5 amazing Content Marketing to grow your audience

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At this point, I’m sure you know very well of the value and importance of a using a variety of content marketing assets.

And you also probably know that blogs and social content alone most likely won’t deliver the ROI you expect for your efforts.

So your biggest challenge now is to figure out which assets will help you reach a wider audience, isn’t it?

And let’s face it, with so many options out there, testing new content types without proven success can be costly: both in time and money.

Luckily for you, that’s what I am going to help you with today.

In this post, I’ll show you 5 content marketing assets that you can easily apply to expand your reach and improve the ROI of your content strategy.

Ready to get started? Here we go.  

Here’s Why You Absolutely Must Include New Types of Content in Your Strategy

Fact: content is becoming a bigger and bigger part of how marketers communicate with their target audience.

For example, CMI’s 2017 report shows 89% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their current strategy.

And of the 11% who don’t currently, half plan to start in the next year.

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So there’s clearly a demand from B2B buyers for quality content and marketers like you are paying attention to the types of content that convert the most new customers.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Most of what’s being created comes in the form of social media updates and blog posts.

In fact, the same 2017 CMI report shows marketers using those two content types nearly 20% more than most of the other ways you can get information to leads and customers.

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But what does that mean for you?

For one, with all of your competitors focused on delivering only two fairly simple types of content to your audience, there’s huge opportunity to stand out with a variety of marketing assets.

And it’s not just about being different for the sake of being different.

Your customers need to see different information at each stage of the content journey.

So, with all of this in mind, let’s take a look at what other content marketing assets you can begin using today.

#1. Convert More Leads with a Webinar Demonstrating Your Solution

For leads further down the sales funnel, a webinar is a great way to see your solution in action.

And the best part?

You determine what important features they need to see to make the decision to buy.

And that’s exactly the point Agnes Jozwiak makes over on the ClickMeeting blog:

“All potential customers have a problem, and attending a webinar shows that they are looking to solve this problem, and of course, [your] product is the solution…[I]n a webinar you can show versus tell people how the product works, how its effective, what it does, what it doesn’t do etc.”

Chief Architect do a great job of using webinars to convert leads to customers.

From the moment a prospective customer goes to sign-up, they know the webinar is geared toward them and exactly what the webinar will offer.

And for a salesperson at Chief Architect, that means anyone who signs up – whether they actually attend or not – is a hot lead that should be followed up with immediately.

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#2. Use SlideShare to Boost Organic Web Traffic

LinkedIn SlideShare is a great tool for increasing your visibility related to keyword searches.

That’s because more than 80 percent of its traffic comes through organic search.

So, if you take the time to create quality presentations, you can give your brand a serious SEO advantage.

NetApp knows this and used the strategy to rank first with a SlideShare for a fairly common google inquiry, “how data saves time”.

And here’s what the slideshow looks like within SlideShare:

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#3. Use Your Own Research to Create Proprietary White Papers

Only 38% of B2B marketers plan to make white papers a key piece of their content strategy in 2017.

That means using proprietary research to write white papers is a sure way to stand out with valuable content for your target audience.

And it’s not just me who thinks so. Rob Leavitt, Director of Thought Leadership at PTC, shared his thoughts on the value of a quality white paper for your audience:  

“There is no substitute for well-researched, well-thought-through points of view on issues that really matter to your customers. If you don’t take the time to do that, it doesn’t matter what format you are using. It just won’t be effective.”

In other words, putting together a great white paper that truly adds value to your target customers can be one of the best lead generation tools available to you.

#4. Interview Influencers to Create Brand Awareness and Build Credibility  

Taking the time to interview key influencers in the industry of your target audience accomplishes a few key things for you as a marketer:

1. Shows leads and customers you understand their business.
2. Builds a referral engine from the influencer’s network.
3. Gains you access to a broader audience if the influencer shares the content with his/her audience.

And the great part is, depending on your level of comfort, the interview can be conducted in any number of different ways.

You can go with a traditional blog post format where site visitors can read a transcript of your interview.

Or, you can invite the influencer to co-host a webinar as a means to draw interest from your own prospective leads and his/her audience.

And for the more adventurous, podcasts can be a great way to consistently draw in influencers for more in-depth conversations.

Whichever way you decide to go, interviews are a simple but great way to add a new asset type to your content strategy.

#5. Use Social Media Visuals to Appeal to Different Learners

You know, I couldn’t believe it when I saw this statistic the first time:

65% of the population is said to be visual learners?

Crazy, right?

But it’s true.

What’s more, we tend to remember information better if it’s accompanied by a visual. According to Hubspot:

“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.”

So, to boost your content strategy, you might consider including any one of the following:

Additional images to accompany your blog posts on social media. Here’s how we use this strategy to increase our social audience’s engagement with our content (in the case of the example below, this blog post):

To create it, we simply used one of the subheadings to create an engaging visual we can now publish instead of the post’s featured image.

• Infographics that tell a story through the power of visuals.
• Videos
• SlideShare presentations. Again, here’s another example of how we use this strategy at Chatterbuzz:

Actually, the possibilities for creating visual content are endless.

Check out the way BuilderTrend uses visuals on their Twitter feed to build excitement for an upcoming in-person event (which is another great content marketing asset, by the way).

And That’s It…

Hopefully, you’re walking away from this article with some ideas for using new content marketing assets to grow your audience.

Best of luck!