When it comes to content marketing, there are three broad content marketing strategy types you may want to consider.
A few years ago, YouTube published a research paper proposing that companies who established the strongest brands on social media did so by publishing three different types of content. The paper focused on video content and the terms were a bit confusing but the underlining premise of much of the report was sound. Therefore, I have digested the underlining message into a description of three content marketing strategy types.
Inbound Content
Once you know the customer segment you want to reach you have to try to understand their intent. More specifically, what are they searching for? Unfortunately, as we stated in Will You Fail Because You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, many customers are ignorant of your industry and as such have difficulty selecting the right words in constructing a proper search query or completely ask the wrong questions based on wrong or incomplete information.
With an inbound content marketing strategy, you have to figure out alternative search queries and even try to anticipate improper questions.
For example, many of my clients have no idea what a registered agent is or what they do when they create a new entity for their business. Most don’t even ask. If as part of your inbound content marketing strategy you targeted keywords to educated prospects about what a registered entity is and what they do, you would miss a vast number of prospects that would gain value from the knowledge but never asked. Therefore, as part of the inbound content marketing strategy, you would need to create content with a title like, “How to register an entity” or “What you need to know before you register an entity.” This is because the prospect would likely be including “register an entity” in their search query and not “registered agent.” Once the prospect is captured through SEO and lands on your page you can describe what a registered agent is and why it is important.
Therefore when it comes to inbound content marketing strategies, it is all about anticipating the customer’s entry points and then targeting long-tail keywords in the title and content and follow good search engine design principals.
The problem with an inbound content marketing strategy alone is that once the prospect finds the answer they came for, they often leave your site. Therefore, you need to give them a reason to stay or explore further. This leads us to the next strategy:
Addictive Content
Once a prospect lands on your site, you want them to stay and explore or come back later for another dose. Therefore you must encourage them to subscribe to your future content or provide content that makes them what to click-through and discover more of your content through links and teasers.
Typically, you create an addictive content marketing strategy through regularly scheduled content that gives a prospect a reason to come back for the next content installment. By developing content with a strong editorial voice and an identifiable personality, prospects will be encouraged to sign up to mailing lists or become subscribers so they are alerted whenever you publish new content.
Tentpole Content
Once you have had a chance to build a following of loyal fans, you may want to build buzz to promote an upcoming program or release in an attempt to use your current audience to leverage an even broader audience and extract even larger financial commitments from them. The term “tentpole” is a marketing tactic that gets its name from the shape of the activity leading up to an event.
When you create a program or have a new product release they are usually costly and time specific such as a live streaming program or a new release of a book. For these events to pay off, you want to make sure you can extract the greatest value from the event. As you get closer to the date of the event, you will want to build up the frequency of your content marketing buzz to generate more and more excitement as you are getting closer to the date.
Moreover, after an event or release, you will want to produce post-event content to maximize your returns. For example, immediately after an event/release, you will want to capture post-event comments and encourage discussions among the participants. Finally, you will want to consider repurposing the content of the event/release into other products. For example, if the event is a live seminar, perhaps, you may want to produce an audio podcast of the event. If the event is a book release, you may what to create a few white papers that describe specific topics covered in the book.
How can you use your knowledge of the three content marketing strategy types to crush your competition?
In the next post, we’ll look at how these three content marketing strategies are combined with your content marketing goals to pay dividends.
