1. Written posts, blogs, articles, guides, and more
Advantages: These articles demonstrate your company’s knowledge and expertise, which can help build your credibility and reputation.
Disadvantages: There is a lot of blog content out there, so competition is thick—and you need a lot of creativity to create new topic ideas. Writing also takes a lot of time to generate content ideas, especially if you’re explaining complicated concepts.
How to produce: To help you think of compelling content, look at trending searches. This will give you insight into the questions people want answers to, which can spark ideas about what to write about.
Best platforms: LinkedIn and Facebook are perfect for these types of content, especially when it comes to articles that are 1,500 words or longer. You can post the whole piece, a short snippet, or a link to the piece. Twitter is also a great bet, but the limited character count means you can only include a link and small quote, which still can drive traffic to your website.
Pro Tip: Embrace the content calendar.
Your content calendar is a framework for the ongoing story you want to tell about your business and what content to share. When you take a holistic view of your social media or email marketing output, you can turn ideas and broad strategies into an actionable plan that can be tweaked as you learn more about what works best.
Use our content marketing editorial calendar to visualize when and how you connect with your audience. The calendar displays your scheduled and completed marketing emails, social posts, and digital ads. You can filter your calendar to display your marketing for a specific audience or all audiences.
2. Electronic books (eBooks)
Advantages: An eBook tends to be longer and more detailed than blog posts, which helps showcase your industry expertise. Far fewer businesses take the time to produce an eBook compared to blogs, too, so you avoid that heavy competition.
Disadvantages: Not everyone wants to read a whole eBook, and they take a lot of time to produce and find content that will appeal to your target audience. While they can help generate leads, people don’t always actually read them.
How to produce: An eBook is basically several blog posts compiled together as chapters from the same category. You’ll want to choose your best content or even hire a professional writer with experience writing eBooks.
Best platforms: Users come to LinkedIn to connect with colleagues and learn relevant information about their job or other interests, which makes it an ideal network to share an eBook. Facebook and Twitter are secondary options.
3. Links to external content
Advantages: If you don’t have time to finish a blog post or your writer is on vacation, you can always link to relevant articles, resources, and websites from other sources that you trust. Industry leaders are also excellent resources for content.
Disadvantages: When you link to content that you haven’t created, you’re effectively opening a door to another business’s social media experience. Readers may even find the other source more informative than your page. Content curation is a good digital marketing strategy to use on social networks, but it also can be time consuming. It is important to check your social analytics to be sure that curated content is engaging and effective, and not to stop your own content creation process.
How to create: Research different blogs using keywords similar to those on your website. (Keywords are words or phrases commonly searched on the internet.) Make sure to read every post and click around on the website, too. This will ensure you don’t share an article on social media accounts from a site that could negatively represent your brand’s views.
Best platforms: LinkedIn and Facebook are great marketing tools for any type of written content, even if it’s just links to the content. Twitter is a secondary option.
4. Images
Good images or video definitely increase engagement, and they endear your brand to customers. They can also keep customers from quickly swiping past your post and missing your message.
Advantages: Visual content is much more digestible and engaging than long-form blogs and articles. Smartphone cameras are sophisticated enough to take stunning pictures, and apps help you quickly edit them, add filters to them, and more.
Disadvantages: Image-focused platforms like Instagram have a lot of competition. If you want quality beyond a smartphone’s capabilities, a professional camera and editing software can cost a lot and be very time consuming to use.
How to produce: Pictures and images are some of the easiest content to create. It's as simple as grabbing your smartphone or camera and snapping a picture.
Best platforms: Images work well on every platform, but Instagram and Pinterest are by far the best networks for pictures. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat are alternative options. Attaching an image to a blog post can also help improve engagement and clicks.