By now, if you run a business, you’ve most likely heard the term “content marketing.” In fact, you’re probably already using multiple forms of content marketing within your organization to boost brand recognition, generate leads, and close sales. But are you leveraging as many different content types as you can to reach a larger audience?
Finding which content marketing strategies work best for you starts with understanding the most essential, tried-and-true content types that other businesses find successful. Here, I’ll dive into the essential types of content used in content marketing, discuss why they’re essential, and how you can determine if they might be the best fit for your specific business goals and needs, from the top of the funnel to the bottom.
What Are The Different Types Of Content Marketing?
Your content marketing strategy should involve a variety of content types to address your target market at various stages of the buyer journey, or marketing funnel.
Landing Pages
Landing pages often make up the core content on a website. Each landing page might outline a service or product offered by the company, with a focus on the benefits of that service or product, and a call-to-action to make a purchase, or reach out for additional information.
Some landing pages may entice visitors to take other types of action, such as opting into a mailing list, making a purchase, or downloading another content asset, like a white paper. Marketers can use email campaigns, paid advertising, social media posts and other content to drive visitors to landing pages.
Blog Posts
Blogs are an essential content marketing type, applicable to a wide variety of people and businesses. For many companies, a blog might make up the bulk of content on a website and the heart of their inbound marketing strategy. Blog posts allow readers to find out more about your company or its offerings, or to stay up to date on relevant news. Updating blog content regularly can also give your SEO a boost.
According to data from Brightedge Research, blog posts appeared in Google’s top 10 search results more often than any other type of content. Blogs appeared in the top 10 Google rankings 19% of the time, followed by general pages or product pages (16%), and top-level pages (14%). You can read more on statistics for B2B content marketers here.
It’s important to craft blog content that is relevant to your readers, useful, and informative. Since blogs are often top-of-the-funnel content, you want to answer common reader questions and concerns.
Videos
Videos have a greater barrier of entry than blog posts, but that barrier is smaller than you might think. It’s a great way to show off your product or service, create an engaging how-to, tell a story, bring an interview to life, and more. Just look at Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube channel: Gary uses video to delve into relevant topics for his audience, interview others, highlight stories, and more.
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If GaryVee’s videos look more highly produced than you can manage, don’t be intimidated: You can film interviews on conferencing tools like Zoom, or take perfectly serviceable videos on your phone. AI tools like HeyGen and Midjourney also help make creating professional-looking videos easier than ever before.
According to Brightedge Research, video shows up in the top 10 on Google 7% of the time. But people may also find your videos on YouTube or other social media platforms, making this tool an important element of omnichannel marketing to help build brand recognition.
Infographics
Infographics remain a fun way to share statistics and interesting snippets of information with your audience. Tools like Canva make it easy to create a professional looking infographic designed to be shared by your audience. Here at Taboola, we often rely on infographics to share marketing data with our busy readers at a glance.
eBooks
When you have a lot of content to share and are looking to establish your company — or an executive at your company — as an industry thought leader, an eBook might be the best format. Sure, eBooks can be time-consuming and costly to create, but they can deliver a powerful ROI, too. A recent Forbes article described eBooks as, “your best bet for driving leads and sales in 2024.” As David Fortino of NetLine told Forbes, “Ebooks remain the most popular content format, representing 39.5% of demand.”
EBooks deliver value to your audience, help collect leads by requiring an email opt-in to access the book, and demonstrate your company’s expertise. Before embarking on eBook creation, ensure you have enough information to share in this format, a relevant message for your readers, and the resources to write, format, and produce an eBook. You may find the investment is well worthwhile.
White Papers
Speaking of a hefty content investment, white papers are also high-value lead magnets that can be used at any stage of the buyer journey. Like eBooks, they’re long-form content, but tend to be denser and more data-driven. They might include mini-case studies within, or they might lay out data from a co-branded study. DocuSign, for example, felt a white paper was the best way to compile its wealth of information on how and why schools use its product.
White papers are ideal for companies looking to lay out the facts without a ton of flourish and finesse, although that’s not to say white papers can’t have those things, too. A well-designed layout will catch readers’ eyes and keep them captivated. The term “white paper” may sound highly technical, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring.
White papers aren’t for everyone, especially if you don’t have the data to dive into, but when they’re applicable they can be valuable and interesting to consumers.
Checklists
“7 Things You Must Pack for Your Disney Vacation.” “5 Signs You Need a Content Marketing Agency.” “10 Steps to Performing a Content Audit on Your Website.” These are all examples of checklists that businesses or consumers may want to read. You’ll notice they all provide helpful information, subtly weaving in details that showcase the writers’ expertise and help remove entry barriers for prospects considering doing business with you.
Buffer, for example, created three corresponding social media checklists — one daily, one weekly, and one monthly — that make it easy to master social media management best practices.
Creating this type of content can help simplify processes that your potential customers might find confusing or intimidating, or highlight the reasons they need your product or service. Checklists also help establish your brand, since they’re shareable and easy to read.
Interviews
Speaking of shareable content, interviews help amplify your message, since the subject of your interview is likely to share the content throughout their network. They might post an excerpt on their website and link back to your piece. You can get a lot of leverage out of interviews by capturing it on video, sharing the video, and also crafting a written Q&A or a narrative using the best quotes.
Reach out to experts, leaders, or influencers within your industry, people whose stories could add value to your audience. Own a fashion company? Interview a designer weekly on how they got started. Run marketing for a social media management platform? Talk to social media creators who use the platform to highlight some of their tips and tricks.
Interviews give you a chance to shine and they put the spotlight on a symbiotic relationship between yourself and the interviewee. They’re a win-win — easily created content your audience might find interesting.
Social Media
Entire books have been written on developing a solid social media strategy. Suffice it to say, social media posts should be a part of nearly everyone’s inbound marketing campaign.
Creating social media is as in-depth a process as you allow it to be, from hiring designers and social media managers to using social media management tools for some level of automation. Find the effort level that matches what you can spend in time and money (although it’s worthwhile to consider supplying more resources here), think about the types of content your audience wants, and analyze your results to create more content based on what performs well.
You’ll also want to pay attention to where your audience hangs out online. With increasing numbers of social media platforms launching everyday, from Streams to Bluesky, you don’t want to spread your marketing team too thin by managing too many social media accounts. Choose two or three with the most impact and work to grow your network by delivering tremendous value.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to apply your inbound marketing efforts, such as collecting email addresses of visitors to your website, and use those efforts to reach your audience through another touchpoint — right in the inbox.
Email marketing is a pillar of content marketing. When you craft an email campaign, consider the following questions:
- What might your audience want from you?
- How can you give them information without making them click around too much?
- How can you make things clear for them through this correspondence?
- What is your goal through this email and how will you measure it?
- What’s the best call-to-action to drive conversions?
You can experiment with A/B testing to see which emails perform best, and segment your mailing list to reach your audience in various stages of their journey. Affordable automation tools like Mailchimp, Flodesk, and Constant Contact can make creating and tracking the results of email campaigns easy.
GIFs and Memes
Before you scroll past this one because it doesn’t seem like it’s for you, think about the last piece of social media content that made you literally laugh out loud. It was probably a GIF or a meme, right?
GIFs and memes may not be for everyone, but they may be for you. It’s all about being native to the platforms you’re on and not worrying about being overly polished. Memes and GIFs are what people consume on social media — getting in on that conversation makes you look like you belong there. Tons of companies of all kinds have hopped on the trend, from BarkBox to Salesforce to Glassdoor.
Before you rule out this content, consider the importance of being social media literate, and determine if your audience truly wouldn’t like consuming this type of content, or if getting into it just feels intimidating. Start small and see what your audience thinks.
Testimonials and Customer Reviews
Your audience loves you, right? So, shout it from the rooftops. Build a portfolio of testimonials and customer reviews — it might be the content marketing secret sauce you haven’t yet discovered.
Reach out to your customers to get these testimonials or reviews, speak with them, or scan social media and the web to see what people are saying about you. Then, ask permission to use their words with proper attribution.
Testimonials and reviews can live on your website, but they’re also important social media collateral. Ask for testimonials on LinkedIn, Yelp, or Google reviews. Many brick-and-mortar businesses today have a QR code near their point-of-sale that satisfied customers can scan and then leave reviews on popular review sites.
Best of all, testimonials can have multiple uses. If you receive an awesome sound bite from a customer, you can design it as a social media graphic, include it in an email campaign, or post it on your home page. You can even have that customer submit a piece of user-generated content where they speak on video about their experience doing business with you.
Testimonial-based content has a place in the strategy of any business looking to acquire more customers. It’s about building up enough rapport with your audience to get them excited about sharing their experience.
Newsletters
If you’re regularly putting out new products or have a consistent flow of new information you want your audience to know about, incorporate a newsletter into your content marketing plan.
Newsletters can be sent on a cadence you feel comfortable with, both from the standpoint of how often customers are comfortable receiving communication from you, and how often you think you can put together a substantial product. Take EMARKETER‘s daily newsletter: It shares a curated list of content and includes a top-line overview to help readers find what’s most relevant for them.
If you don’t have enough to share with your audience daily, make it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, but stick with it. When you launch a newsletter, your audience becomes accustomed to receiving it, so make sure the addition to their inbox is worthwhile.
Podcasts
In 2020, it seemed like every homebound creative with an opinion launched a podcast, along with many businesses seeking new ways to reach bored audiences looking for education, entertainment, or new perspectives. Many of these podcasts, especially those produced by hobbyists, fell by the wayside after the pandemic when people returned to the grind of everyday life. But for businesses who embraced the format and continue to hone the craft, podcasts remain a powerful marketing tool today.
Before you launch, consider what might add value to your audience. Could this be a good platform for conducting interviews? Could you delve into topics your team members are experts on? Can you share tips relevant to your product or service? Gensler’s podcast, “Gensler Design Exchange,” for example, is an educational dialogue between various types of industry experts.
Creating a podcast isn’t easy, but if you have a unique idea and think it would add value to your audience, it’s an interesting content type to explore.
Native Advertising
Use a content discovery platform, such as Taboola, to implement your content marketing strategy through native advertising. Native advertisements blend in seamlessly with the content around them, giving you a chance to create content built to drive marketing goals without the intrusiveness of traditional ad formats.
You can easily repurpose other content you’ve worked on to fit native ad formats, and drive that content to longer-form pieces you’ve written.
Why Use Different Types of Content Marketing?
The internet would be boring if everyone only wrote blog posts or shared memes. Likewise, using different types of content marketing can help keep your marketing strategy from growing stale.
Also, consider that different types of content simply appeal to different people. For instance, according to a recent study from Epsilon, 80% of GenXers prefer email marketing and want to receive coupons or freebies from their favorite brands. Millennials turn to social media like Instagram to find products that relate to their lives, with 31% saying social media influences their purchases. Nearly half (48%) rely on website reviews to help them make buying decisions.
Armed with this knowledge and, of course, your own market research, you can choose the best content types, published on the right platforms, to reach your audience.
How to Choose Which Content Marketing Type Is Right for Your Business
Businesses rely on many different types of content to attract and engage the right audience. You should rely on your content marketing strategy to determine the best types of content to use for specific audiences. Top-of-the-funnel website visitors, for example, may be looking for white papers, informational blog posts, and company news to help them learn more about your brand. Social media posts or videos might also catch their eye.
Curious consumers who are starting to make a decision (middle-of-the-funnel prospects) may look for webinars, videos, and in-depth articles to help them find out why your solution is the best for them. Finally, readers who are in the bottom-of-the-funnel — very close to making a buying decision — may be most interested in promotions, discounts, testimonials and reviews, or case studies.
Deep diving into your audience personas helps you figure out where and when they might consume content, and it helps make it obvious where you should be inserting it.
When you’re creating your content plan and choosing the types of content to create, also consider the resources you have available, including your budgets. A blog is a relatively low-cost type of content to produce, while videos or podcasts may require more of an upfront investment.
If you don’t have the right content creators on your in-house team, think about outsourcing to professionals, or even a full-scale marketing agency to help generate the content that will best resonate with your audience.
Key Takeaways
There are many ways to go about content marketing. To find what works best for you, consider your audience, consider your resources, and be open to the process of trial and error. Be interesting, be different, and be sure to always add value — not noise — to your audience’s lives.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are the 4 Ps of content marketing?
The four Ps of content marketing refer to product, price, place, and promotion. This concept, first introduced in reference to any form of marketing in 1960, emphasizes offering the right product, in the right place, with the right promotion, and at the right price. How you choose to promote your offerings comes into play with content planning.
What are the 7 steps of content marketing?
Delivering successful content marketing campaigns relies on seven steps: Identifying your goals, creating audience personas to understand your target market, completing a competitive analysis, auditing existing content to find successful content and content gaps, choosing the types of content that will resonate with your audience, choosing the right channels for content distribution, and measuring your results.
What are the 5 P’s of content marketing?
The above strategy can also be summarized as: Planning, production, publishing, promotion, and (measuring) performance.
