When it comes to marketing you have probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’. Today, content has long overtaken traditional methods of marketing as the best way to earn your customer’s attention. Content helps businesses encourage their audience to trust and reach out to them with their needs rather than relying on outbound methods such as direct advertising and cold calling.
Some suggest that a massive 40% of the labor force were working from home in summer 2020. So the opportunity to grab people’s attention with great content is now bigger than ever. But with content being a widely accepted tool by marketers, it can be difficult to make your content stand out and convert readers into paying customers.
The first step in standing out is simply to produce better quality content than your competitors. In this article, we take a look at the next step in content success and give you five ways to diversify your content in ways that appeal to your audience.
1. Start a Podcast
Podcasts certainly aren’t new. Apple released their podcast functionality back in June 2005; the foundations of podcasting go back as far as the 1980s. But in recent years, podcasts have gone from strength to strength, partially because of the growth of podcast availability as well as the convenience of being able to consume audio content whilst undertaking other tasks.
Some surveys suggest that 37% of the population listen to at least one podcast each month. Using a podcast as part of your content strategy offers a huge opportunity for businesses to tap into a ready and waiting audience.
Although there are options to advertise through other podcast platforms, some suggest that podcast adverts aren’t as engaging and accepted as other forms of advertising. So, to get the most out of podcasts it is best to start your own. Alternatively, you may choose to sponsor a podcast in order to get them to mention your products and services naturally.
When starting a podcast it is important to remember that people love them because of their non-evasive nature. Therefore, focusing on delivering value to your audience rather than using it as an opportunity to pitch your audience is crucial to success.
2. Turn Blog Posts into Video
High-quality blog posts are the backbone of many businesses’ content marketing strategies. Long-form blogs are a great way to deliver considerable value to your customers. You can simultaneously make your website more attractive to search engines.
We can spend a huge amount of time writing the perfect blog post. Which makes it strange that so often we totally forget about them once they are published. Not only is this exhausting, but it is also leaving some great opportunities for wider content creation on the table.
One smart way to diversify your content and leverage your current blog posts is by turning them into videos.
When creating videos, consider your blog post as a ready-made plan; all you need to do is deliver it in video form. You may do this by sitting yourself or someone else down in front of a camera and delivering your blog content in a natural way. Alternatively, you may employ an animator to help create an animated story to accompany your blog post and a voice over artist to deliver the audio content.
Creating videos is a great way to engage a wider audience. People enjoy watching videos ; it is less taxing than reading and can usually communicate the same information in a much shorter time. This report highlights that 87% of marketers who leverage video marketing have seen a drastic increase in website traffic.
3. Host an Online Event
Online events have grown in popularity in the last few years as a way to reach out to those who can’t meet in person, whether due to the pandemic or their geographical location. Diversifying your content by hosting an online event is a good way to facilitate live interaction with your audience whatever their location or individual circumstances.
Online events can vary from webinars to live streams and should always deliver considerable value. For example, you may host a live event where you invite various experts from your niche for a webinar to cover one area of interest in detail.
Online events can be a great source for further content diversification. For example, you may record your event and publish it as a series of videos; you may use what was discussed to write up a detailed blog post; or you may simply turn the event into audio and release it as a podcast.
It is likely that social media is already a key part of your content marketing plan. But to continue to earn the attention of your audience, you need to develop a social media strategy that delivers diversity both in forms of content and the platform on which it is hosted.
For example, your business may already use one or two social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook to publish content from your blog. This is a good start, but by branching out to new social platforms, you provide yourself with access to a wider audience and a chance to engage your current audience in new ways.
Although you may use the same content across all your social media platforms, each piece should be tailored to the platform you are publishing on. After all, a formal business-focused post on LinkedIn just won’t look right on Instagram. When you expand your platform usage, try and develop content that looks native to that platform.
You may also diversify your social media by publishing different content types on your current platforms. Platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn host a range of content types from text posts to videos and even live streams.
5. Conduct Your Own Research for a Whitepaper
Whitepapers provide a deep dive into a subject area that would be of interest to your business or your audience. Not only do whitepapers look at the current issues surrounding a topic, but they also offer and discuss possible solutions.
A well researched and delivered whitepaper can be a good way to increase your authority in your niche. By offering expert opinions on the solution, they can also be used to position yourself as the best business to help your customer solve that problem when it occurs.
Diversifying Your Content
Businesses that invest time and resource into content should always be looking for ways to get more from their efforts. Diversifying your content rarely means producing entirely new content, but finding new ways to deliver that content in ways that engage your audience.
