Content marketing is no longer a secret.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes are using carefully tailored content to optimize their lead generation efforts, boost their search rankings and improve their overall reach and relevance.
But with this uptick in content marketing adoption has come a new problem… content onslaught.
The web is littered with blog posts, white papers, ebooks, PDF guides and shareable infographics, and it’s making it harder and harder to stand out as a brand.
So what’s there to do? How can you make sure your organization’s content stands out from the crowd?
The answer’s simple: you experiment.
The surge in content creation doesn’t mean content marketing is less effective. It simply means we need to get a little more creative with the content we produce – especially if we want it to give us a leg up on the competition.
Take this recent post by Type-form, for example. Using an interactive “guide” named Paul, this creative blog offers an engaging, educational and fun read all at the same. It’s memorable, it’s interactive and it shows off Type-form’s tech-savvy expertise – a winning scenario no matter how you look at it.
To stand out in today’s overcrowded content marketplace, we need to take this level of creativity to your own content efforts, producing outside-the-box, non-vanilla content that really gets customers excited.
Before you write another blog post, think: “could this be in a form of video content instead?”
Videos are great social media fodder, and they also allow customers to put a face to your brand – something that does wonders for encouraging long-term loyalty and repeat business.
Consider videos for any sort of educational content you’re looking to produce – like how-tos, FAQs or even just interviews. You can even repurpose old blogs into new videos to get some more traction.
Podcasts are one of the most popular and easily consumable forms of media on the market. All you need is your phone and a pair of headphones, and you can learn, listen and laugh wherever you go – on the train, while driving to work or even sitting at your desk.
If you’re not sure how to start podcasting, consider an app like Anchor, which makes it a simple, drag-and-drop process. To increase your podcast’s reach, make sure to publish it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.
One of the main goals of content marketing is to establish your brand as an expert in its field. What better way to do that than through teaching?
Webinars offer you the opportunity to do just that, presenting educational, instructional content to a live audience or via a pre-recorded video. You can also use webinars to make your internal processes more efficient, creating webinars for things like HR onboarding, sales pitches and other commonly used content.
Make sure to use your webinars to create more traditional forms of content too; post the final video on your blog, add it on social media or send it out to your email list to expand its reach even further.
We’ve been dabbling in these more interactive content pieces over the past few months, so check out our LinkedIn and Facebook feeds to see for yourself. What types of non-vanilla content are you experimenting with? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.