When it comes to content marketing, there’s a lot of “been there, done that” out there. After all, everyone’s blogging, so how can you stand out? It takes a little creativity, but once you break through the doldrums, you’ll find these to be quite effective tools to help you connect with your audience.
1. Infographics and Graphics
I am admittedly not a designer, and I don’t have the budget to hire a graphic artist for all my blog posts. But last year, I started experimenting with Canva, a fun tool that helps even the most graphically challenged person create appealing images. You can use them on your blog, social media, email…anywhere.
Infographics are another great visual addition to your content marketing arsenal. They’re great for providing information that you want to depict in a visual way to better engage your audience. There are even tools to help you create your own infographics, like Piktochart.
Since we know that visual imagery can have a huge impact in engaging an audience online, it’s a content marketing tool worth the time investment.
2. Ebooks and Whitepapers
Sometimes a blog post isn’t enough, and your audience wants more meat. Both ebooks and white papers are fantastic for providing additional information on a topic, and boosting your email subscription list. Because you should never give away a piece of larger content like this for free.
I mean, yes, you shouldn’t charge for it, but consider getting that email address of someone you know is already a qualified lead as payment for the ebook.
Look at your top blog posts and consider enhancing a few of them into longer forms of content. Put them in a pretty visual package, and create a signup form for it on your front page.
3. Content Recycling
I’m relatively new to using this tool, but let me tell you: it works. I started using a WordPress plugin called Revive Old Posts about six months ago, and it’s one of the top referrers of traffic from Twitter to my blog! All the plugin does is dig up old blog posts and automatically tweet them out. That’s it.
There are other ways to recycle your old content. You can link to it in current posts, create a roundup of all posts on a particular topic, or write a response to an old post to start the dialogue back up around it.
4. LinkedIn Blog Posts
This is another newish tool I’ve personally had great success with. I’ve had hundreds of views for blog posts I’ve published through LinkedIn. I find there’s pretty great engagement there, since LinkedIn users tend to comment more on content.
Because the LinkedIn world is so much bigger than most of our business blogs, you’ve got the potential to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t have read your content elsewhere.
