Digital Marketing has various modules, and in all of these modules, Content marketing takes priority in digital marketing. Content marketing is the foundation of all the digital marketing activities. Still, only good content doesn’t perform on its own without other marketing activities. Good Content Marketing means creating a great content and also marketing it in right way.

In this article, we’ll cover the following 3 major points:

• Why content marketing?
• The different types of content
• The most common content delivery formats

Why Content Marketing?

Content marketing is not a new tactics of marketing, it is one of the oldest form of marketing that has existed. Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication and also is a form of content marketing, because stories have been used traditionally for communication.

History of content marketing dates back to 1732 (288 years old), when Benjamin Franklin first published his annual ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’ to promote his printing business.

Now back to our main topic, why to choose content marketing? Traditional marketing is no longer effective to hold the attention of the audience/ attract new audience and convince them to take action.

Also, traditional ads are interruptive type of ads. These interrupt us while watching TV or listening to music or while driving down to somewhere. We now switch to a different channel when an ad is played and wait for the ‘skip ad’ to skip the ads appeared on YouTube and can block those using ‘Ad block’ tools while browsing. This made difficult for the brands to thrive on advertising their products and services.

Due to all these, brands and businesses search for alternatives to reach customers without interrupting them in between their entertainment and engage people so that they want to hear from them.

And, the alternative is content marketing. As content marketing provides valuable content to your audience which traditional ads never did.

Content marketing creates a feeling of correspondence within the audience because they’ve as of now benefited by the brand through content and also creates trust between them. Take the case of my blog, since majority of you were benefited by the free content I’m publishing. When I launch a paid course or eBook, some of you feel committed to get it. That is the intensity of correspondence.

With the content marketing, brand can attracts customers for almost free. Of course, nothing is free, but content marketing continues to attract customers for a long period of time in a manner that makes it almost free.

Different Types of Content

All the content published on the internet can be classified into following 5 types

• Gyan
• Interviews & expert roundups
• Data & Case studies
• User generated content
• Curated content

Gyan

Almost 75% of the content published on internet are of gyan type. Most of the bloggers prefer to publish this type of content because it demonstrate them as a leader or expert in their niche.

Motive of the gyan type of content is to share your knowledge and expertise with your audience and the content could be an article or a blog post or a podcast or a video.

How to articles are the most popular post type used in gyan type content. People always have the question about how to do this or that. If you look into my blog posts, you can notice that most of them belongs to this category.

Interviews & Expert Round-ups

Networking is an important skill and to create a network in your niche, creating interviews & expert roundups content helps you in it.

Interviewing different experts in your niche helps you to produce content which is different from your usual perspectives.

Interviews are where one person answers multiple questions, and expert round-ups focuses on one question answered by multiple persons. Expert round-ups helps readers to get different views for a particular question.

Publishing these contents also helps you in reaching the audiences of the experts and getting backlinks because most of the time, experts tell their audience about the content they are featured in.

Data & Case Studies

Data & case studies are one of the content type which are hardest to produce and are most rewarding content type.

Due to requirement of a lot of time and effort, data based content like surveys, polls, and analysis of existing data, is one of the least produced content. Also publishing a real case study adds credibility to your profile as an expert than many how to articles.

User Generated Content

To generate the user generated content, bring the users together on a platform such as a group on social media or a forum and the users produces the content which is consumed by other users with or without your contribution.

Facebook groups and forums mostly grows due to user generated content. Blog comments and threads in forums are one of the user generated content type.

The success of this type of content depends on the core content creator, the users participate in the discussion, and moderators of such discussions.

Many brands have used the user generated content to grow their brand reach and engage the audiences.

Curated Content

Have a busy schedule and you need to publish a quick post, then this type of content will be your favorite. You have to just-

• Pick a topic
• Search on the internet for a list of content published on that topic
• Collect a number of content from them
• Write a brief intro or summary
• Your post is ready to publish.

This would keep your readers happy and engaged with you.

A right mixture of all the content types will help you to become a leader and a trusted expert in your niche.

Most Common Content Delivery Formats

Same content will reach to a wider audience, if it will delivered in different formats.

The major content delivery formats are:

• Text
• Images (visual)
• Audio
• Video (audio-visual)

Text: Content can be deliver in form of Text in articles, blog posts, eBooks, white papers, emails, and social media posts. It is the widely used content delivery option.

Images: Content can be deliver in form of Images like memes, info-graphics, cartoons, slide decks, bar graphs and charts, which attracts more with the text content. Nowadays, people feel more comfortable in interacting with image based content and share them more than text based content on social media.

Audio: Content in form of Audio become gets a huge rise in recent times as podcasts. People mostly prefer to listen instead of reading, podcasts and audio books are being widely used by bloggers and publishers to share content and to attract more visitors.

Video: With YouTube and Facebook’s love between people due to growing speed and penetration of internet, videos and the production of video has become very famous between bloggers and publishers. There is also seen the explosion of services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime videos, and HotStar because people spending more time on mobiles than desktop.