5 Ways To Spice Up Your Content Marketing

A diverse range of content formats helps to set you apart from the competition and can surprise and delight customers in equal measures. Take a look at these 5 ideas for breathing new life into your customer communications with Beacon.

1. Content Mixtape

Individual content assets can get a new lease of life when combined together.

Say you have a video, a blog post and a Slideshare that all focus on a specific topic. By combining these separate assets into one content pillar you can quickly create a package of content that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. Rather than short, standalone pieces you will all of a sudden have a comprehensive publication about that topic.

This approach is perfect for reusing previous pieces of content that are still relevant. It also gives you the opportunity to curate other people’s content in combination with your own. For example, by embedding a YouTube video that complements an article of your own you can enrich your content.

2. Lead Generating Ebook

Ebooks are the most popular ‘carrots’ that live behind landing pages. In order for a landing page to work, a marketer has to offer something that is valuable enough to make a person enter their precious email address. Since marketing ebooks generally contain detailed information on a particular subject – exclusive content that is not freely published on a company’s blog, that value is implied. As a content marketing technique, ebooks tick all the boxes – valuable, relevant content made for a specific persona.

Ebooks can take a lot of time to produce, and a big part of this is how the book is designed. As well as length, it is typically the look and feel that sets an ebook apart from a blog. This is where Beacon makes things easy – just paste your content and choose from best practice typography, layout and color combinations to get a beautiful ebook in minutes rather than days.

3. Customer Case Study

Customer case studies are essentially stories, right? It’s that simple format: a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is the customer’s life before they found your solution – think Cinderella before her Fairy Godmother stepped in. The middle is when they discover your product or service and their life begins to change (they’re off to the ball). And the ending is how the customer lived happily ever after with Prince Charming the positive results that you brought them. Life will never be the same and they know it.

Case studies are a great format because the content is easy to get your hands on. Speak to customers, sales staff and account managers to get specific details and combine that with some repurposed marketing copy.

Beacon is the perfect tool to help with your customer case study because it takes care of the design without you devoting more resources to it. Perfectly in keeping with this fast format for content marketing.

4. Company Magazine

Magazines as a content marketing format aren’t exactly new. The tractor company John Deere started publishing The Furrow in 1895 to help educate farmers on techniques for running more profitable farms. This in turn helped them to associate their brand with farming best practice.

Content marketing magazines had previously been utilised by companies with big budgets – particularly since print was the dominant format. Now, with the greater adoption of tablet devices and smart phones, smaller brands have the opportunity to package their content into magazines that appeal to their target audience.

Since magazines are generally consumed in a casual manner as opposed to more formal content types (like whitepapers) it gives you the opportunity to take an editorial, story based approach that can work with either B2B or B2C brands.

5. Targeted Comms for a Specific Customer

Customers are unique snow flakes. Each with their own personality, challenges and goals. This is a good thing! It means that if you listen to the customer you have the opportunity to tailor your message depending on what appeals to the individual.

Your website is a general marketing tool – speaking to multiple customer personas at the same time it is particularly useful when potential customers are doing general research. But when they’re a bit further along the buying cycle they need information that is specific to the problems that they are trying to solve.

Now, this content probably exists somewhere amongst your various marketing assets but if they customer has to go hunting for it then you’re taking a bit of a risk. Why not just package up the content that you know appeals to them and send them that instead? Targeted content makes life easier for the buyer. Beacon gives you the platform to quickly combine content into a branded, focused, lead nurturing document.

Conclusion

Beacon is a versatile tool and can help to give you content that visual wow factor. To keep your strategy moving, first take a look at your existing pieces of content to see if you can combine and recycle them with a fresh design and format.