Best Content Marketing Strategies (with Examples to Learn from!)

Content marketing has changed the way we promote ourselves, and nowadays, it’s more than just creating and sharing articles or images. In fact, there are several content marketing strategies you can take advantage of to give a methodical approach to your inbound efforts.

In this article, I’ll cover the best ways to draw in, keep, and grow an audience by producing and sharing valuable, pertinent content rather than simply telling them to buy your product or service. I’ll go over the best approaches to this practice and share with you some content marketing strategy examples to follow and inspire your company’s future actions.

Let’s take a look!

 

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is the way you plan ahead for how you’ll develop and distribute high-quality content to attract potential customers and gain leads that’ll result in revenue growth.

In order to understand how to create a content marketing strategy, you have to keep your audience in mind, determine who the piece is intended to reach, on what platforms, and why people would be interested in it. The best inbound marketing agencies know that a properly targeted campaign can be the decisive factor on whether your inbound efforts will properly attract customers, or end up ignored.

 

Best Content Marketing Strategies

Once you’ve got a thorough understanding of how your potential customer acts, you can learn about the different content marketing strategies there are to see which one works best for them. Let’s go over them!

 

1. Take Advantage of Video Content

In 2022, 1 million videos were watched per second. In comparison to other types of content, marketing statistics show that users prefer to watch videos because they’re easy to digest and much more memorable. That’s why creating and sharing high-quality videos has to be an essential part of any content marketing strategy.

What this type of content is especially good at is drawing audiences in. Adding a short hook at the beginning of each video can capture your viewer’s attention and encourage them to keep watching. Later, with eye-catching visuals and compelling storytelling, like in this example, you can easily engage your audience long enough to make sure your message reaches home.

 

2. Leverage Social Media

Content marketing is about finding a way to reach your audience in a subtle, casual way that potential customers won’t feel intrusive. Sharing relevant content on social media can help you build brand awareness and increase conversion rates without getting on their bad grades.

To make the most of social media as a content marketing strategy, focus on targeting the right niche and understanding it better than anyone else. If you know what your target audience wants and why they do so, you’ll be able to share content that appeals to them on a deeper level and stand out among the overflowing number of companies online. 

A way to do that is to share pieces filled with your unique brand identity, like in this example. Those who resonate with that will be drawn to your content, and, consequently, your brand.

 

3. Share Newsletters

Email marketing is an effective content marketing strategy to educate your audience and help them make well-informed decisions about your brand and products. Additionally, weekly or monthly newsletters will increase brand recognition and keep your company top of mind when customers are considering making a purchase.

If you want to increase your subscriber retention and build favorability, you can start sharing exclusive content like ebooks, behind-the-scenes, and the latest innovations in an area.

Take a look at this newsletter from the New York Times. The “In other news” section gives readers an exclusive insight into the latest happenings in the book industry, which allows them to make their mailing list feel special.

 

4. Create Testimonials and Customer Success Stories

Testimonials are an effective tool for building confidence and trust in your company. Success stories from existing customers build empathy in viewers and allow you to connect with potential clients on a more human level in order to persuade them that your service is worth their time and money. 

You can ask a few of your most important or recent customers to give a review, but remember that the focus should be on them and their personal experiences. In this Salesforce example, you can see that the client talks about themselves, their pain points, why they needed the service, and how it helped them in the end in creating unique experiences for their customers through technology.

 

5. Write Blog Posts

Who would’ve thought that, from the beginning of the internet until today, blog posts would play such an important part in a company’s online presence? This beginner-friendly SEO content marketing strategy will enhance your site’s organic positioning, draw traffic from organic search results, and nurture leads with valuable content. 

Like in this example, you can also write guest posts for other websites’ blogs. The key to writing quality blog notes lies in research. Once you’ve found the most popular article on a topic, strive to make a similar one that’s significantly better by including unique information or an in-depth analysis, for example. 

That way,  you’ll come up with content like this guest post by our CEO, Victor Blasco, and enjoy benefits such as enhancing your brand’s reputation, positioning your business as a thought leader, and getting relevant backlinks to your site.

 

6. Design Infographics

Infographics have become really popular in the past few years, and not only because they look great on your website or social media profiles. The combination of attractive visual information with hard data, like statistics and numbers, makes them a persuasive marketing tool.

When it comes to creating your infographic, besides showing powerful visuals that can simplify your ideas, you need to think about how to break down the information into easily digestible sections. Studio Pattern presented the data in three different sections, all clearly defined with a specific header to guide the audience through the topic and making it easier to understand.

 

7. Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy for Emerging Search Trends

Your content marketing strategies need to be adapted to the upcoming search trends in order to reach the audience you’re looking for, and lately, in addition to written queries, voice and image searches have also become an increasingly important trend. For example, you need to consider that, unlike text-based queries that range from 3 to 4 words, voice searches tend to exceed 20 words and are often shaped like questions.

A great tactic, as shown in this example, is to include a FAQ section on your website or landing pages and break down your text into subheadings and bullet points to help voice search engines understand long paragraphs.

This content marketing strategy may not be for everyone, but if the product or service you’re offering aims to attract a technophile audience, your content needs to be optimized for voice and image search.

 

8. Develop Content with Cross-Channel in Mind

To gain the biggest market reach possible, your company needs to be present on every platform that your target audience is in. But keeping an effective marketing content strategy can be hard when your efforts get divided into a series of channels, each with different practices and formats. 

To save time and effort, you have to keep cross-channel in mind even before you start to create content. Instead of following only one format, adapt your elements to various settings in the very production process, so you don’t have to invest in starting all over afterward.

And record everything! You can save the steps of the development process to showcase later on, like in this example. Social media platforms, like Instagram, are key places to share behind the scenes of your company and build a community that’s interested in learning more about your brand.

 

9. Work with Influencers and Important Figures

Having famous personalities promote a certain product is a tried-and-tested technique in marketing to help your audience overcome any doubts they might have regarding your product or service’s authenticity. 

You can co-create content with an influencer, and have them record a video using it, testing it, and giving honest reviews. However, if you want your influencer marketing to be effective, you have to give the person you’re working with freedom to create. At the end of the day, they know their followers the best, and their content should feel natural and carry their personal touch, even if it’s promotional. That way, you’ll have genuine, authentic, and relevant pieces that’ll help you win the trust of your target audience

 

10. Personalization Your Content Marketing Strategy

In a sea of rivals, personalized content, and carefully thought-out user journeys can make your customers feel heard and understood. So, if you’re looking for ways to improve your content marketing strategies, you can’t go wrong with content that showcases your brand’s value and principles in a way that resonates with each person individually. 

Audiences are drawn to brands that they can personally identify with, be it through a shared philosophy, a love for a particular pastime or activity, or an adherence to certain principles or beliefs. The more your target audience can identify with your content, the more likely it is that they will interact with it and take action.

 

11. Start Managing Online PR

Reputation is an important aspect of every business, especially in the B2B world. Focusing on your online PR as a content marketing strategy can help you increase brand awareness, improve your online presence and visibility, and reach broader audiences by gaining mentions on social media and blogs with relevant domains.

You can create online press releases with the latest goings-on in your company, nurture relationships with online journalists and bloggers to gain online coverage, organize interviews, and foster new partnerships in the digital world. 

Don’t be disheartened if your stories don’t get picked up by any platform right away because public relations management is a long-term strategy, but the results are worth it in terms of brand authority and awareness.

 

12. Create Webinars and Offer Courses

Webinars are a B2B content marketing strategy to draw industry experts, clients, or potential customers in to join in a discussion on a certain topic. You can talk about your products, reflect on industry changes, and gain direct insights from your potential clients on their worries and goals.

The first step in creating a good webinar is finding the right topic to talk about. In the sea of free educational content, you need to come up with something that your audience is really interested in, and willing to learn. Take a look at this Wix example: It makes sense to assume that someone who wants to create a website wants to learn about SEO.

 

13. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) are pieces created and shared by customers or fans. Just like testimonials, they can be an incredibly effective way to drive brand awareness because they work as social proof.

The problem with UGC lies in the fact that you don’t control its creation, so it can be hard to incorporate it into your content marketing strategies. To sort out that challenge, you can encourage users to create it by hosting events, offering free giveaways, creating hashtags, and making sure to repost every piece of relevant UGC on your channels.

 

14. Repurpose Old Content

You don’t have to start from scratch every month when you start writing down your content plan. If you have old posts that are not up to the current standard, you can rework them, correct the loopholes in the information, and try to add additional elements to them like images, videos, and infographics to complement the data and make it more meaningful. 

Blogs are a type of content that is commonly repurposed, as the information can become obsolete in just a few months or they can contain SEO mistakes from older practices. If that’s the case for one of your better-positioned articles, edit it and bring it up to date. Just remember to let readers know that you’ve made some changes.

 

15. Make Data-Driven Decisions for Your Content Marketing Strategy

Analytics will provide valuable information to help develop future content and target your customers effectively. By measuring what is working, what readers like, and what is driving them to your website, you can guide your actions to reach the best possible outcome in the future.

Track different traffic sources for keywords, links, and other connections, and use alerts to monitor information related to the customer’s needs. Using analytics in your content marketing strategy will allow you to understand the best topics to address, where you need to start targeting your potential customers, and what is being searched for.

 

Wrapping Up

Nowadays, the majority of businesses approach their marketing using a series of inbound strategies. As a result, there is an overflowing amount of content online, which puts companies in a competitive position not only for customers but also for their attention.

I came up with this list of content marketing strategies so that you could maximize the effectiveness of your inbound strategies and explore new options. Finding the ones that benefit you and your current market the most can be the boost for your business that you were looking for.