What Are The Types of Content Marketing Strategies?

We’ve all witnessed it—when a content marketing strategy clicks on a large scale, creating long-lasting opportunities and growth for a business through engaging new customers. How did the marketing team know? How did they craft a message and funnel it through the right channels with impactful content, almost as if they knew exactly what would work?

As students of content strategy, DemandJump knows the end goal of a content marketing strategy is to show how content development and execution has achieved clear business objectives. But creating a content strategy requires spending time identifying the most effective ways to connect with an audience.

There are several strategies that you can take to better connect with your target audience. This blog will discuss:

• What a content strategy is
• The different types of strategies in digital marketing
• The different types of content in digital marketing you can create to make the strategy you have in mind successful

Let’s get started.

What Does a Content Strategy Look Like?

Content strategy requires a lot more than creating and distributing content—even if the content is good. A well-crafted blog or a semi-viral video with 10,000+ views is not how content strategy achieves business objectives for you or your company. While these do help, real results come from creating that quality content, finding a way to get it in front of your audience, and encouraging your audience to take some sort of action to keep them on or direct them to your website.

Understand your audience in their full capacity as information gatherers; they want to find answers to their problems and will search for content that gives that to them. To make sure your content answers their questions, you have to make sure it is good quality. Otherwise, you risk your audience leaving your page before they take any further action. First, though, you have to connect with your audience to get your content in front of them.

A good content marketing strategy focuses on relevancy and connection with audiences over time, across multiple forms and mediums. The goal is to achieve authenticity with your viewers—and there’s no single content strategy that suits every business. Approach yours organically, but don’t hesitate to look at different types of content marketing strategies to get you started.

What Are the Different Types of Content Marketing Strategies?

Your content strategy is not limited to any set formula—nor should you follow the below examples to the teeth. Audience awareness, innovation, and playing to your strengths will help form your content marketing strategy. Take these examples as starting points.

Pillar-Based Marketing

This type of content marketing strategy generates traffic through related, linked pieces of content. Generally, a main pillar page will act as the catch-all authority on a broad topic; then multiple sub-pillars (slightly shorter and more specific pieces of content) and supporting blogs (short pieces of content that aim to answer one specific question) on related topics will hyperlink to the pillar page. The pillar page will navigate the audience to a website or webpage with even further information.

What’s interesting about this model is that the audience can start at any point of contact and will eventually be linked to all the related pages. Doing this gives substance to your content strategy.

DemandJump is an expert in the Pillar-Based Marketing strategy because we invented it. Our platform allows you to more easily create your strategy by giving you insights into what your target audience is searching for. From there, we will give you ideas on what your Pillar-Based Marketing strategy should look like, from the title of each piece to keywords to include to make your content rank on Google. To learn more, click here.

SEO

The search engine optimization (SEO) strategy aims to get your content to the forefront of search engines. It does so by including factors like keywords, mobile-friendliness, content quality, authenticity, and more to ensure audiences are being directed to reliable content. In a similar way to Pillar-Based Marketing strategies, SEO achieves authenticity by ranking in search engine algorithms designed to detect worthwhile content. At the end of the day, the Pillar-Based Marketing strategy uses SEO strategy, after all. That’s where those keywords we mentioned in the last section come in.

It’s important to note that good SEO does not mean keyword stuffing. It means writing quality content and including those keywords organically throughout your content. Make sure to have enough keywords to rank higher in search engines but not so many that your content sounds robotic.

Subject Matter Expert Authority

Often, cold hard information wins the day—and many audiences want reliable content that cuts through the rhetoric. A subject matter content strategy strips your content down to the facts. You interview subject matter experts, and then you create content on what you learn. Infographics, how-to articles, online instructional manuals, and educational tools are examples. When you have information backed by subject matter experts, your audience is more likely to trust you, leading to further engagement and even subscriptions to mailing lists or e-newsletters.

Social Media Strategy

A strong presence on social media can be hard for businesses to achieve. But there are organic ways to connect with audiences without being too “sales-y,” something that drives many potential customers away. Businesses who achieve success with social media strategies build their brand through interaction and participation in social media groups and on related social content. Sharing fun facts, commenting on current events, and linking to useful blog articles that your team has written are great ways to connect with your audience on social media.

What Are the Types of Content in Digital Marketing?

There are several types of content in digital marketing that you can use to bring success to your marketing strategy. They are:

• Blogs: This type of content is a great way to share helpful information with your target audience about whatever topic you feel your business is an expert in or whatever topic you feel your audience is curious about. For example, if your business provides software to help teachers in the classroom, you might decide to write a blog on the different types of teaching methods. While you can plug your business a little bit within your blogs, the focus of these is to teach your target audience.
• Social Media Posts: As we mentioned previously, social media is a great way to connect with your target audience since more than half of the world uses it. To make your content marketing strategies even more effective, you can write different posts on the same topic for each platform to better appeal to those on each site. For example, a LinkedIn post might sound more professional than a similar post on Twitter.
• Emails: This type of content can be more product or service-driven and focus more on your business itself than other types of content. With that being said, these emails should provide value to your target audience. That value could be anything like informing them of how one of your products or services could solve one of their problems, a newsletter teaching them more about your business, or a coupon that can save them money on one of your products. Call to actions (encouraging the reader to do something) are important for emails because your readers won’t want to read lengthy content in an email. Instead, they will want to know what you want them to do and why they should do it.
• Technical Content: This type of content includes anything such as whitepapers, ebooks, and how-to guides. These are informative pieces of content that are more formal than blog posts. While they are more technical (hence the name), they should not include so much jargon that your target audience doesn’t understand what you’re trying to teach them. Including technical content in your marketing strategy will make your business stand out as an authority in whatever topic you choose to write about.

Content Marketing Tactics

Tactics in content marketing are formed and developed when you’ve created the content and seen the results. To quote E.M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” In this case, how can we know our effectiveness until we see the results of our content creation?

Data analysis is a great way for you to learn how to strategize your future content, and creating lets you learn more about your audience. There are tools available to help you engage with this data.

Create Your Content Marketing Strategy With DemandJump

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