The Uncle Sam US Army recruitment poster is perhaps one of the most iconic and eye-catching ‘marketing’ strategies familiar with adults who came of age in the 20th century. Yet its message still resonates today, especially among marketers, since it’s a campaign that captures attention and offers great storytelling.
And with almost everyone shifting online for information and entertainment in the 21st century, great-looking posters are being replaced by various online marketing campaigns, focusing on content marketing.
In the digital era, content marketing is an essential activity any business could use to spread awareness of or sell a specific product. It’s also useful to engage potential customers or create a loyal client base.
While traditional advertising is easy to spot via posters, TV ads, radio spots, and the like, it’s also easy to ignore. Content marketing sharpens this approach and provides information that customers find valuable and relevant to their lives, with the aim of driving them to purchase a product or avail of specific services.
This approach requires building a strong relationship with the audience by consistently providing high-quality and useful content. It’s the reason why entrepreneurs of today explore this strategy even upon starting their businesses. If you’re one such businessperson, click for more insights on how content marketing helps your business grow.
The key to an effective content marketing strategy, besides consistency and relevance, is showing you understand your audience and care about them enough to try and solve an issue or something they care deeply about in their lives.
To attract the highest possible number of customers and make a holistic content marketing strategy, you need a mix of a few or all of these types:
There are an estimated 3.6 billion social media platform users worldwide, prompting businesses to invest in this approach. Social media platforms offer the flexibility to upload and share content, such as photos, videos, images, and text-based stories. 
Infographics refer to data presented in a mix of text, charts, or tables to provide information that’s easily understood or digested by readers. They’re useful if you’re simplifying complex topics and can be very useful for sharing on things like social media and email marketing.
3. Blog Content Marketing
Blogs are an important component of every content marketing strategy. It’s versatile and flexible in introducing a new product or promoting internal or external content via links. Basic knowledge of SEO techniques, including learning how to check backlinks, can increase website traffic and visibility via blogging.
It’s not surprising, then, that over 81% of companies use blogs as a content marketing strategy, with about 78% publishing articles regularly. In the virtual world, over two million blog posts are published daily, becoming one of the most trusted information sources these days.
However, there’s more to blogging than writing an article and publishing it on the website. Industry experts claim that blog posts with images get up to 94% more views, and posts with more than 1,000 words are likely to be shared by more people.
Until recently, more and more adults in the US have turned to podcasts for both educational and entertainment purposes, opening another content marketing opportunity.
By definition, a podcast refers to any audio file presented like a radio show that audiences can listen to, download, share, and save for convenient listening. A podcast typically sticks to a particular topic, although it can be a mix of anything, too.
Research indicates that over half of consumers prefer consuming information via video. Convincing businesses further is the fact that over 500 million people watch Facebook videos daily.
You could explore creating video content to share on your social media platforms, place it on your company’s website, or collaborate with relevant influencers. Heeding SEO tips to take your video content marketing strategy to a higher level would also be a good move.
6. Paid Ad Content Marketing
This strategy requires you to spend for increased visibility and site traffic. Businesses can place ads on social media, landing pages, banners, sponsored content, and anywhere they could reach their target audience.
However, paid ad content shouldn’t be considered an end-all and be-all of marketing, as it needs to be complemented with other strategies to make it even more effective. Check these content marketing tools to manage your content better and improve your strategy.
Content marketing is slowly replacing traditional advertising. While there so much you can do these days with almost zero spending, doing it strategically helps you stand out from the competition.
