As a content marketer, I am sure you would have never had it easy.
Every day begins with brainstorming fresh ideas and ends with the hard choice of narrowing them down to what fits the strategy—and the budget. But content scouting doesn’t stop there.
With Google’s search algorithms constantly changing, content marketing teams face a dual challenge: staying visible and staying relevant.
Adapting to shifts in search engine results pages (SERP) requires more than updating content; it’s about using innovative content creation software and tapping into emerging trends to engage audiences effectively. Be it audio, video, text or image content, centralizing these content marketing ideas can be a good way to generate newer content strategies, provide actionable insights to teams and brainstorm better.
Let's see how teams can implement various content marketing ideas to stay relevant to their audiences.
The projected valuation of content marketing industry reaching $600 billion in 2024 marks a significant uptick from previous years. Studies show that you need to target and tailor your content by actively researching top competitors and working to build semantic content that educates your audience and sets you apart as a brand differentiator.
Content is a crucial part of the buyer's journey, helping your brand to build trust, industry recognition, and overall credibility. The average content marketing return on investment (ROI) is $2.77 for every $1 spent, which equates to 3x investment and 177% more profit, according to Forbes Advisor analysis.
“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”Lee Odden
Co-founder, TopRank Marketing
Maybe you don't have a team of graphic designers or content marketers on call, but that shouldn't stop you from creating content that converts. This article will outline 15 content marketing ideas for a startup budget so you can get started immediately.
Businesses using blogs as part of their content marketing mix get 67% more leads than those who don't, as well as a 434% higher chance of being ranked in Google’s SERPs. So, if you're without a blog or it’s highly outdated, here are some content marketing ideas for your blog.
If you're unsure where to start with your blog's content, start with business. Write about your business awards, achievements, and upgrades. Let customers know that your company stands by its reputation of being the best.
It can be as simple as writing about how your company successfully qualified as a Google Partner or listing the top ten brands to watch in your industry. This allows you to control the narrative of your brand according to your target market. When people search online to research and see what they can find about you, they'll see credible content, giving them a great first impression.
As a B2B blog, you can write a weekly newsletter roundup of industry updates to keep your readers current. These newsletters can be distributed among your mailing lists or remarketing the cookie ads highlighting customer's personal preferences. But it doesn't mean that you have to bombard the inbox of a slightly interested lead who might get thrown off a cliff and irritated with unnecessary content. Don't blow up inboxes, but slightly nudge the readers and deliver industry-leading news that has taken a hot seat.
For example, if you're a marketing agency and your clients depend on you for expertise, you can engage in content writing on the latest changes in digital marketing, Instagram or Facebook social media marketing, or Twitter poll marketing. Integrate polls with content to gather real-time marketing analysis and use the survey data on your blogs. Not only are you providing educational content, but also crunching real-time data to build your brand presence.
If you’ve recently attended a business event, your next blog post could be an event summary. Share your experience from start to finish: images, stories, lessons, the people you met, or a line from a keynote speaker's speech that made an impact.
If your company is hosting the event, review the topics that your guest speakers addressed. Feel free to add what's to come for the next event your company would like to host.
Not sure what you're next content idea for your blog should be? Try inviting people to guest post on your blog. Guest posting isn't just great for search engine optimization (SEO); it helps to build credibility for your brand.
Guest posting also gives you the power to pick, choose, and refuse which posts you'd like to accept to regulate the quality of content that gets published on your site. Always have guest post guidelines for external authors to follow so that they can provide a variety of work, tone, and topics that match your brand. Going a step further, you can even create a landing page on your website for guest writers to contact you.
Guest posting can also increase brand awareness and open the door for networking with other brands for future projects.
An infographic is a form of visual content marketing that helps to break down complex or detailed data in a visually appealing way that keeps the reader engaged and informed. More than fifty percent of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information. This means that curiosity will ignite prospects to spend time and study the infographic to keep their knowledge up-to-date. This could extrapolate some probability of the audience's spike in product interest.
Your infographic can be a previously written blog post, an annual closure report, or a survey. The key to fantastic infographic design is to choose a layout that conveys your information effectively and impactfully.
Source: G2
Don't limit your blog to long forms of written content; you can take this opportunity to create a Slideshare or PowerPoint on your blog.
Most people viewing your slide want information and answers to the problem your solving rather than entertainment. You want to make sure that your slide is straight to the point, yes visuals are essential but you don't want to spend too much time designing that you forget to make your content digestible.
Adding an image or graphic design helps with the flow of the presentation; use arrows, ticks for bullet points, and image examples to adequately demonstrate your topic.
The old saying goes: you shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel, but where there's room for improvement, you should. Take a look at your old articles and update them with relevant information, features, images, and examples. Once done, you can update your publication link with the reimagined content elements.
Updating your old content also helps to fill up your editorial calendar, extend the life of existing content, and shows your brand credibility for being a relevant source to staying up to date.
Also, repurpose old articles into different types of content that can be shared in different channels like social media, email, etc.
Tip: If you aren't starting from scratch, repurpose a previous, high-traffic or high-ranking blog post in the form of content that can appeal to a different type of learners and readers. Find out ways to repackage your content and derive more value out of them.
8. Highlight your customer success stories
Go beyond placing your clients’ logos and short testimonies on your website. Create a detailed article on how you successfully assisted your client with your products and services.
Further, you can create a landing page to document all these testimonials in form of brand case studies to exhibit the true and tangible return on investment on marketing spends for future buyers. Integrating a bot platform via this landing page can also build more trust and increase product engagement.
Source: G2
Add the following elements in your article to create an engaging story:
You can also tailor your story in the following sequence: situation, problem, solution, and outcome. It can be tempting to show yourself as the hero of the story, but remember the main character of your customer success story is your customer, so keep the spotlight on them.
We've all read a few how-to articles like how to use LinkedIn or some other informative topic guide. There's something about a guide that attracts people to click. It makes them feel as though all their solutions await in one large piece of content, and sometimes it does just that; other times, not so much.
Creating how-to guides is a great content builder because they help drive more traffic, links, social shares, and potential customers to your blog.
Writing an excellent guide and how-to guide takes time. You want to make sure you address as many problems or questions as your readers may have about the topic.
Tip: Moderate and repurpose your customer reviews to build credible and inclusive content to talk about buyer needs and pain points with G2 seller solutions.
Seventy-three percent of millennials prefer when businesses communicate with them via email, and with 99% of consumers checking their email every day, it provides the perfect platform for delivering content.
An email series is a series of emails sent to subscribers informing or teaching them about a specific topic(s). For example, your email series could be a guide to email marketing where customers would learn to segment email ideal customer profile (ICP), promote services via email campaigns and more.
You can use email drip campaigns and marketing automation software to drive leads your way.
The video currently accounts for 60% of the total internet traffic, with the main consumers being smartphone users. Studies by Ericsson suggest that by the end of 2024, videos are projected to account for 74% of traffic.
Add that to the fact that milennials spend around 9 hours per day on digital entertainment, with an average of 4 hours per day on video content. It's clear to see that video content is a valuable asset to any brands content marketing strategy.
Here are a few video content marketing ideas you can use on a budget to get yourself ahead of the curve:
The FAQ page on your website is an excellent place to find content for your customer. FAQs are a haven for customers who want to double-check details before purchasing your services.
There's no rule of thumb to suggest your FAQs should live solely on your website. Visual learners interested in using your products or services should be given content that can help with FAQ videos. Why not craft an online video marketing strategy to answer questions your audience is most likely to have?
Gone are the days when IKEA customers complained about confusing instructions, searched Google Translate to read them, and ended up with a big mess rather than beautiful furniture. They took the initiative to create detailed step-by-step videos on how to assemble their furniture.
Source: Ikea
Seventy-three percent of shoppers prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. Another 46% said they would be more likely to seek additional information about a product after watching an online video, which tells you that it's more effective to show than tell. If you have a new product or feature coming out, create a video introducing it to your current and potential customers.
Pipedrive creates short-form instructive videos to explain the use cases of their CRM tool, spread awareness of the change and innovation that their product, and empower their customers to aim for higher revenue pipelines via their product.
Source: Pipedrive
Put together a professional case study video to show off how your marketing skills to potential customers. You can create a series of videos highlighting your most successful customers. You can host the videos on social media, landing pages, and blog articles and even use them for YouTube ad campaigns to generate leads.
Thinking of taking your video content seriously? Check out this example from Hubspot to learn creative ways to use video for your B2B business.
Source: HubSpot Marketing
I’m sure you've heard the word influencer before, especially if you’re in digital marketing. But the term micro-influencer might be new to you. Micro-influencers, someone with 1000-10,000 followers, are becoming more popular with big brands.
Ask micro-influencers to create content for your brand. Influencer marketing has been in the top five marketing tools and strategies for the past few years. You can use influencers in a wide variety of ways. One way is to partner with an influencer to do co-promotions for a discount or product launch.
Relationship management simply means maintaining cordiality with your professional influencer community via social media or discussion forums. Active engagement on their posts through likes, comments, and reposts can increase clickstream data and increase clicks on your individual profile, which can help spread brand visibility and garner other people's audience (OPA) attention. Maintaining professional candor with influencers also increases the probability that they will collaborate with you in a content marketing project or initiative in the future and partner with your brand as an active stakeholder.
Webinars have always been among the top 10 ways to generate leads and create content for your business. You can have a pre-recorded webinar or a live webinar, but keep in mind that live webinar attendance and engagement are 46% higher when compared to other webinar methods. Setting webinar invites and ensuring a smooth video conferencing session with webinar software can elevate brand awareness and market knowledge. It makes you stand out in the professional community as you strive to make a change by educating your customers.
You can take snippets of your webinar and share them on your social media platforms or insert them in your blog for a video explanation.
More than 40 percent of digital consumers use social networks to research new brands or products. You'll need to put content on social media that attracts potential buyers. Once followers engage with your content, they'll reach out to you. It's proven that social media users try to reach out to brands or retailers.
Here are some content ideas you can post on your social media pages:
If you're working on a project, capture “behind-the-scenes” images and videos so your followers can see the time and effort you put into your work. You can put these clips on any social media streaming service you choose.
Build short teasers or trailers to add more glitter to your go-to-market product launches. Have your best video directors on the field to capture the candid, human, and bright moments among your teams and share them on social media.
If you don't have enough money or time to take product images or design graphics, you can take pictures of your employees' day-to-day activities and post them on social media.
It may seem simple, but the power of content goes far beyond selfies and coffee mug photos. It's about showing your brand authentically on social media. Try to ensure that your images are high quality by using a filter or editing the image before posting.
Edited posts help to increase your chance of engagement with followers. Boring pictures and blurry images get little to no love on social media.
Having a giveaway is a great way to boost engagement and leads and provide content for your brand. You can ask followers to enter by providing videos, pictures, or tips regarding your products or niche.
Voice of Health decided to run a summer giveaway on instagram. They asked followers to post a picture or a video that contained tips and tricks to beat the heat. In doing so, followers had a chance to win a hamper.
The content you receive from your giveaway can be repurposed or reposted to your social media platforms or website.
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by individuals outside of your organization or business. It shows real people enjoying and using your brand, which builds your credibility while filling your content calendar for another day. That’s a win-win.
One such example is people creating content for HubSpot's Inbound conference every year. Thought leaders and keynote speakers that are invited as guests on the event share their own roundups and social media posts reinstating gratitude and conveying their satisfaction and excitement to team with for future ventures. These events eventually result in a huge amount of consumer foot traffic, both online and offline.
Podcasts help you to reach out to new leads for your business and can help in building familiarity with a wide range of audiences. At least half of all Americans listen to a podcast, so imagine how many people listen to them globally.
Creating a podcast is budget-friendly, all you need is a quiet room and recording equipment. A podcast also provides the perfect opportunity to talk about how your products and services can help customers.
Once you've started posting, writing and sharing your content, you'll need to monitor it to see if you're getting a return on your investment, and yes time is also an essential investment when it comes to content marketing.
Try to create a monthly marketing report on blog views, shares, open rates, and followers you've obtained with the help of your content. Here are some critical ways to measure and monitor your content marketing efforts.
Map your website traffic by consulting SEO tools like Google Search Console or Google Analytics to analyze traffic trends over a specific time period, organic keyword and backlink growth, and location-wise traffic gain. You can use these SEO tools to create data-driven report analysis, performance analysis, or website domain authority trends to enhance your content visibility, build newer strategies, and experiment with different content formats to achieve traffic goals.
Track your content's reach, likes, comments, and engagements. It's been proven that the more engaged people are with a brand on social media, the higher the influence it has on the potential buyer. Track these actionable metrics via campaign managers like LinkedIn campaign manager or Screaming Frog and analyze the areas of improvement to build more brand-aligned content.
This Google Analytics tool is a marketer's go-to for data tailored to your business website and social media platforms. It allows you to track not only traffic but also understand your customers' online behavior with goals and aggregate data reports. With numerous features like active users, event counts, user engagement, sessions per month, average time, new users, traffic, acquisition, and engagement, users get the most precise data about their consumer behavior on the web.
Once potential customers have started the process of inquiring about your services or signing up for a demo, you need to nurture them until they become qualified leads or paying customers. Content marketing is naturally a part of any successful marketing funnel. Without following up with leads after creating content, you leave your potential customers susceptible to being swept away by your competitors. This means following up with email subscribers, answering questions promptly, and providing more free content.
Generating newer, market-centric content ideas is a multifaceted process. From looking at random billboards to attending an industry conference to understanding the psychographics of a marketer's mindset, some great ideas will surely get crackling. Here are some pointers to help you generate the best content marketing ideas.
You can use all these ideas to start publishing and posting quality content for your business. But the real work begins when you have to turn that potential lead into a loyal customer. Don't make the mistake of trying to do everything on this list all at once only to feel overwhelmed and discouraged; choose what works best for you and your startup’s needs and marketing budget.
Looking to outsource content marketing services? Learn more about free content marketing agencies that can create content, email, and social content strategies without shelling out dollars.
This article was originally published in 2019 and has been updated with new information.
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