What Content Makes Sense for Your Market?

When you decide to use content marketing as a strategy in your marketing arsenal, the main question is: what type of content should we produce?

Consider This
The goals of your content marketing program: Is it brand awareness, lead generation, new customer acquisition, customer loyalty, thought leadership, or a combination of these?

Your audience: How familiar are they with your industry, company, and offerings? How do they prefer to receive content?

The content: How is each story told best? Some stories lend themselves easily to case studies, others to white papers, and still others to podcasts or video.

Content
Below are five types of content for your marketing program, and some reasons to choose each.

Articles
Written like a feature story, an article is a good strategy to tell a story succinctly. You can structure this in many ways, including as a how-to article, a roundup of information from a variety of sources, or an interview format. This is one way to reuse existing content, such as using a small section of a larger piece or book or reformatting and reworking something like videos, presentations, or case studies.

Case studies
Case studies are a great choice when you’ve got customer success stories. This is the best format to explain the business challenge a particular customer experienced and how your offering helped them reach their goals. This type of content is well received by customers and prospects because they can easily connect to the experiences of companies in the same industry or those that are facing the same challenges. 

Events
Whether it is an event you host or an industry event you participate in, this is an opportunity to create presentations and accompanying handouts to share with your audience. An added benefit: live events allow two-way communication so you can get immediate feedback from your customers and prospects.

Newsletters
These days, this is typically an e-newsletter although some companies do use a printed newsletter. A main benefit of this approach is the regular publishing schedule; you can reach your customers and prospects at defined intervals. So, you can continue a story across editions, use a recurring theme or format, and vary the length and style of the articles you include.

White papers
A white paper typically describes a challenge, describes the situation, and then presents possible solutions, as well as recommending a course of action. Although it is a marketing document, created with your company’s offerings and solutions in mind, it must be written without blatantly marketing to your audience. It must be written with the goal of educating your audience and sharing valuable insights with them.

-September 2010