Your content must be strategically relevant, eye-catching and compelling to draw attention, and interesting and informative to keep your audience engaged. In today’s increasingly challenging business environment, the quality of your content has become critical to the performance of your content marketing programs. From video production, animation, creative graphic design & branding to blogs and writing services, central to your mission will be creating engaging content that will help you attract more visitors, generate more leads and close more business.
Here is a list of the leading content types that you will want to incorporate within your content marketing program:
Videos
Content marketing is key for any business, but it’s changed a great deal over the last few years. Blog posts and text articles, formerly the main drivers of traffic to your website, are no longer viable as stand-alone content marketing options. Your content campaign must also include significant investment in video content to succeed and to drive visitors to your website.
Leveraging video as a part of your content marketing is changing the way companies need to approach their marketing strategy. For the majority of best in class organizations, video is working best for them above all other marketing tactics according to an Aberdeen Research report, and marketers have rated video the single most important online marketing channel for their marketing strategy. 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
Google’s search engine optimization tactics now focus on grabbing the results that provide the most relevant and useful content. Video is a key part of this new SEO. In fact, research shows that it’s much easier to increase your ranking on a video than it is on a text-based content page. A survey in Forbes magazine found that 90% of online customers use online videos, more than any other content feature besides the traditional contact form. And, a Forrester Research study shows that with proper optimization, video increases the chance of a front page Google result by over 50X.
Clearly, we can gather that promotional videos are a strong marketing tool for any business, and a must-have for companies looking to attract visitors and sales. When you produce your videos, you will want to tell a compelling story that will capture your audience’s attention and drive your message home. You will need to engage the services of a professional video production team that brings proven experience creating, directing, and producing sophisticated videos with a creative vision and high production values. To give you ideas of a variety of video styles that may work for your programs and strategy, take a look at some video samples at Blue Wave’s website: https://bluewavemarketing.com/content-creation/video-production/
Animated (Motion Graphics) Videos
A dynamic animated motion graphics video is a great way to introduce your product or company and promote your message as a part of your integrated content strategy. Videos are able to convey a message much better that static text and graphics, and have been proven to do things like increase conversion rates, lower a company’s cost per lead, and improve search engine optimization. A study shows that explainer videos increase lead conversion rates by as much as 20%.
And, high quality animated videos in particular are shown to generate greater response rates that typical “talking head” videos, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional corporate video shoot. Animated “explainer” videos are a great way to attract new visitors, educate current customers and promote your business in a sleek and cost-effective way.
The the animated video you create for your business needs to be on-point, concise, and produced with high production values to generated the positive results you’re looking for. Animated videos offer a wide range of options and creative possibilities, beyond traditional live video shoots. To help inspire your creativity for the production of your next animated video, take a look at the range of the motion graphics videos we’ve produced for our clients at Blue Wave Marketing: https://bluewavemarketing.com/content-creation/animation-motion-graphics/
Writing & Blogs
Maintaining a blog on your company’s website has become one of the most valuable tools that businesses have to engage with their audience and improve their online presence. Posting regular blogs will improve your online visibility, boost your SEO, drive more traffic to your website, develop better customer relations and will position your brand as an industry thought leader.
Some key stats to consider:
- 60% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.
- Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 5X more traffic than companies that published 0-4 monthly posts.
- Blog titles with 6-13 words attract the highest and most consistent amount of traffic.
- Microsoft Research analyzed user behavior on over 2 billion pageviews, and found that your web page has only ten seconds to grab the reader’s attention. The opening lines of your blogs and other written materials need to be compelling – be creative!
- If your company doesn’t have an email newsletter, make it a priority – email is still the most effective way of staying in front of your target prospects and customers.
Blogging as a part of your content marketing will be more successful if you think about how you’re going to generate the ROI for your efforts and focusing on measurable results. Your single greatest measureable result is the call-to-action (or CTA) link that you place within your blog (or within any other content you create) that gets a prospective customer to become a lead in your sales funnel.
You will need a series of skilled writers and journalists – whether sourced internally or outsourced – who can write content for your industry-leading blog, white papers, eBooks, case studies, press releases and other content. You can also build inbound links and traffic by partnering with powerful influencers and thought leaders who create content for your blog, then promote it from their sites.
As Dan Crow, Product Manager, Google Crawl Systems is quoted as saying, “Only two things matter: great content, and quality link building.” He said, “The first is to build great content for your users. Not for search engines, but for your users. Publish stuff they want to read. The second is to promote your content well. Build links into it, so more people can find and discover it.”
Design & Branding
Effective creative positioning aligned with strategy is essential to building brand credibility and effectively conveying your message. Your brand’s visual marketing as applied across your content media should be in touch with current trends in graphic design and digital design technology. Your business needs to produce creative, edgy content that will resonate with your target audience, and your design elements should reflect a consistent message, theme and look.
To help you keep pace with these graphic trends, here are some marketing statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales:
· The demand for infographics has increased 800% in the past year.
· 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging.
· 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%)
· Infographics are “liked” and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content.
· When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
Whether you are creating infographics, motion graphics, product brochures, or branded elements for content marketing assets like eBooks, white papers, interactive media or other elements, you will want to be sure you are creating consistent graphics which grab the attention of your target audience.
Blue Wave Marketing is the perfect partner for your integrated content marketing needs. We bring over 20 years of expertise, and have developed all kinds of marketing solutions for a variety of midsize to Fortune 500 companies. For a free content marketing assessment and brief demo of our services, call us today!
You can contact us by visiting us at our website or calling us at 617-576-3100.
