It’s all too easy for a content marketing strategy to appear stale, especially if you’re a small business owner – you tend to gather ideas from what already exists, meaning it’s harder than ever to stand out and be innovative.
Excellent content marketing strategies stand out because they’re diverse. You produce a good array of content across different formats to hit your target market from all the right angles. Moreover, you’re empowered by great tools to help you make higher-quality content.
On that note, let’s explore some of the best ways to broaden your content marketing strategy!
Lean Into Visual Content
When you start a business, it’s only natural to focus on written content. It’s the easiest form of content to produce – and a decent chunk of your content marketing strategy will require written pieces. This includes web copy, advertising copy, blog posts, email marketing newsletters, and so on.
However, you can’t become overly obsessed with written content, as it will make your strategy stale.
There’s a place for blog posts and written words in a wider content marketing strategy, but you need to lean into visual content for the highest degree of efficacy. It’s been proven multiple times that visual content is more beneficial than just words on a web page. In fact, here are three incredible statistics from StoryChief Insights that back this up:
- Landing pages with videos increase conversions by up to 80%
- People retain 65% more information when visuals are involved
- Social media posts with images get 150% more engagement
If you have a quick look online, you’ll find loads of other stats beating the drum to the tune of visual content supremacy. It’s something you must focus on, which means you need to create and produce a wide range of images and videos.
From the image standpoint, you’ll need a quality camera to take natural photos of things. You can use photos for products on your website or as a replacement for boring and repetitive stock images. It’s also possible to create images using different applications, allowing you to have cool vectors or graphics. Your content instantly becomes more unique and innovative because you’re creating visuals from scratch.
And then you need to think about videography. You can use videos in many ways throughout a content marketing strategy. Perhaps you need some advertising videos, or maybe you’re filming some content for YouTube. Either way, you must get three critical tools:
- A good video camera
- A drone
- Video editing software
Shop around for the camera – there are too many options to talk about in this post alone. As for the drone, you’re probably best getting something like the DJI Flip. It’s the industry-leading option, and you can click here to learn more about its capabilities. On the editing software front, you’re probably looking at Premier Pro or Final Cut Pro. Both lead the way, and it normally comes down to personal preference.
Armed with all your goodies, you’re now in the ideal place to make visual content in various formats. Use it as standalone content or to support your existing pieces of written content.
Transform Old Content Into New Pieces
Expand your current content marketing strategy by taking old pieces and giving them a makeover. This is called content repurposing, and it’s a beautifully effective way to produce more content without needing to come up with brand-new ideas.
The benefit of this is that you can take good content and squeeze more juice from it. Let’s say you made a killer blog post last year that drove loads of traffic to your site. It was the source of many leads/sales, and you want to recapture this effectiveness. If you repurpose the content, you could see the same effects but via a slightly different audience.
Content repurposing means you take something and change the way it’s used. E.g. You convert your blog post into a YouTube video or trim it down to become a social media post. This differs from content refreshing, which involves editing or updating old content, but it remains the same format.
Here are some general rules to follow with content repurposing:
- Only repurpose your own content
- Make sure the format changes in some way
- Try to target audience subsections that didn’t see the original piece
That last point is the most important. Your target audience will be split into different subsections based on their content preferences. Some will love reading blogs, others are podcast-pilled, and some prefer to watch videos. Take old content and split it across as many platforms as you can muster to ensure your entire target audience sees it. You get the benefits of great content, but one idea now provides five or six different pieces.
Encourage UGC
UGC stands for user-generated content, and it’s one of the most powerful tools in your content marketing arsenal. Encourage your audience to produce content that you can share across multiple platforms. It’s mainly used on social media, and here are some examples:
- Reposting customer’s photos of your products
- Hosting competitions where customers send in photos/videos for you to share
- Sharing customer’s posts about your brand on social media
- Using reviews and testimonials as social proof
User-generated content is so powerful because it builds brand authenticity. You can use UGC to generate trust with audiences, and it brings you closer to your target market. You seem less like a faceless corporate brand and more like a company with time for its customers.
While most UGC can be free, you’re also able to pay for UGC creators to make posts for your brand. Lots of companies do this, particularly for short-form video content on their TikTok or Instagram pages.
We can sum up this post by saying that your content marketing strategy should revolve around three key ideas: expanding your visual content repertoire, repurposing more of your old content, and getting as much user-generated content as possible. These ideas will help you broaden your strategy and produce more content that converts.
