Most Popular Content Marketing Formats for Emotional Publishing

You have mastered the content marketing techniques that represent the core of online success. The next big thing is to get informed about the content marketing formats that you can use. The format differs. However, you still have to create content that captivates people rapidly and consistently. High-quality content is the foundational principle one must follow when building an online presence. Building trust can only be done by providing visitors with original content.

Most Popular Content Marketing Formats

You can build a community if you publish diverse content on a regular basis. Converting the audience into actual customers takes a solid content marketing plan. To tackle all of these purposes, your content must be relevant. More than that, it should be attractive, emotional and convenient at the same time. Apply these fundamental principles when you are building your content and keep it diversified by switching between different content marketing formats.

How-to’s

A how-to article that gets plenty of attention must offer visitors benefits. When scanning headlines, people tend to skip those articles that don’t offer them any valuable piece of information. In many cases, people are not looking for learning things from scratch. More often they want to know how to improve their own way of doing something.

This is why you should focus on how to’s that teach people to tackle the task in an easier, more efficient manner than they would. From a credibility standpoint, keep the headline simple and the content of the article strictly related to it. How to’s should be filled with relevant information only. Structure the article in easy-to-understand bits to get the visitor read it whole.

Case Studies

Writing convincing case studies can be tricky, considering that around 60% of consumers trust companies that produce custom content. Case studies are meant to tell a story. The protagonists in these stories should be your customers that manage to overcome a problem using the products or services you offer. Thus, when reading your case study, potential customers can find themselves in the same posture, which will lead to taking into account to buy your products.

You should not mistake case studies for press releases, which will be described later in this article. Identify a good angle for your case study and make it relatable for your customers. Use the narrative arc that storytelling is based on – start with an introduction, slowly rising action, reach climax, make the action fall and find a resolution for it. The transformation of that situation will further lead to using your products and services. Style and tone strongly influence how powerful a case study is.

Charts

Visuals govern the marketing world at the moment. This is why you need to learn how to create persuasive charts that can be understood by everyone who follows what you publish. People get tired of chunks of text, and a chart could be the best method to combine important data, beautiful visuals and narrative skills in one single content marketing format.

First of all, keep in mind that human eyes don’t follow a specific order when reading a chart. People stick to cultural conventions when they read a chart, which means you should follow the basic rules when creating one. Beside displaying data, you also need to tell a story about it and there’s no better way to do that other than adding a central message to explain what’s going on. The same goes with graphs, in case you want to publish them with the help of a WordPress tables plugin to keep track of your past activity and let people know how the business evolved.

Webinars

Creating webinar content is a highly-effective content marketing tool that you definitely need to use, especially in business. You need to choose a narrow topic for webinars, as only certain points should be addressed to make the webinar easy to remember. Q&A webinars are the most popular because they engage the audience the most. The webinar description should be very clear, including the exact points that are going to be discussed. The script for the webinar should be planned for around 30 minutes (the average period of time that the audience can maintain attention focused) and include visuals.

Infographics

Infographics are all about transmitting a complex idea through visuals and a few words. This form of content marketing seems to be very appreciated nowadays when all people are in a hurry and want to assimilate as much information as possible in a short time. Infographics can’t be general – you need to choose a specific topic and outline the main points that you want to present through it. Infographic headlines should be kept short and descriptive – maximum 70 characters. One thing that makes infographics compelling is represented by flowy information. Try to keep the facts related and presented in a chronological manner. Use lists instead of chunks of text.

Mind Maps

Mind maps are diagrams that can help you present multiple ideas in one format only. This type of content is suitable for product offerings, development projects and other complicated topics that can’t be summarized in just a few words. Mind maps contain a central idea and a few other branches that are related to it. The branches can also have sub-branches, depending on how complex the topic is. Mind maps are a great method to make your visitors understand something quicker. After understanding the main idea, they can continue visiting your website or your profile in order to gather additional information about that topic.

Templates

People often look for resources online and offering content for free can attract a lot of customers. Creating templates that people could find useful and providing them on your website can lead to an increase in your subscribers’ number. If visitors appreciate the content you publish, they will come back for more. Therefore, you can actually set a price for the templates at a certain point. To create compelling templates, do some research. It will help you to see what information people seek on your website. Thus, you will be able to properly target your content marketing formats.

Based on that research, create templates that could provide them with some insight. Other types of resources should help as well. For instance, if you have a blog where you talk about social media marketing, you can give visitors a free Facebook post template for a giveaway. The options are unlimited – you just need to find the types of resources that the community you have built would enjoy.

Press Releases

Press releases shouldn’t be longer than 500 words and they should present data in a more journalistic manner than regular articles. Whenever you want to launch a new line of products or something noticeable happens in your company, you should publish a press release. This type of content needs to be shared with media outlets to reach as many people as required. The headline text must contain the name of the company, as well as the important news related to it. The subheading should describe the big event to make the client curious. A few brief sentences should be enough.

As for the content of the press release, you must focus on describing the benefits that customers would receive if they chose your company. For structure, stick with the traditional introduction-supporting paragraphs-conclusion scheme. The opening paragraph should answer the basic questions that your customers may have. Make sure to include the why’s and how’s of the whole press release in the introduction. Provide further information in the body. You can also add quotes and recommendations from customers, staff or other people relevant to the business. The closing paragraph should summarize everything and encourage people to contact the company. Listing the contact information and the official website will help people reach the company easier.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content is one of the most hard-to-get content marketing formats. When you already built a community that constantly engages with your website, it’s easy to incorporate user-generated content into your marketing strategy. You can run customer surveys to learn more about your community, answer questions that people ask often. Moreover, you can introduce a category where visitors can submit their ideas and recommendations. You can even ask your customers to share their story with you.

Publishing all this content will increase your company’s credibility, which should lead to more sales in the future. There are many other ways in which you can ask your community to generate content. Experiment with them and see which ones suit your company the best. If people enjoy it, keep doing it on a regular basis.

Timelines

These content marketing formats are similar to infographics. However, they are mostly used to show the evolution of something or to present future predictions. Timelines are also useful when you want to share a schedule with your community in a visually-pleasing, easy-to-remember manner. They are pretty simple to create – you just have to mention the date (or simply the year) of an event. Then shortly describe what happens/is going to happen then. Using the appropriate colors, fonts and other visual elements will make the timeline easier to read. A brief introductory message should help people understand what the timeline is about in a faster manner.

Content Marketing Formats – Final Words

We hope that the content marketing formats will be helpful. Don`t forget about the diversity of formats, use new techniques and share your thoughts in comments!