Not enough time, not enough in-house resources or not enough budget to outsource content creation? Whatever your reason for not producing enough quality content for your website – not having any ideas for different types of content shouldn’t be one of them.

In this blog post, we take a look at the different types of content you can create, with ideas to get you well on your way to win at content marketing.

Infographics

Infographics are visualisations of data; they are educational and informative and help users understand vast amounts of information quickly. They are extremely shareable and can hold viral capability when done right.

Whilst they usually cost to have made, there are a number of free tools you can use to get started:

Infographics done right:

13 Reasons Why Your Brain Craves Infographics

Impact Of Music On Productivity

What Is An Infographic?

Case Studies / Testimonials

If you’re struggling to get content on your site – why not get your customers to write the content for you? Not only will testimonials and case studies add to your site’s content, but they also instil trust in your brand and give potential customers a reason to work with you.

Ebooks / PDF Downloads

People love free stuff, and ebooks are the cream of the crop when it comes to free content. They allow you to provide in-depth valuable information usually in the form of a PDF that your users can download and keep for future reading.

Despite the initial time and effort that will go into creating a downloadable e-book or PDF, there is huge conversion potential. Not only does it build trust with users and raise your brand awareness but making an email address a required field means you can target users at a later date. Note: Make sure your data capture procedure id GDPR compliant.

Interviews

Interviews are a great way to bring a second opinion from other industry experts to your content. In addition to the added value the interview brings to your readers, the interviewee is likely to share their feature with their own readers, bringing them over to your blog.

Another added value of interviews is that the content is ‘exclusive’ and the interviewee is unlikely to have answered all of these questions before.

Round-Up Posts

Roundup posts are a great way to compile information and opinions from several different experts in your industry, they offer unique value to the reader in the form of several different viewpoints.

This can either be done in interview style, or by curating content and quotes from the blogs of several industry experts and putting your own thoughts in. Curate is the key word here – don’t copy.

Quizzes

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent more time than you’d like to admit filling out quizzes to find out what type of cheese you are.

Content Marketing Quizzes

Aside from finding out this kind of vital information, quizzes can actually be used as a powerful marketing tool. Take Topshop for example, who use a quiz on fashion to find and select styles for their visitors. Not only does this improve user experiences, but provides valuable information to Topshop for marketing to these people in future.

Original Research

Other bloggers and businesses are always looking for research to cite to back up their points and there’s no reason why your blog can’t be that point of reference. Granted, original research takes time, but if it’s done right it can become a piece of content that is cited, referenced and linked to for years to come.

You can use your own research, however, to avoid bias results or selective data, you may opt to have the research done by an independent organisation on your behalf. This will cost but makes users more likely to cite your research, and reduces the risk of anybody questioning its legitimacy down the line.

Surveys

Surveys are not only insightful but can lay the foundation of many future pieces of content. For example, if we were looking to find out more about our potential customers we might ask:

  • What do you look for in a web marketing company?
  • Have you ever been stung by a web marketing company?
  • Are you confident in your ability to handle marketing activities for your business online?

From these questions, you can identify the most important thing to your potential customers, this will be valuable information in improving conversion rates and enquiries. This kind of data lends itself well to infographics and can be cited when writing future pieces of content.

P.S – If your survey is looking a bit dull, why not offer a prize for a random entrant?

Product Reviews

Every industry uses unique products, software and services. Sharing your experiences with these products can help you gain recognition from others in the industry, you may even find that your reviews become instrumental in changes to the product.

For example, here at All Things Web®, we use various tools and platforms to help improve our service to clients. For this reason, we may do a detailed review on a marketing tool including who it’s suitable for, how to use it properly and how we rate it.

Predictions

Time to get the crystal ball out, if you notice a certain trend or change in your industry, hop on the bandwagon early and get writing about it, predictions that go against the grain are hard to ignore and you’ll gain recognition if your prediction turns out to be correct.

Memes

Memes have surged in popularity in recent years, particularly on social media sites such as Instagram, Reddit and Facebook, so big in fact that there are personalities that make a fortune creating them. They aren’t appropriate in all cases but they can engage users by adding personality and humour to your content. You can make memes online for free with tools such as imgflip and makeameme.

Content Marketing Meme

Guides

The web is full of guides, and now it appears to be full of ‘ultimate guides’ – I’m still waiting for ‘The Ultimate Guide To Writing An Ultimate Guide’.

So, if you’re thinking of writing a guide, make sure it’s a good one – show off your expertise, collect opinions from other prominent entities in your niche and promote it far and wide. Guides that are successful have the potential to be used as an online resource for years to come.

How To’s / Tutorials

People love doing things themselves, or at least learning how to. These can be smaller versions of guides that teach your users how to achieve a certain action, make it simple with clear explanations and relevant imagery/video.

Who’s doing ‘how to’s ‘right?

Wikihow have built an entire community filled simply with how to posts – from overcoming making your own honey, to surviving being bitten by a venomous snake.

Content Marketing How To Guides - Wikihow

Q and A’s / FAQ’s

Your customers have questions, and you should be answering them. This can be done in the form of a dedicated FAQ page or post, detailed video response or resources page. You could also use a live video platform to host a live Q and A.

Live Chats / Webinars

Platforms like Facebook Live have enabled businesses to instantly go live and interact with users in real-time. These live streams have become increasingly popular on social media channels due to the opportunity to interact with brands and get a look behind the scenes of the business.

Who’s doing webinars right?

SEMrush hold regular free webinars, inviting users to discuss topics with experts in the industry:

Industry News

You should have your ear to the ground for any current or upcoming changes in your industry that will affect consumers, creating a really good industry news post means going beyond relaying the changes – include your own opinion and explain to customers what the changes mean for them or the service they receive.

Jargon Busters

Most industries have ‘jargon’ and whilst you may try and make your website as easy to understand as possible, there will usually be some industry buzzwords that your users are unfamiliar with.

Breaking these words down in a one size fits all jargon buster page or post is a great way to make your site more inclusive, as well as helping users understand industry language they may have misinterpreted elsewhere.

Jargon buster posts done right:

Mortgages are full of jargon, APR, LTV, AIP, SVR.. what? So I’m navigating my way around a mortgage broker site, I come across some language I am unfamiliar with so head to Google and stumble across Which? mortgage jargon buster.

The post clears up the meaning of the jargon for me, and look they have a nice strong CTA at the bottom – maybe I’ll just call them instead.

Which Mortgages Example of a great CTA

Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t going away anytime soon for the same reason radio isn’t – people aren’t always in a position where watching a screen or reading text is feasible, for example in the car or whilst doing exercise.

Once you’ve recorded your podcasts, you can host them on your website – discussion points of a podcast can include industry changes, company news, interviews and just about anything else that’s worth listening to.

Opinions

If you have a different opinion to other industry leaders – shout about it. You are an expert at what you do, so you shouldn’t be afraid to go against the grain if you feel there are misconceptions surrounding a topic in your industry.

Don’t be afraid to ‘respond’ to blogs from other leaders in your industry – don’t be rude or dismissive of their take on things, but do share and explain your viewpoint to add another expert opinion into the mix.

Gifs

(It’s pronounced ‘Jif’, by the way). These engaging and funny moving images are super-shareable and a great way to pad out content and keep users reading. Like memes, they aren’t appropriate in some situations but if you’re writing a lighthearted post, a gif can really add something to it.

Who’s doing Gifs right?

Like quizzes, Buzzfeed are the kings of Gif’s – they often incorporate gifs into their standard text articles, but also create entire blog posts made up of gifs:

’28 Gifs That Explain The Whole Entire World’ – This post has 8,600 shares on Facebook

’50 Gifs Everyone Should Save’ – and another 5,700 shares on Facebook and 24,400 shares on Pinterest for this one.

Guest Blogs

Guest blogs work both ways, you can either make yourself available to write content for another site, the reward for this is usually a link back to your website as well as increasing your brand’s visibility.

The other option is inviting guest posters to write content for your site, here are a few tips for attracting guest bloggers to your site:

  • Invite guest posters in – Create a specific page for guest blogging
  • Approach the right people – look for prominent bloggers in your niche.
  • Offer them an incentive – backlink, social share, ‘shout-out’ etc.

Video

Last but by no means least, video content. Made easier by the technology and platforms we have available now, video is not going anywhere fast. It’s easy to consume, loved by search engines and more likely to be shared

Ready To Win At Content Marketing?

So now you have enough ideas for content to keep you going, but are you going to get the time to create it? If the answer is no, why not let us help you – give us a call on 01285 50 55 50 or fill out a contact form and we’ll get back to you.