When it comes to content marketing, no two brand strategies are the same. The expectation of the brand from the marketing campaign, the format best suited for the content, and the audience’s response to the content together should decide the content marketing strategy.

An important aspect of your marketing strategy would be the choice of format(s) that suit your type of content perfectly. Thanks to the ever-evolving facets of content marketing, you are never short of a suitable format for posting content. This includes in-depth content like research articles, long-form articles, blogs, and white papers, as well as interactive content like infographics, images, videos, and webinars, and podcasts. Formats such as email newsletters, e-books, and polls also enhance content shareability.

In-depth content

If you want to showcase your industry expertise and establish your credentials as a thought leader, the in-depth content is the best way of achieving it.

• Blogs: Take blogs, for instance. The tonality of blogs should command authority over the discussed topic. Blogs don’t need to be very long, and yet they can establish your message with relative success. The blog content can be repurposed to create crisper formats and used in social media posts. If you can manage more guest blogs and receive trusted citations, the brand’s search ranking can improve dramatically.
• Long-form articles: With long-form articles, the word count doesn’t get in the way of information and coverage. You are at liberty to give exhaustive information on your selected topic. You can provide meaningful and complete information on topics related to your niche through long-form articles. Notably, such articles are widely shared on social media.
• Research articles: As a more in-depth cousin of the long-form article, a research article will require more time and effort. It can include relevant statistics, feedback results, analyses, and even inferences in the first-person narrative. Consumers rely extensively on research articles for factual accuracy and to form an opinion.
• White papers: At an organisational level, white papers are widely preferred as a shareable content format. With a more specific central topic, white papers back their content with visual depictions such as bar charts and graphs, as well as statistics from reliable sources.

Longer content ensures that visitors to your website spend at least 40% more time than on an average page, and they also end up viewing more pages. Furthermore, longer content is able to bring more inbound links, thereby improving your search rankings. Such pieces are just as popular on social media score as short posts and perform better than medium-length (500-800 words) articles.

Video content

If you want faster engagement and increased reach, video content seems to be one of the most suitable options these days. Social media is lapping up video content in a big way, and it is proving to be an effective way of drawing maximum attention to your brand.

Thanks to various free and licensed video creation tools, video making and editing is no longer a niche art. With product video scripts based on your content marketing strategies, you can release engaging videos for your brand marketing. Videos are a hugely popular content format on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Webinars (and their audio alternative, podcasts) are also popular formats for presentations, discussions, and Q&A sessions.

Last year Cisco predicted that 82% of internet traffic would be in the form of video streaming. And 88% of content marketing strategists have affirmed that video marketing has provided them with a positive return on investment. As people are spending more and more time watching videos (100 minutes a day by 2021, compared to 84 minutes in 2019), one cannot overemphasise the importance of video marketing.

Image content

Well-presented and well-designed images convey a lot of information with minimal text and space. Images are easy to share, making them an instant hit on social media. You can use a combination of text and illustrations to show all necessary information in a single page.

Brands are also using variants like memes with viral success. Analytics have shown that pictorially presented data has a greater recall value than most other formats. What’s more, images and GIFs are easy to create and highly engaging content forms with unparalleled shareability.

In terms of the popularity of image-based content, the numbers are staggering. About 95 million photos are uploaded every day on Instagram alone! They generate over 4 billion likes. And 88% of content marketers have admitted to an increase in their visual content compared to previous years.

Email and other content marketing formats

Email marketing is generally used to summarise your content marketing campaigns and put them across to the target audience. Apart from showcasing your generated content, e-mailers can apprise subscribers of various developments and updates related to your brand and the industry. Including polls and quizzes in your content calendar ideas guarantee instant engagement, while sharing of checklist-based content is also widespread on the internet.

By selecting the right portfolio of formats in your content marketing strategy, your campaign model can achieve an impressive return on investment – be it in terms of popularity, lead generation, or sales and subscription.

Sources:

Optinmonster: Content Types

https://www.coursearc.com/how-to-increase-student-engagement-using-polls-and-surveys/

https://lauro.media/blog/visual-content-marketing-statistics

https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/types-of-content-marketing/

https://adespresso.com/blog/main-different-types-content-use/

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