Content marketing can be tricky.
It’s such a huge industry, and there’s so much ‘help’ available.
You’re told to constantly try new things, A/B test. It can be overwhelming.
So, rather than another how-to guide, we got in touch with 10 content marketing experts.
We asked:
What new content marketing methods can help a brand to stand out? Are there any you’re currently experimenting with?
These 6 pros got back to us:
Adam Connell – Blogging Wizard
Matthew Stibbe – Articulate Marketing
Here’s what they said.
Adam Connell – Blogging Wizard
This content marketing method isn’t exactly new because I’ve been using it for a while, but it is incredibly effective.
Here’s how it works:
Start off with a high-value article. Something that incorporates insights from industry experts. Either a long-form guide with quotes or an expert roundup.
Encourage all of those experts to promote the article with their audience. And go nuts with content promotion.
Then, you repurpose that article into an infographic. But not just any infographic.
The critical step here is that you partner with a larger publication and offer them the opportunity to publish the infographic exclusively on their site with co-branding. The idea here is that they gain a linkable asset, but they need to commit to supporting the article as much as possible.
The infographic will be published elsewhere, but it’ll always include their logo (and yours). Make sure the article on this site links back to the original on your website.
This step works best if you write the article that will include the infographic. Include tweetable quotes in the post and highlight some of the insights shared in the infographic.
Then, reach out to all of those influencers again and encourage them to promote (and link to) the infographic.
Once you get people invested in the success of the content, it is usually pretty easy to get them to share it. This way, it isn’t just you trying to promote your article; you have a significant number of industry leaders helping out as well.
Finally, you’ll want to add the infographic to the original article on your website. Then support it with a blast of outreach. My preference is sniper-style outreach rather than shotgun outreach.
So, how effective is this approach?
I used this approach in the early days of Blogging Wizard to get thousands of visitors and social shares. The infographic got in excess of 35,000 views and thousands of shares.
Bottom line: you can’t have content marketing without marketing.
So always be thinking about how you can strap a rocket to your content. That “spark” is what’ll make the difference between content that dies fast and content that takes on a life of its own.
Alex Packham – ContentCal
- Publish consistently. This is by far the main thing that works and helps you to stand out.
- Repurpose and publish content: 1x piece of long-form content can be chopped up into so many variations. Start with long-form and then make social content/videos/shorter blogs/imagery etc. Make your content go a long way.
- Be on the right channels – think hard where your audience is and be there too.
- Stay on top of emerging channels e.g. TikTok. If your audience is there, you will need to engage – now or in the future…
Dennis Yu – BlitzMetrics
What if I told you that you could get more work done on vacation this weekend than you’ve done in the last 3 months?
It’s not only possible; I just did it.
Alex Berman and I just went to Universal Studios in LA. Before the flight, we came up with a simple goal:
“Let’s pay for this trip by talking about this trip.”
So, we devised an offer – one of his courses (‘Twitter10k’) plus one of my courses (Personal Branding). A package deal, only available for that weekend.
Then we got to work on creating a ‘content storm’.
A 5-minute Facebook Live on my page.
A Twitter thread on Alex’s account.
LinkedIn posts, more tweets, and 15-second videos on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Stories.
In all, we posted over 150 pieces of content.
The result?
A fun vacation, and record sales of the product. More than enough to pay for the trip.
I highly recommend trying a content storm for your brand:
Set a goal, then create as many pieces of content as you can around that topic. Post them all, and let the algorithms do the work.
Then you can write an article about it and push through Quuu Promote, too!
Goldie Chan – Warm Robots
Content marketing has been undergoing a shift to visuals for the past few years.
We see it even in text with the common use of emojis to add color and imagery to word documents or soften/excite messages.
Myself and my team at Warm Robots have been very interested in content types that are engaging as possible – polls, questions, and surveys.
If it elicits a positive response, it’s likely a good way to grow a brand or community.
Matthew Stibbe – Articulate Marketing
We still value traditional conversion tools like landing pages or pop-up forms, but we’ve seen great success with embedded forms inside a long blog post.
For example, our featured ultimate SEO guide post is our best converting offer.
There’s a pop-up form and an embedded form in the post that lets readers download the 7,000+ word article as a PDF.
I think the reason is that the value exchange is very clear – you get the whole article in a form that you can read offline.
Sujan Patel – Mailshake
Repurposing content!
It’s not exactly new, but we are having a lot of success with repurposing content on social networks like TikTok, Instagram stories and by posting a shortened version of an article on LinkedIn/Twitter.
It doesn’t always lead to meaningful traffic, but it does have significantly higher awareness and engagement (as measured by likes/comments/shares)
Conclusion
Interestingly, there’s quite a lot of overlap in these tips.
Repurposing and mass content promotion were hot topics!
It seems that you shouldn’t always be looking to create new content. Try making what you’ve already spent loads of time on go further.
Creating a content storm and co-branded infographic is definitely something we’ll be trying out in future.
Which was your favorite tip? Have you had success with anything suggested? Let us know in the comments.
