When you start doing content marketing for your business, it can be hard to know what kinds of posts to share.
Should you stick to only talking about your specific products and services?
Should you share your customers’ experiences and stories?
Or should you broaden out to focus on the industry or market as a whole?
While most companies will focus on their own brand first, there are some guidelines you can follow to make sure you are tapping into what people want.
To help you choose which type of content is best for your market, here are four different types of content, you can try:
1) Emotional Content (News, Entertainment)
All human beings are driven by their emotions. How we feel about something dramatically affects whether or not we will take action or not. When it comes to marketing, you must find ways to appeal to the emotions of your customers whenever you can.
Humans love any online content that shares emotions. The typical forms of emotion-based content you will see are:
- News stories and current events
- Entertainment and humor
- Controversial topics
All of us spend the majority of our time on social media consuming one of these three types of emotional content.
2) Utility Content (How-To, Guides, Tips)
You might have noticed that since the invention of the web, humans have been sharing information to help each other. In every single area of interest, you will find someone offering useful information, tips, how-to guides, and advice.
Utility-based content is incredibly valuable for businesses. For example, a friend of mine has amassed over 150,000 youtube subscribers simply sharing how-to guides on how to find the right pointe shoes for ballet. While that topic doesn’t appeal to the masses, it has magnetic appeal to those people aspiring to be better dancers. And better yet, when those dancers need to purchase shoes, they immediately trust the business that has shared the information.
Look for ways to be helpful to your audience. Aim to shorten their learning curve to making a purchase decision by giving them useful, insightful content.
3) Number Driven Content (Research, Statistics, Data)
If you want to change people’s minds or get them to trust and buy from your brand, it’s crucial to appeal to the rational, logical part of their brains as well.
Using data and number-driven content can help to add credibility to your business. For example, if I were trying to convince people to share more photos on Facebook to grow their online attention, I could share some recent Facebook usage statistics in 2020:
- 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day
- 14.5 million photos are uploaded to Facebook per hour
- 243,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute
- 4,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per second
These facts are all from the same statistic but shared in four different ways. You can see how easy it is to grab a piece of data and then use it in your content to back up your ideas.
Add some basic statistics into your content where you can, or even create some posts specifically listing industry statistics that help people make a decision.
4) Story-Based Content (Examples, Case Studies)
The human brain finds stories irresistible. In fact, as soon as you hear the words ‘let me tell you a story,’ your brain immediately starts to go into a more relaxed and attentive state. You are more open to persuasion, and you will have higher retention of what is being shared.
Content that contains a story, or even a case study of some kind, will have a higher interest level than pure theory. While it’s not always possible, if there is a way to include tangible examples or stories in your content, it will add a lot more value.
What Does Your Target Market Want?
The easiest way to figure out which kind of content you should share is relatively easy. A simple Google search for the main phrases and keywords you want to be known for will show you the top-ranking content.
Look at the first five listings on Google and see which of the content types (Emotion, Utility, Numbers, Story) they are using. You will likely see a mix of content types, but one of them will probably stand out among the top five.
You can either try to emulate the top posts by copying the content style, or you can try to do something different to try to stand out. Either way, make sure you are creating something valuable that your audience is searching for.
Combine Content Types for Impact
Finally, remember that you can use a variety of different types of content and also different mediums (video, audio, written, images) to keep people engaged.
The better you can appeal to the human traits and tendencies in your content, the more likely it will be shared and attract new attention for your business.