors.
Expand Product And Service Sales Pages
Expanding your product and services’ sales pages, often with relevant and interesting content, keeps the readers more engaged and increases the chances of conversions, and helps you expand your other content marketing strategies.
As a product or service page is, for most companies, the most crucial page on their websites or a social media profile, having these pages always updated and optimized for conversions creates a basic need to make more engaging and fulfilling content around these pages.
And if you’re not sure what content you should create next to promote your business, always turn to your sales pages and develop them to be the best they could be.
For example, great sales pages also lead to great content ideas for online advertising campaigns.
And if you’re an online store, product page SEO and ecommerce SEO will be crucial for you.
Share Exciting Data
As we talked in the case studies, you can present solutions to your target audiences’ problems by sharing exciting data around the industry.
What types of data should I then share?
That would be highly dependent on your business.
For example, a B2B software company would better share data to help their customer make better data-driven decisions going forward.
But for example, an online store for clothes could use their data to share interesting topics about how different clothing trends impact what they sell or showcase clothing trends of the future.
Interviews and Surveys
Interviews and surveys are both excellent content marketing ideas for businesses to use. Most companies will have customers to send surveys and interviews to and create content based on the answers.
You can either create content around survey data and share across your platforms or use the data to discover even more ideas.
Interviews are a prime source for content as you can source interviewees internally like (employees or business partners) or externally (like customers or industry experts and leaders).
For example, a published interview with an industry leader or expert can also build your authority within the industry and helps your customers see that your business understands their market well.
Use Influencers for Content Creation
Utilizing influencers for content creation can help you create unique content to new audiences and revitalize your marketing strategies.
For example, when you partner up with the right type of influencers that matches your brand and create content that you can then use for promotion, it is an alternative to outsourcing your content creation.
Depending on your industry, the channels the influencers use may vary. For some influencers, social media platforms will be more crucial, and for some, that could be industry blogs or other publications.
And investing in influencer relationships and including them in your marketing strategy has many more benefits.
You can learn the benefits of influencer marketing here.
Conclusion
These were some of the examples of content marketing ideas for businesses you can use to get inspired for your next awesome piece of content to increase sales and brand awareness or drive traffic to your website.
To help you always get new ideas for content marketing, remember this, you can always find inspiration within your business and the data you already have.
For example, you can use web analytics to discover what content worked the best to create a solid strategy so you can grow further faster.
As a bonus idea, always check what types of content and content topics your direct competitors create and share. You might be surprised to find how many new ideas you can discover through your competitors and how much you can add to the topics and content they create and share.