Content marketing is just one tool in your marketing toolkit. If you’re not seeing the results you want from your efforts, it might be time to head back to the drawing board.
Creative content marketing can inject inspiration into your campaigns to help you bring them to life. Instead of trying the same old thing over and over again, these ideas can help you break the mold and reach your audiences like never before.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Before you can begin developing creative content marketing ideas, you need to understand the importance of content marketing in the first place.
Content marketing campaigns can help you drive sustained digital traffic. With strategic content and powerful branding, you can convert large percentages of your traffic into loyal customers.
Content marketing starts with research and strategy before moving to production. Your content can target users at any stage of their buyer journey, whether they’re still searching for information or they’re ready to buy products and services.
Although content marketing requires more long-term work before you can start to see results, it ends up being more cost-effective than short-burst advertising. Through your content, you can develop your brand as an authority and watch as the customers find you.
Content Isn’t Limited to Writing
Developing creative content ideas means thinking outside of the box. While content writing is an excellent place to start, you can expand from there.
Consider different content types for all of the information you can produce. Reviews, interviews and entertaining content might be best as a video. If your business produces industry reports and data analysis, a white paper would be the best format.
While you’re thinking about content types, always consider your audience. What makes sense for them? An industry executive may not have the time to watch a YouTube series, but they’re probably willing to download an informative white paper.
We also recommend combining different content types to make the user experience more engaging. For example, incorporate video content and infographics into a blog post helps users understand your information through a variety of formats.
Repurpose Content for More Benefits
Creative content strategy also means repurposing your existing content. Consider your most successful blog posts or site pages. Depending on your industry, you might have the most site traffic on long-form articles or product pages.
Take whatever’s working for you now and get creative by repurposing it into additional formats. We’ll use a long-form guide as an example. Do you cite specific data in your guide? You can repurpose it as an infographic and email it out to build customer loyalty.
Research to see if there are new industry updates or news that pertains to your guide. Instead of updating the guide, you can repurpose it as a podcast to make timely updates.
With more types of content, you can create additional touchpoints with potential clients. More content also means you’ll have the ability to broaden your reach.
Focus on Storytelling
Regardless of format, your content should always tell a story. Research shows that character-driven stories move listeners or readers to take action like helping others.
While storytelling in business won’t look like traditional, character-driven tales, you can still develop your content to tell a story. Whenever you’re creating a new piece of content, try to focus on the five key elements of storytelling: Who, What, When, Where and Why.
Though your audience may have more technical insight into your topics, you’ll always resonate more through storytelling. Instead of dumping your insights into a blog or video, consider why your audience would connect with the information.
Let Your Customers Create Content
One of the best types of creative content is user-generated content. By asking your customers to send in content, you’re humanizing the user experience for prospective customers.
There are different ways to start collecting UGC that might include social media and email campaigns. If you offer a product, you can ask customers to send in photos using the products along with quotes or testimonials.
If you’re a B2C business, UGC might look like case studies with client testimonials. Customer-created content is an easy way to inject storytelling into your content since it shows a user experience from beginning to end.
Organize Your Content Into Series
Instead of constantly creating content to stay on top of trends, position yourself as a leader. Creating series will help you create content that keeps your audience engaged while showing that you’re an expert in your industry.
Through content writing, a series is usually organized as topic clusters. You can create a pillar page or guide that leads to different sub-topic blogs. Through clustering your content, you’re also more likely to rank higher for target keywords.
You can also develop content as video or podcast series. Keep in mind that YouTube is considered the second-largest search engine behind Google. Some of the same keywords you’re targeting through written pieces, you can also target on YouTube through a video series.
Organizing your content into series shows that you know the ins and outs of a single topic and its subtopics. Both users and Google will reward your knowledge through high rankings and traffic.
How to Use Creative Content Marketing
To get started using creative content marketing, start with what you already have. One way to leverage content is through optimization. Even if you have a blog or other content piece that’s ranking low, you’ll have somewhere to start.
Consider the blogs you have on the site and if there’s a better way the content can be presented. Remember it doesn’t always need to be written blogs. Developing a creative strategy means innovating on what you’ve already been doing. Don’t be afraid to break the mold – you can always test and analyze what works.
Our services include strategic content marketing to help you start on the right foot. We’ll help you develop content that drives traffic, conversion and brand authority in your niche.
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