Content marketing is a very powerful means of spreading the message about your unique products and services. I have written recently about the danger of depending on just one of anything in business or personal life – and that applies to your content channels as well.
What Types of Content Do People Consume?
Text is an easy and popular way for your prospects and clients to consume and share content. Social media and search engines love text, so do a large number of business readers because while pictures and video can be misinterpreted, well-written text communicates clearly and precisely.
- 140 character tweets;
- social media updates;
- blog posts – long or short;
- reports and booklets;
- Print and ebooks;
Audio content, is a very popular and portable way of learning for many people, especially as they drive or exercise.
- podcasts;
- interviews;
- seminars;
- music.
Quality videos are fairly easy to create these days, and You Tube is one of the biggest search engines on the planet, as well as a very popular place to hang out and share content.
- Animations;
- Live videos;
- Powerpoint presentations;
- Webinars.
Photos are a powerful way of communicating, and sites like Pinterest and Flickr make it easy to share – photos also make your content easier for readers to consume, especially when accompanied by text to drive home your point.
How can you Publicise Your Content?
Consistent, high quality content, which is appropriately larded with key words, and tagged will be picked up by search engines. If you use a variety of media and channels you can also create a very effective loop of content that increases the chance that your content will be noticed in social media channels and shared widely. This will dramatically increase your visibility without additional advertising. However, you can also pay to highlight your content and this can accelerate your visibility if you choose your target market carefully and watch how much you are spending. On the other hand, you need to be wary, lousy content will de-rail your best efforts to get noticed!
“Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.” David Ogilvy
Appropriate content, aimed at the right sources can also attract free publicity from journalists if you bring it to their attention, and if it is timely, useful, and suitable. David Meerman Scott has covered the mechanics of this in detail in his book Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now
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The advantages of Press attention and Social Media are that you attract unpaid endorsements from outsiders who are presumably independent, and that carries far more weight than your own statements about your product, or anything you have paid to propagate.
Multiple Channels Create Broader Appeal
The idea is to have multiple channels to get the word out about your business – online and offline; audio, video, photo, and text; your own website and outpost channels, other sites and social media references; your own publications and independent ones. That way, you are not at the mercy of a single provider and your promotions will be more resilient and have a broader appeal.
The Infographic below is a matrix of 16 different types of content which your business can use to increase its visibility. It highlights the ease or difficulty of implementation by businesses and absorption by consumers. The lower part of the infographic provides more precise details on the impact and content which each of the channels can provide.
