Tag Archives: Types of content

The importance of visual content in your content marketing

When I started providing content writing and content marketing services more than 10 years ago, content marketing mostly constituted of publishing blog posts, broadcasting a newsletter and publishing articles and blog posts on other websites and blogs. People were quite happy writing lots of stuff. We were writing articles, tutorials, how to’s, and in the process, attracting decent amount of traffic to our websites.

Then a new breed of content marketers started experimenting with visual content. I remember, initially they used attractive graphics and imagery along with textual content. Gradually, in fact, not gradually, but quite fast, they started replacing textual content with infographics. They started presenting useful, insightful information, with the help of very attractive and slick visuals.

Along with visuals, videos also became an integral part of content marketing. GIF files for some time appeared here and there, but they lost to videos, but then again, they are in vogue with the advent of giphy.com.

In fact, visual content has become so mainstream that recently I came across a keyboard that types just emojis. There is an instant messaging app that just allows you to send emojis instead of text messages.

All mainstream instant messaging apps like Snapchat and Instagram heavily depend on images and videos. On Facebook and Twitter, updates that contain images and videos get more views and likes compared to the updates that contain just text.

So yes, visual content is as important, if not more, as textual content for your content marketing. Text is important, as of now, because it is down to earth, and not everybody wants to see just images and videos. Sometimes you just want to read text so content writing isn’t going to be replaced very soon.

In fact, most business websites depend on content writing for their content marketing needs. Whereas visual content requires some sort of platform, content writing can be accommodated almost everywhere. Even the images need to contain some sort of text to convey a message. This is why, no matter how much importance visual content gains, content writing for content marketing is indispensable.

But this blog post is about the importance of visual content for content marketing.

Visual content is everywhere these days due to many reasons. It’s way too easy to notice an image or video in your rapidly changing timeline than text. According to these insightful statistics on importance of visual content for content marketing, 51% B2B marketers preferred to publish visual content in 2016. Here is another very useful blog post on the importance of visual content and how it is gaining traction compared to textual content.

There is a misconception that creating visual content is difficult compared to content writing. Of course it is, comparatively, difficult, it is not as difficult as it is perceived.

For example, there are many online image editing tools available that allow you to create very attractive graphics. Videos can be created using an average mobile phone. GIF files can be created using giphy.com. Simple text messages can be created using image files. You can create PowerPoint slides and then export them into video files and then upload those videos on YouTube. Later on, you can convert certain portions of those YouTube videos to GIF files.

If you have been ignoring visual content for content marketing simply because you think that it will be difficult to produce, just start with shorter images and videos. You will be surprised to know how easy and interesting it is to create them.

10 types of content that make your content marketing successful

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On what does the success of your content marketing depend? The success of your content marketing depends on two things:

How relevant your content is
How you make sure that your content reaches the right audience

Both these factors are interdependent. The second factor is self-explanatory. I mean, once you have created high-quality, relevant content, you need to use all the channels at your disposal to disseminate your content and make sure it reaches the right audience.

Before I proceed, how do you define a successful content marketing?

You create high-quality, relevant content on an ongoing basis, for a long time
Your content reaches the right audience
Your content elicits the right response from the right audience

What’s the right response?

People read/view your content
People respond to your content
People share your content on social media websites
Your sales increase

Now we come to the moot topic of this post: 10 types of content that make your content marketing successful. Here they are:

Content that creates a sense of urgency without misleading people.
Content that makes people feel important.
Content that tells an interesting story, especially with a lesson.
Content that inspires us to take an action that can turn our lives for better.
Content that reconfirms our beliefs without pandering to our misconceptions.
Content that educates us and also entertains us at the same time.
Content that challenges our beliefs without hurting our feelings, with hard facts.
Content that throws at us an element of surprise.
Content that gives us a fresh point of view.
Content that elicits strong emotions, like sadness, happiness or joy.

These are the 10 types of content that make your content marketing successful.

Doing content marketing without content writing

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In my previous blog post I talked about various types of content that you can use to carry out your content marketing strategy. Most of the suggestions in that blog post involve some sort of writing. Whether you write a blog post, an article, an e-book, a case study or an email campaign, writing is involved. What if you are not the writing type and your audience is not much into reading?

This blog post talks about 6 ways to build an audience without indulging in content writing.

Although for many years I have been providing content writing services since businesses these days are looking for turnkey content marketing solutions I’m also collaborating with other content producers that can help you generate non-writing content material such as

Infographics
Visual data representations and charts
Videos
Slideshows
Podcasts
Webinars

Another good way of generating content (that sometimes I do on my own content writing and content marketing blog) is content curation.

It is not necessary that every time you need to come up with original content (although more than 60% content on your website should be original). There is lots of interesting and great stuff being published on the Internet all the time. You can curate those links using your own blog as well as your social media timelines. A good thing about curation is that you can automate some of the publishing tasks by using the right syndication feeds.

Content marketing is all about eking out a presence for yourself and it can be anything as long as it gets the message across and people appreciate your content.

Wondering what type of content you should publish on your website?

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There is no dearth of content publishing ideas once you decide to use content marketing to promote your business, whether you want to publish content on your own website/blog or on third-party websites to gain more exposure (and high-quality incoming links).

As I have repeatedly mentioned on this blog, anything that manifests on the Internet can be termed as content. It’s another issue whether it is solving some purpose or not. An image, a link, a blog post, an articles, a social media update, a mindmap representation, your menubar, a video, a screen cast, a product description page, an FAQs page, everything that comes in front of you is content. So whenever you’re publishing something, you’re publishing content.

Many businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves think that content marketing merely means publishing blog posts and articles and then submitting them to various directories (old world) and social networking websites (new world). Publishing blog posts and articles and submitting them everywhere is certainly one of the main parts of content marketing, it isn’t just blog posts and articles that make up your content. This Entrepreneur blog post lists 101 different types of web content that you can use to build your website.