Content Marketing Ideas
Content marketing is not just about creating and publishing blog posts.
If you are looking to drive in traffic to your website, turn more of them into customers and retain those customers for long, you should not limit your content marketing efforts by simply posting on your blog and guest blogging on related blogs.
In this post, I’ll introduce a few content marketing ideas you might not have seriously considered yet with some proven case studies.
I’ll also include actionable tips along with those successful case studies, so you don’t necessarily need to replicate those examples on your website. Instead, you can learn from those examples and implement those marketing lessons for better results.
Without any delay, let’s get started.
Content Marketing Vault
Idea #1: Video marketing- Create a video gallery on your website
Did you know that video is the future of content marketing?
Let’s take a look at a few studies that illustrate this point.
- A study by Neilson reveals that 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their content marketing strategies in the near future.
- 90% of customers say that viewing a video about a product influences their purchasing decision.
- A survey of retail brands such as NewEgg and OnlineShoes reveals that brands that incorporate product videos on their websites report much higher average order value and conversion rates.
Evidently, if done correctly, video marketing is a surefire strategy to drive more conversion on your website.
Moreover, search engines love videos.
It has been reported that adding videos to your website can increase the chance of your brand being on the front page of Google SERPs by 53 times.
Additionally, YouTube has now turned into the second largest search engine. With the right tactics, not only would you drive in more organic traffic from your videos to your website but also helpful to turn those traffic into customers.
Now that you know the importance of video marketing, let’s look at an excellent video marketing example of NewEgg- the well-known computer hardware and software ecommerce retailer.
From in-depth tutorials to product reviews, you can find all sorts of videos in their video gallery.
newegg-video-gallery
Actionable tips- video marketing
Below are a few things you can learn from their video marketing strategy.
- Create a video gallery site- All of the videos in their gallery were hosted on their own site. The benefit is that not only it helps to drive more organic traffic, but also gives you more control on your videos. That being said, do keep in mind that hosting videos on your own server will consume more bandwidth. So if you’re on a shared hosting, you might want to consider switching to a reliable hosting especially if you’re planning to host many videos on your server.
- You can always distribute those videos to various platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, which helps to attract traffic to your website.
- Make the videos short and sweet. Short videos entice more of your visitors to view your videos.
Idea #2: Use SlideShare to build brand authority
SlideShare is not just a platform where you can upload and archive your tired old presentations. If you’re looking to expand the reach of your products or building awareness for your brand, SlideShare could be the right platform for you.
slideshare-oracle
On a regular basis, companies like Oracle share their slide presentations on SlideShare that are repurposed from their existing corporate PowerPoint presentations.
Wondering how it benefits them?
- More visibility: Oracle’s slides often get featured in the ‘Technology’ stream of SlideShare, which help them to gain more traction.
- Demonstrate their expertise: For them, SlideShare is a platform to demonstrate their expertise and increase the brand awareness in their niche circles.
- Generate sales: As their slides provide relevant information to their potential customers, this strategy also influences the purchasing decision, which in turns generating more sales.
Actionable tips- Slideshare marketing
Follow the guidelines listed below, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness using SlideShare.
- Define your goals- Unless you have measurable goals, chances are you won’t find any tangible results using SlideShare. For instance, you can use SlideShare to get more traffic, gain leads, become a thought leader in your niche, etc. Whatever it is, make sure to set your goals before jumping in to creating slides.
- Create beautiful slides: There are many ways to create PowerPoint presentations for SlideShare. You can either create presentations by yourself or hire a designer from Fiverr.com or Upwork.com.
- Insert a clickable link and publish it: The best thing about creating a SlideShare presentation is that it allows you to create clickable links and call-to-action buttons within the slides. Make sure you add a clickable link or a CTA button within a slide before publishing it.
Idea #3: Grow your email list with free paywall
When it comes to email marketing, one of the common practices to encourage users to sign up to the email list is by offering an ebook or email course. As more businesses are offering generic opt-in bribes such as ebooks, it became harder to stand out from the competition.
In fact, an average email subscriber receives 416 commercial messages per month. This denotes that apart from acquiring leads, you’ll need to focus on nurturing the leads as well by increasing the engagement rate and trustworthiness of your emails.
How would you stand out from your competition while building an email list? How would you entice more subscribers to opt in and nurture the leads throughout your sales funnel?
Let’s look at the example of CopyBlogger and how they used their ‘free paywall’ to encourage more signups to their list.
The team at CopyBlogger wanted to offer something more unique and valuable to their leads in return for entering their email address. For that purpose, they created a premium content library consisting of 15 ebooks and 20-part internet marketing course called MyCopyBlogger.
copyblogger
This library was accessible to registered users only, which eventually helped them to increase the signup rate by 400%.
Actionable tips- email marketing
If you’re looking to grow your email list exponentially like the above Copyblogger’s example, below are a few tips that come handy.
- Add opt-in forms to key location: Besides your landing page, you’ll need to add opt-in forms to other key locations like sidebar and below the content area. You can also try adding pop up sign ups and content upgrade to see what works the best on your website. For your WordPress site, you may use a free plugin like Optin Forms or premium list building plugins, so adding opt-in forms will not be a hassle.
- Track the onsite behavior: Leadin is a free plugin from Hubspot that help you get to know more details about your leads. It tracks each lead individually and tells you the onsite behavior, so you get a detailed info. Learning the onsite behavior is an essential step especially when you’re looking to nurture your leads.
- Segment your leads: Once you tracked the detailed on-site behavior of the leads in the content library, you can segment your leads into a distinct group on the basis of their behaviors and preferences. This will help you send them personalized emails that are optimized for conversion.
Idea #4: Generate backlinks using infographics
Kissmetrics is one of the popular companies that leverage infographics for generating backlinks and traffic to their website. In just 2 years, they created and published 47 infographics, which helped them to generate 41142 backlinks from 3741 unique domains.
kissmetrics infographics
Actionable tips- infographics marketing
If you’re looking to create infographics below are a few tips that might help you.
- Research: No matter how well you designed an infographic, the design is useless unless it is backed by solid data. Make sure you do thorough research before jumping in to the design process.
- Create graphics: Once the info is set, the next step is to design the graphics. Simply search for the word infographics on sites like Dribble or Behance to find and hire designers who can create infographics for you.
- Embed code: Before you publish infographics on your blog, make sure you create an embed code so people can easily embed it on their site as well.
- Start promoting: Promote your infographics by sharing it on social media and encouraging other bloggers to embed it on their website.
Author bio:
Shahzad Saeed is a freelance blogger for hire. He specializes in writing on WordPress, marketing and ecommerce. You can follow him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed
