Content marketing tip #5: Essential content formats that should be part of your content marketing st

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

In the previous tip I covered a few content types.

Any content type can be presented and delivered in various different formats. For example, a written content can be presented as an email, an article, a social media post, an ebook, etc. Using a wide variety of content formats is extremely important when you are trying to align your content with your business goals, your promotional channels and your marketing objectives.

I’ve made for you a nice collection with the most useful and efficient content formats that should be part of your content marketing strategy:

10 essential content formats that should be part of your content marketing strategy

1. Emails and newsletters

Content marketing is about building valuable, long-term relationships and is a well known fact, one of the most efficient ways to engage your target audience is the good, old email. Sending your content directly to people’s inbox will always be a primordial marketing avenue for you.

2. Articles, blog posts and in-site content

These are the most common and most popular written content formats on the web. They can be extremely efficient in putting out a point of view at a very fast pace and delivering your core message(s) to a well-targeted target audience.

3. Ebooks

In content marketing terms an ebook should be designed to contain thought leadership, tutorials, best practices, etc on a particular topic. They are very popular and they can be incredibly efficient content marketing assets especially in the B2B segment. Also, they are representing a great opportunity to expose your branded content in a creative way while you are building trust and authority. If you are really god in creating value-packed, visually appealing ebooks they can easily become the bread and butter of your content strategy.

4. Definitive guides

These are very large – usually segmented – content masterpieces containing tons of thought leadership. They will take a lot of effort, but regularly they go along with a larger promotional plan and if your content is really helpful your efforts will we rewarded tenfold. Obviously these are the best content formats that can help you to build your authority.

5. Special reports and white papers

A really useful content or information relies on research and rock solid data. This is why the white papers and the special reports are so popular. You can create them by collecting survey and industry data, various topic-related stats, trend reports, etc. These comprehensive documents will require some effort, but they can be extremely valuable and efficient content marketing assets which can bring you a lot of recognition in your field especially in form of attractive premiums or free offers.

6. Cheat sheets

These are smaller, shorter downloadable content pieces that are created to give the reader a simple, quick access to a series of useful tips, golden rules, best practices, etc. Usually these are easy-to-digest one-page documents with simple design and they can be efficiently leveraged both on front- and back-end.

7. Workbooks

Basically, these are downloadable “exercise files” used to provide readers with an actual template to fill in her or his answers, thoughts to certain questions or questionnaires. They are very handy and useful if your goal is to teach your audience something in particular.

8. Infographics

These highly visual, engaging graphical compositions are becoming more and more popular every day. According to Hubspot an infographic is 30 times more likely to be read than a text content! Why? Because visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text!

No matter what do you have to say, any information can be exposed in an attractive visual way and an eye-catchy infographic is definitely better than a dry-as-toast text-based report. If you have some basic design skills these easily shareable content pieces will always have an important role in your overall content marketing strategy.

9. Videos, webinars and teleseminars

I know, getting in front of a camera can be scary and intimidating for many of us. But the fact remains: these days the video format has an incredibly powerful, continuously increasing impact. The #2 search engine in the world is YouTube! According to Wordstream, more video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major US television networks have created in 30 years. Also, 51% of marketing professionals name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I don’t have any video creation skills and I simply don’t like video creation. But, I have to admit, in these days with all those super-smart devices most of us carry around, a full video production studio is in our pockets. To put it simply, if you are lucky enough to don’t have my video-creation-phobia, video is definitely a format you don’t want to neglect. No matter if is a captivating product demo, a helpful webinar or a just a funny piece of video content, video is an extremely powerful and efficient content marketing asset that can be easily incorporated in any type of content.

10. Podcasts and audio materialsales and sign-ups

There are countless situations when and where you simply can’t watch a video. I am going to give you only one example: it’s probably not the best idea to watch videos while you are driving, right? But listening an audio material while you are driving is completely achievable and this is why audio can be a very important and useful marketing asset in your content marketing strategy.

The most common and popular audio content is probably the podcast, which basically is nothing else but an audio article. Nowadays is unbelievably popular because people who don’t have enough time time to read are able to listen to articles while in other activities or their usual daily commute.

And don’t forget: recording audio is super-easy! Additionally, if you are creating videos you can simply export the audio version as a separate .MP3 file that can be quickly and easily re-purposed using other promotion channels. The bottom line: audio is an important, valuable and easy-to-produce content marketing asset that can help you a lot in your content marketing efforts.

One final word …

Creating various formats of media is very important for your content marketing, but you should always keep in mind that search engines can’t crawl or read media. In other words, any piece of media content must be carefully and efficiently SEO optimized, otherwise they won’t be indexed by search engines. So, be sure to optimize your media content by providing keyword-rich written content along with your media files. Use relevant descriptions, embed your media, write summaries, create transcriptions, list highlights, draw excepts, etc.