They say beauty is only skin deep, and that sentiment rings the truest when it comes to your website. Your audience needs good content and would like it to be delivered on a nice, professional looking website. Between substance and aesthetics, the one that you cannot compromise on for your is pretty obvious.
What is content?
There are several formats to use when it comes to content marketing, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. It isn’t uncommon for a content marketing agency to combine these formats.
In fact, agencies often use a combination of them to make content stand out even more.
Here are six things you can leverage on to create better website content.
Blogs
A popular tool for businesses, blogs are one of the best ways to boost your content marketing.
They help with your Google search presence, drive organic traffic to your site, and keep visitors there via a ton of internal links.
Why is blog content important?
Blogs with content that meet specific needs are often indexed by Google. This means that there’s a higher chance of your website getting on the front page of search engines.
Consider this report from Forbes: pages that appear on the front page of Google make up 71% of search traffic clicks, and have gone as high as 92% in recent years. This is because Google’s self-learning AI is getting smarter at identifying what kind of information people are looking for. In contrast, the second page consists of a paltry 6% of all website clicks.
Let’s put that into perspective.
If 100 people are looking for a business service that you can provide, only 6 of them will see your blog if you’re on the second page of Google.
Now add in the factor that only 10% of them may be interested in your services, and now you’re down to 0.6.
Given that people are increasingly going online to search for products and services, your business will lose out if you’re not on the front page of Google.
Besides blogs, you can boost your content marketing with Quora. Learn more about it here.
Case studies
Let’s say your business provides a chatbot service, and it’s been pretty successful in helping your clients’ customer service. So you want to promote it to more businesses.
Problem is, the conversational marketing field is still pretty new and not a lot of businesses are familiar with it.
To increase your brand exposure, should you go for a LinkedIn banner, a full-size newspaper ad, or a television commercial?
This is where a case study comes in helpful. Case studies help to demonstrate your contribution to your customers’ successes in their respective fields.
They help to highlight special applications of certain services, products, and events.
Why are case studies important?
Case studies are popular because they provide real-life examples as to how your services can add value to a business.
For instance, if you’re an SEO agency, you can show data on how your company has utilised SEO to drive a website’s traffic by 200%.
If you’re using case studies as part of content marketing, make sure you know which customers to use as case study examples.
Preferably, you should get quotes from customers who have benefited greatly from your services to serve as a testimonial.
Videos
As people are more engaged when they can see and hear the information, videos are now one of the most widely used tools in the digital marketplace.
In fact, digital marketing expert James McQuivey has estimated that a single minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. For reference, the entire Harry Potter series was only 1.08 million words long.
And with so many video production and tools available, it’s becoming easier to produce them.
Why are videos important?
It’s also a brilliant return on investment. Brands that use videos can expect to see a huge boost in organic traffic from search engines, sometimes up to 157%. What’s more, they’re more likely to purchase products after watching a video about it.
With engaging videos, visitors are more likely to spend more time on your website. This increases the chances of your company making a sale.
And if you’re lucky, your video might even go viral on social media.
Need help increasing your sales? Here are some sales tools to consider using.
Infographics
Infographics make use of illustrations to make things easier for readers to understand. It’s a very visual form of content marketing, and breaks up the monotony of a wall of text.
By themselves, infographics are not a particularly strong source of content. They have to be combined with other formats to give greater context to your articles or videos. In a sense, infographics play more of a supporting role.
Why are infographics important?
Infographics help businesses to educate their audience, leading to better clarity in explaining your products and services. According to HubSpot, people do 323% better at following instructions with text and illustrations than without illustrations.
When your audience has a better understanding of what you can provide, it helps them to understand if they need your services or not.
Complex topics stand to benefit the most out of infographics, especially for information that contains a lot of statistics.
Having an illustration of the features of your products can also help your audience to visualise how they can benefit from them.
Social media posts
One of the fastest growing content marketing methods currently, social media is a must-have for any aspiring business. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter will all help you to grow your business and establish relationships with your customers.
Why are social media posts important?
Because the majority of your interactions with the public body will be through social media, it sets the tone for your company. If you’re selling products to the younger audience, use more slangs and emojis. If you want to appeal to industry experts, keep your tone more professional.
The most important factor when it comes to social media is consistency. One of the most well known social media accounts belongs to Wendy’s, who has never failed to deliver sassy comebacks at anyone who tries to poke fun at them.
If they were to deviate from that identity, people might not be as interested in their Twitter account, leading to lesser chances of brand awareness and engagement.
Your social media accounts should contain a healthy mix of informative and promotional content. These will help to create new leads, as well as alert your existing followers about promotions and provide customer service.
The greatest strength of social media lies in its ability to make things go viral. If you manage to make your post go viral, there’s a good chance that your business will get higher numbers of website traffic.
GIFs/memes
There’s just no escaping them.
If you’re not familiar with the term, memes typically feature viral images that are paired with text to make it relatable. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and usually features a short video clip.
Memes and GIFs have been mocked as “the millennial’s strange sense of humour”, but they still remain some of the most shareable types of content marketing out there today.
Why are GIFs and memes important?
In today’s fast-paced world, the speed at which you can gather information from a GIF or meme is its greatest strength. They’re also easy to share due to their relatively small file size, especially compared to videos.
Most importantly, they’re fun and relatable. These two types of content can entertain readers and get them to click on your profile in the hopes of seeing similar content.
However, before you start sharing memes with your audience, take note of how your audience will respond to them. There are trends and hidden subtleties that accompany some memes, and they go out of style frightfully quickly.
To remain relevant, it’s best to keep up with the trending memes, and filter out which ones are considered “high quality”.
No matter how much thought you put into your website’s design and interface, your content will always be the star of the show.
Everything else is secondary; pictures, graphics, and banners will only ever act as the supporting cast.
Learn more about how you can improve your content marketing here.
Need help with your content? Drop us a line and we’re more than happy to help you with it.