What you’ll learn about content marketing tactics:

• Content marketing can be a challenge to get right
• Choose the ideas that are aligned with your brand and be consistent
• Explore our list of 10 content marketing tactics and select the ones that make sense for you and your customers

Content marketing. It’s a simple term, but it’s not always easy to execute properly. The truth is, there are many content marketing tactics to explore — from blog pillars and social media to value-centric messaging and innovative marketing campaigns — and pinpointing the right idea at the right time can feel daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. 

As long as your brand voice comes through in the content and you stay committed to providing value as customers progress through the marketing funnel, you’re most of the way there. Add to that a culture of continuous iteration and testing — so as to verify how successful your choices are — and your content marketing strategy will make a durable impact on your business.

To help you along the way, we’ve compiled some general pointers and a list of 10 content marketing ideas for you to test as you continue to build your brand’s presence. 

Choosing the Ideas That Are Right for Your Brand

Before you choose any of the content marketing tactics below, it’s important to keep these three key guidelines in mind: 

• Stay true to your brand. Anything you produce should make sense within the broader context of your brand. For example, it might be strange for an accounting firm to create an animated video that’s considered juvenile. 
• Be consistent. Whether you’re producing a fun infographic or a product-centric email campaign, your brand’s voice should be consistent throughout. Your prospects or customers should be able to recognize you across each asset. 
• Stay genuine and open. More than ever before, consumers want to know what brands are all about so that they can ensure their values are aligned. Incorporating this approach into your content will help generate trust and long-lasting relationships with your customers.

These mandates will help ensure that each article or visual piece you create ties back to long-term marketing strategy and drives value for your business. 

Choose from These 10 Content Marketing Tactics

#1 Create a Content Strategy and Calendar

Instead of being reactive and producing content on an as needed basis, you can stay ahead of the curve by building a data-based strategy to guide your content production. This can use various inputs — like what your target audience is searching, any content gaps in your competitor landscape, and upcoming events in your industry — to help you make decisions around what content and formats to develop on a quarterly or biannual basis.

With a strategy in hand, you can then produce a detailed editorial calendar that accounts for topical variety and distribution of content across the marketing funnel. 

Pro tip: flow your calendar into a planning tool like Asana or Trello so that your team can collectively work towards implementing it. 

#2 Build Content Pillars

When you’re developing content for your brand, it tends to fall into natural categories — product, industry insights, and company news, for instance. There may also be thematic categories that relate to the problems your business is trying to solve, or new markets you’re exploring. Review these categories and identify the top three to five that really resonate with your brand. 

Once you’ve identified what your pillars are, you can develop specific landing pages for each one or, if you don’t want to go that far, you can use them as filters or tags on your blog. Landing pages that are focused on a particular topic prove to be useful assets for prospects and customers looking for answers around that topic. This way, you can show that you’re being intentional about what you’re communicating to your audience — and rank higher in search. 

Pro tip: to make these pages SEO-friendly, make sure they’re over 2,000 words long and link out to related blog content on your site.

#3 Segment Your Audience

Another important set of categories to keep top of mind is your audience segments. Are your customers divided into decision-makers and end users? Or by regional boundaries? Is there a generational consideration that’s critical to your brand? 

Use your customer data platforms to understand who is engaging most with your website and content and which topics they like best to ensure you are catering to them moving forward. 

Pro tip: identify the specific target audience before you create a piece of content so that you can keep their wants, behaviours, and habits top of mind. 

#4 Implement A/B Testing Where Possible

Understanding which of your marketing efforts perform — and which don’t — will inform what you do moving forward. Instead of doing this retroactively, you can run A/B split tests on headlines, calls to action, product pages, and email messaging to get a clearer picture of which content is most effective for each of your personas. For instance, you can use emotional terms in one version and more practical words in another.

Pro tip: Make sure you’re testing for both desktop and mobile experiences, as many of your users will be exploring your site on their smaller devices.

#5 Put the Spotlight on Your Values

We said it earlier: people are looking for brands that are transparent and aligned with their values. This means it’s more important than ever for companies to spell out their values and infuse them into everything they do — even their content marketing. 

Consider creating a landing page that’s dedicated to your values. You can create visual cues or icons for each value and then have them pop up throughout the rest of your assets to indicate which value is being highlighted. You can also share the story of why those values are important to your brand and how you landed on them. 

#6 Give Readers a Peek Behind the Scenes 

Sharing your values is one way to win over your audience — but it doesn’t have to stop there. To start, consumers will be interested to know what products and services are on the way and what your company has put on their roadmap. That’s information that’s directly related to their relationship with your brand. You can also share stories from members of your team, giving insight into what it’s like to work at your organisation. 

Pro tip: you can use your social media accounts to have account takeovers or live video that feature someone on your team and their day-to-day experience working with your brand.

#7 Focus on Producing High-Quality Content

There are two primary benefits of creating great content: your audience will see you as a trusted source and your SEO rankings will improve as a result. Given that, it’s worth investing in writers who know their craft and have a track record of setting companies up with effective content. The way you set them up for success? Give them access to you and other subject matter experts on your team so that they can tease out your insights and the important things people should know about your brand. 

In turn, high-quality content that’s focused on informing your audience will go a long way towards building your reputation (and that of your executives) as a thought leader within your industry. 

#8 Feature Your Users and Customers 

Your customers are going to be your biggest advocates, so showing how they’ve succeeded with your products and services is an easy way to feature the potential of your brand. Whether it’s a testimonial, a pull quote in a case study, or a customer example in a blog post, embedding your users and customers into your content makes your offerings real. 

Encouraging your users to create their own content is another way to engage your audience and promote your products in a seemingly organic way.

Pro tip: develop a branded hashtag and launch a campaign to have your audience create posts or stories with it. 

#9 Make the Most of Your Content

A blog post is always more than just a blog post. You can strategically embed links to other pieces of content on your site, pull bulleted lists into a social-friendly carousel, or create a 90-second video that covers the same topic in an easy-to-digest format. Any time you create a piece of content, you should always be thinking about how else you can use it to get the most traction from the idea. 

Repurposing your content will also be important when you’re thinking about your various personas. For example, if you’re targeting two different generational groups, what’s the format (or the channel) that makes the most sense for each? Then you can determine how to best atomize or reuse the content. 

#10 Don’t Be Afraid to Be Funny

If your brand voice allows for it, you should test out creating content that’s funny and engaging in a totally different way to your standard content. This will help you stand out amongst your peers and memorably attract people that might have otherwise ignored you. 

You may not have the time and resources to try out all of these ideas, so start with the two or three that make the most sense to your brand and your broader marketing strategy. And remember: test, test, and test again.

Want to have a conversation around which of these content marketing tactics make the most sense for your brand? Get in touch with us and let’s chat.

Photos by Joanna Kosinska, Debby Hudson, and Patrick Tomasso.