Once you have established your content marketing objectives you’ll have to lay out the best content types that will help you to achieve them. Let’s see what are the recommended content types for the 4 most common marketing goals:

1. Sales and sign-ups

In this case you are going to focus on the clear, unique benefits of a given product or service, including a strong call to action to encourage people to make a purchase or to sign up.

The most useful content types will include thought leadership content, targeted social campaigns, product demos, video tutorials, etc.

2. Lead generation

Your goal is to lead as many people as you can to your lead generation forms, so you’ll have to create content that is interesting, detailed and useful enough that your visitors will be willing to exchange their information for getting access to your content.

Needless to say, some nice, attractive incentives will help a lot. The most efficient content types will include webinars, unique tools, live demos and demonstrations, contests, comprehensive guides, white papers, etc.

3. Traffic generation

If your primary goal is to drive traffic back to your website you’ll have to focus on creating relatively short, easy-to-digest but also interesting and engaging content that’s easy to find with strong ties to your niche, industry segment or business.

The most useful content types should include email newsletters, relevant blog posts, targeted social media ads, guest posts, invitations to special events, press releases, etc.

4. Brand awareness

Increasing your brand awareness should be one of the most important goals included in your overall marketing plan. In this case you’ll have to create content with a bit of a broad appeal. Something that will illustrate your expertise and will be useful to a wide-range of people.

The most useful content types will include case studies, testimonials, client success stories, branded video materials, social media posts, branded free resources, etc.

Conclusion

Fact is, feeding the beast takes time and effort. And developing a content marketing strategy for your business takes even more time and effort. Playing to your strengths, figuring out what you are really good at and what you enjoy doing is very important if you want to produce quality content (especially on long term).

Before choosing a given content type ask yourself a few simple questions. Do my followers enjoy this format? Do I enjoy creating this type of content? Will be easy or challenging and time consuming to create this type of content? Is it something that is adequate for the chosen communication channel?

What is really important: instead of struggling with too many content types from the very beginning, focus on your strength (writing, photography, video editing, podcasting, etc) and adopt a progressive approach to develop new content creation skills over time. Finally, forget the bad, old pitchman-style and always “speak” to another person like a human, using as many content formats as you can. Which brings us to the next lesson …