Entertain

Competitions

Games and Gamification

If your content marketing includes education, entertainment, or social causes, how can you turn your content into a game? Games are terrific for engagement with an interactive element.

Quizzes

Quizzes complement courses super well and are a fantastic way to teach your audience something and measure what they’ve learned. You can use them for data points, but these are best used simply for engagement.

Challenges

Challenges are like contests, except that it’s up to each individual reader to compete with themselves to improve. Think about 30-day challenges where you can provide your readers one thing to do every day to build a new skill.

Meme

You’ve seen memes. They’re easy to make. They’re viral. They’re hilarious. That’s one of the great benefits of memes — their humor. People love something that they can laugh at, share, and get a kick out of.

How to do it

  • Memes don’t require graphic design skills. Meme Generator and Quick Meme are sites that allow you to add your own text to popular meme images.
  • Memes may not be the best type of content to share on your blog, but they’re primed for social media outlets. Twitter, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr (especially Tumblr) will help your meme to spread.
  • Memes are just-because content. When the mood hits or a funny idea strikes you, go ahead and meme it.

Things to keep in mind

  • They are adaptable. The great thing about memes is that they can be adapted for use in any niche. Your niche is neither too narrow nor abstruse to warrant its own meme.
  • Memes can be low value, so don’t overuse them. When misused, they can devalue the message or brand that you’re trying to promote.

Comics and Cartoons

Humor gets your point across in a memorable way. But not all comics or cartoons need to be funny, necessarily. Hand-drawn or even computer-generated cartoons can tell a step-by-step story, too.

Illustrations

The CoSchedule content marketing blog uses tons of illustrations to illustrate the main points of our articles. A recent illustrated post of ours even turned humorous by featuring a unicorn with the headline, “5 Unicorns Of Refreshingly Unique Marketing That Will Make You Stand Out.” Illustrations create visual interest in your content and make for some very shareable graphics.

Photo

Stock and personal photography can work well to complement written content. Custom-taken images for your brand are even better, showing the faces and places where you work and the humans behind the scenes at your company.

Videos

 

Educate

News

Company News – Your company is ever-changing. Share your latest adventures with your audience to show your business is made of humans who are dedicated to making their lives even better every single day. Even silly, simple news can help your customers feel a connection with your company.

Industry News – Monitor your customers’ industry, and report on the biggest news that may likely impact them. Your audience will notice when you are the first to market with great news consistently. Just take a look at the growth of blogs like The Next Web.

News Jack

Timely content that either reports on industry news, or finds unexpected tie-ins with popular news items. Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed. When there is news in your marketplace reporters and analysts are looking for experts to comment on the story. Newsjacking gets you media attention. With little effort! As the story develops in real-time, buyers become interested in products and services based on what’s happening now. Newsjacking generates sales leads and adds new customers. For free! Newsjacking is a great way to grow your business. Faster than ever! Potential customers alerted to a new trend want to learn more and some want to buy right now.

Press Release

Research, Trends and Original Data

Most of us work in data-intensive fields, where numbers and metrics hold a lot of value. Sharing your findings with others is a powerful way to drive traffic, build trust, and establish your authority. When you do the research, which is hard work, people respect that. What’s more, people share it.

How to do it

  • Obviously, you’ve got to do the research. This takes finding a good topic and investing time and quite a bit of effort into researching it.
  • Present your data in an engaging way. Share concrete numbers, percentages, and other details that engage a user’s interest.

Things to keep in mind

  • Professional research studies can be expensive.
  • Take the customary reporting that you do on a regular basis and convert it into content. For example, if you’re compiling information on your most shared content, the most clicked titles, or the longest view-times of pages, turn this data into a “study” on your blog.
  • Package your research as an infographic. You can get double the mileage from research by writing about it and posting an infographic about it.

Reports

Research Reports – Often presented as a gated PDF, or an ungated microsite. These are similar to an ebook in that they are primarily educational materials, but whitepapers and reports are generally less graphically designed and use language that is a little more professional. They can also create opportunities to partner with other organizations.

Polls

Ever have that feeling when you just want to know your audience’s opinion on something? Polls are great for a quick, one-question dialogue to get you the information you need. Ask a question to get information on upcoming content ideas to create even better content based on your audience’s advice.

Surveys

Surveys are perfect for gathering data you can use in research-based content. They’re also great for getting to know your audience’s needs, so you can create even better content. Use surveys when your readers and customers sign up and unsubscribe to understand areas where you can improve.

Predictions

Joe Pulizzi is notorious for making content marketing predictions. They’re always interesting to me, a member of his audience, and he jokes about them on his podcast when they don’t come to fruition. So he gets to become a thought leader while also showing his humanity—creating a personal and somewhat humorous connection with his readers—all at once. It’s brilliant.

Lists

Curated examples that can be informative, and thus also rather search-friendly, or simply entertaining. Lists have endless appeal. We’re wired to love them. Chance are you’re going to see or read an article today that involves some sort of a list — “5 Security Breaches You Need to Know about,” “17 Ways to Rank Higher in Google in One Month.” Hey, you’re already reading an article with the title “15 Types.” From the ancient Ten Commandments to modern lists of everything, numbered ideas are as popular as ever. You can’t go wrong with this content type. Even popular magazines use list appeal to sell issues:

How to do it

  • Pick a topic, then pick a number. You’re halfway to creating a list. A good example of this is this post on 7 ways to increase your rankings without leveraging content marketing.
  • When you write your list, use this simple format: introduce the topic, list your points, and provide a conclusion.

Things to keep in mind

  • The more detailed your list is, the better.
  • Long lists are good too.
  • There’s no magic number for an awesome list. Odd numbers, round numbers, any types of numbers — they all work equally well.

Infographic

The name says it all: just give readers info and graphics. Use as little text as possible for the former, and let the latter tell the story. If you don’t have a killer graphics artist in-house, this is one for which you might want to work with a professional. These can be embedded in blog posts, and shared on social media. An infographic is the presentation of information or data in a visual way. Its name sums it up — info + graphic.

Infographics get shared more, viewed more, and loved more than most other content types. They are a powerful way to get your information out there in an explosively visual format. One study found that infographics were liked and shared on social media up to three times more often than other content. The viral potential is there.

How to do it

If you have a graphic designer in your professional network, tap him or her to make an infographic for you. Some graphic artists specialize in infographics. If you have it in your budget, you can use a service like Visual.ly. Infographics typically start at $1,000.

When to use it

  • Infographics are perfect for communicating almost any idea or concept. Data, research, statistics, and findings work especially well.

Things to keep in mind

  • Infographics can be expensive. The amount cited above — a thousand dollars — is pretty close to the standard price.
  • Infographics used to go viral just by virtue of being an infographic. That doesn’t work anymore. Everyone is making infographics. Today, you have to make it really good to make it shareable.
  • Make a gifographic. Gifographics use the infographic model but feature animated gifs instead of the static images of a conventional infographic. You can check out an example here.

Tutorials / How to guides

How-to – Posts that teach readers how to do something; these typically perform very well in organic search if they align with long-tail search terms. This is a how-to with a twist – it gives the reader or viewer practical advice on how to achieve the best results from a chosen service provider (i.e., the one providing the information).

Consider a home renovator who writes an article or post on how to work with a renovation professional – including what work homeowners may be able to do on their own (maybe, some of the demolition) to save money.  Wouldn’t you be more willing to trust that renovator?  Some points of this type of content should cover:

List the factors and circumstances that are likely to lead to the best outcomes for clients

  • For each major factor, describe how clients and your firm can work together to achieve those best outcomes
  • List the roadblocks and problems that can get in the way, and provide suggestions on how to deal with them

This type of content works particularly well when you’re promoting a commodity and when it might be difficult for a customer to tell the differences among your products or services and those of your competitors.  In such a case, having trust for the service provider may be the only way to stand out – and the how-to-work-with type of content excels at conveying this vital information.

Successes

You’ve seen these awesome headlines from folks like Neil Patel and Brian Dean: Tell your audience how either you or someone you know was successful using the tactics you recommend. I’m a huge data nerd and understand my own success will differ from what these headlines say. But! They draw me in because they cover tactics that really work and are backed by data.

Failures and What Not to Do

Just as successes are fun for your audience to read, outlining techniques that don’t work well is also interesting—particularly when your product or service solves the challenges presented from the failed techniques. There is an element of controversy to this type of content that people crave. Turn a generally-accepted-as-true idea into a lie, and people will read. Like this: Proof That Publishing More Content Won’t Grow Your Blog Traffic (And How To Do That).

Interviews

Every field has its leaders. When you’re able to interview a leader, you can garner a lot of respect from others in the field, not to mention huge amounts of traffic. Interviews are unique. No one else has this information — only you.

How to do it

First, you’ve got to invite the interviewee and set up a time to talk. Once you’ve done that, here’s a good format for conducting the interview:

  • Introduce the interviewee. Generate excitement and anticipation.
  • Ask a question. Let the interviewee answer.
  • Continue with the question and answer format until conclusion. If intriguing points come up during the discussion (and you’re adept at thinking on your feet), you may wish to chase down the point with further questions.
  • Be sure to thank the interviewee and provide a call to action for your audience.

Things to keep in mind

  • If your interview is audio or video, be sure to provide a written summary or an overview of the interview.

Webinars

Webinars – Though time-intensive, webinars may feature a guest speaker who brings his or her own audience, which can help broaden the top of the funnel. Recorded versions of webinars can live behind a landing page to extend their lifespan. Live-Streaming Video For any event, new tools like Meerkat and Periscope help marketers bring the events live to online audiences.

Live Chats

Google Hangouts, chat tools on your blog and website, and even chat features in webinar tools like GoToWebinar provide a great opportunity for you to connect with your audience and answer their questions. This is a terrific way to gather content ideas directly from your audience.

Questions and Answers (Q&A)

Google’s Matt Cutts has tons of great examples of Q&A. Done mostly in the format of videos, Matt reads through Google users’ questions and simply answers them from Google’s perspective.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

FAQs are a hub dedicated to answering your audience’s questions. Those questions typically concern your product or service and may be technical in nature, though you could expand this to your industry in general to target highly searched terms and provide the answers. It’s a great way to publish content optimized for search engines.

Demos

I’m constantly amazed that our audience loves CoSchedule’s marketing calendar so much that they want to share it with their networks. Demos are like a show-and-tell for your product or service, and are particularly powerful when combined with user-generated content.

Slide shares

SlideShares – Some social media managers focus a lot of energy on SlideShare as a channel, and create content exclusively for it.  Slide decks are a great format for breaking down complex ideas into simple steps or bite-sized pieces. Keep the slides simple: minimal text in one font throughout, and use big images & graphics.

eBooks

Ebooks – An incredibly popular format, typically presented as a PDF and redeemed behind a form. Ebook content should follow some sort of narrative structure, and include a lot of good, visual design. The goal of an ebook is to educate (rather than entertain), but make sure to keep the language conversational if that is consistent with your brand and personas.

you risk wasting resources (time and money) updating videos every year. High-quality video content can also be used to expose your brand to YouTube’s large and active audience.

There’s a world of variety within videos. I could write a whole separate post on different types of videos. No matter what type it is, however, a good video communicates a message in a succinct and memorable way. Done well, a video can be extraordinarily persuasive. This video on Crazy Egg helps to bring in $21k every month.

How to do it

  • Whether you create a video of an office tour, an explainer video, or a music video (it’s been done), you’ve got to get the script right. A video isn’t only about the moving picture; it’s about the words that you say or display. Check out a few more tips for making an explainer video.
  • Put the video on YouTube and Vimeo. Both of these video sharing sites are great ways to garner social signals for SEO and improved results for video search itself.

Things to keep in mind

  • Making a good video is not cheap. You can start small, of course, but contracting a video specialist or a camera crew can cost quite a bit.
  • Videos aren’t supposed to be long. Two to three minutes is a good length.

 

Inspire

Blog /Article Posts

Well, this one was bound to come up sooner or later! Blog posts are a terrific way to publish consistent content, with a blog as the core of many content strategies. Long-form posts tend to stand out among the most shared and sought out content formats. Thought Leadership – Posts that explain fundamental shifts in an industry, or ask the reader to rethink convention wisdom. Distill your content marketing strategy into your blog schedule/strategy. The company blog can and should be used to cross-promote other content, which will help keep posts on a consistent schedule. If you don’t have a marketing team member who is familiar with SEO, this is one area where you might want to consult a professional. But personal stores also work… When Greg Digneo laid out his life story on Copyblogger, the audience responded. He told the story of why quitting was the most profitable thing he’s ever done, and it was super-inspiring for me and for tons of other readers. Connect the dots between your personal story and what your readers really care about, and they’ll eat it up.

Vlog / Video Posts

Video – Whether for YouTube or a blog post embed, short videos for the sake of entertainment or education can help you diversify your content portfolio and improve your SEO. The trick to effectively using video as part of a content strategy is keeping it as timeless as possible.  A blog post is written content mainly targeting how-to, lists, questions, and types of content. Vlog posts, then, are the same, yet dedicated to using video instead of the written word. Vlogs are great ways to complement normal blog posts to reach your visual and auditory audience. If the written word isn’t for your audience, maybe the audio-visual nature of vlogging will connect with them like it does for Casey Neistat

Podcasts / Audio Posts

Podcasts had their phase of popularity, and they’re still a great form of content. Plus, they’re not hard to create. Many people listen to podcasts during their commute or exercise. You have a chance to spread your message farther and better using this format than a lot of other formats. Successful blogs like Social Media Examiner now include recordings of their best blog posts. Like podcasts, this is a terrific way to connect with an audience who is constantly on-the-go.

How to do it

Creating a podcast is simple, provided you have a decent microphone and some technical knowledge. You can check out Apple’s guide.

Things to keep in mind

As with any media publication, be sure to accompany the podcast with content. For example, announce it on your blog with a bit of a discussion. Share information about new podcast releases and provide an overview of the topic. You may even wish to publish the transcript of the podcast. This helps to add SEO value.

 

Convince

Personal Testimonials

Testimonials are very similar to case studies, except that a specific customer of yours tells the story directly from their perspective. These are their own words—a form of word of mouth—that you use to inspire interest in your company, products, or services.

Celebrity Endorsements

Case Study

Many business and professional magazines, and their associated websites, are filled with case studies.

While they can be as gripping as a good detective novel to those in the field, they can also be boring and irrelevant if they aren’t properly developed.  This happens particularly when readers don’t often face problems that closely match those in the case.  In too many situations, the only people interested in the case are the competition, eager to vacuum up all the competitive intelligence they can.  So, case studies help you only if they actually help your readers learn something they can apply.  Some steps to cover here include:

  • Describing the original situation faced by your client or customer
  • Listing the steps that you followed, including how you resolved problems along the way
  • Describing the outcome that your client received
  • Outlining the lessons you learned that will benefit the reader

A case study needs to be relevant to your reader’s situation and provide insights that they can use in their own reality.  It works well to show your character (or that of your organization) and demonstrate your resourcefulness, caring, skill, and diligence in a given situation.  It also functions as an illustration that shows how you’d work with the reader, if given the opportunity.

How to do it

To create a case study, follow this model:

  • Write a summary of the study and a preview of the outcome.
  • Explain the challenges that you had to overcome or the problem that the client was facing.
  • Write out the solution you provided. Make it clear and explain it in a step-by-step way.
  • Discuss the results of your solution and the ways in which it was successful.
  • Provide a conclusion and a call to action.

Things to keep in mind

  • Write your case study in such a way that it doesn’t come off as pure marketing.
  • Make it a story. “Case study” sounds pretty bland, but a good case study is really an inspiring “success story.”

Product Review

Like the book review, a product review can help establish authority and leadership in your industry. Every industry has its unique array of products, software, and services. When you engage key developers, manufacturers, or service providers, you gain recognition and respect. All you need to do is share your experience with the product and provide your recommendation.

How to do it

Here’s a pattern for the product review:

  • Introduce the product
  • Introduce the producer
  • Describe the product
  • Share what you like
  • Share what you don’t like
  • Provide your recommendation
  • Provide a call to action
  • Things to keep in mind

If the product is a physical item, you may want to have a video component to the review. A video allows you to take a hands-on approach to the product as you review it.

Comparisons and “Versus” Content

You may see this a lot for product reviews, comparing one product to another. However, you can apply this storytelling tactic in many different ways to compare or contrast topics to help your audience learn the better option to pursue.

Ratings and Awards

Whether it’s awards for your customers, suppliers, or even your industry in general, these are a powerful way to show you’re listening and supportive. And the folks who receive your recognition? You can bet they’ll share it with their networks, too.