I love content marketing. I believe that if you’re a digital marketer, you love it too. Or maybe not. Because there is a lot of talk on how to create great content for your brand, how to promote it and why you should use content marketing.
And most of this content is about writing a good blog post, article, press release or whatever involves using words.
But what if you don’t like writing blog posts? What if you don’t have enough time to write a great piece of content for your company’s blog? What if you don’t even want to?
So you’re stuck in this moment and you believe that your content marketing strategy isn’t working for your brand.
Well my friend, let me tell you this – content marketing is not only about writing.
According to CMI, content marketing is:
…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Did you read somewhere that Content Marketing is about writing only? No.
Content is everything you see today on the screen. Even if we’re talking about photos, videos, .GIFs, audio, tweets, Facebook statuses, Vine videos, Snapchat videos. Everything on the Internet is made up by a piece of content.
Do you understand that you don’t necessarily have to write something to be a good content marketer or to create content for your customer?
There are 3 other types of content I want to talk to you about, that you can create, even if you don’t want or like writing articles.
And after you finish reading this article you’ll know you can create content without writing.
1. The Rise of Audio – Podcast
I’m going to be honest with you. 50% of everything I know about content marketing is from experimenting with my own personal projects and the other 50% is from listening podcasts.
What is a podcast?
Podcast has been around since 1930 in the form of radio shows.
According to Wikipedia, The term “podcasting” was first mentioned by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian newspaper in a February 2004 article, along with other proposed names for the new medium.
So, why should you create a podcast for your community? Think about this:
- You can educate them
- You can inform them
- You can inspire them
- You can entertain them
- You can make them smile or cry (create an emotional connection)
But most of all, with a podcast you can easily connect with your customers.
At Bannersnack, we’ve created a podcast to inspire our community by gathering stories they want to hear when they go to work or when they’re simply running errands. These are the weekly stories you want to hear if you are in the design or advertising industry. You have a chance to find out more about Paul Rand, George Lois or other giants that helped polish today’s industry.
According to Edison Research, one-third of all American 12 years of age and older have listened to at least one podcast.
And think about this – if you can’t write but you want to start to be a better writer, than podcasting can help you become one.
Before you go with podcast option, here are a few of my podcast recommendation you should listen and learn from.
2. Curate Content – be a Personal Niche Google
Curating Content is the simple act of sorting through a large amount of content on the web and presenting the best headlines in an organized way.
This process can include arranging, sorting, sifting and placing found content (videos, articles, blog posts, infographics, slideshare – everything is content) into specific themes (blog post, newsletter, social media status) and publishing the information for the followers.
What I like about curating content is that you can gather a niche community and give them the right type of content they want to consume.
If you are a logo designer and you want to be a leader in your community, you can start curating great content about logo design and periodically share with that with them.
A great example of curating content comes from “UX Thought of the Day” where Jared Spool is sending a newsletter with a remark about an article he found on the internet. You can read his personal observation and at the final of the newsletter, he gives you the link from the article.
And even if I’m not an UX Designer, I can say that I love this kind of newsletter and information I get in my inbox.
So, in your case, if you are not the writing type who wants to make content marketing but you spend a lot of time reading and learning about your industry, then why not gather all the great topics and share them with your community?
You can do it by social media.
For example, you can choose a hashtag and share everything from your field on Twitter using your hashtag. Or you can do a weekly newsletter with the best titles you found on the internet.
Another great example of curated content is what Saijo George done with his project “Website Builders” –
He gathered all the great tools he found and put them on a simple landing page. This is a great page that every marketer will bookmark and use it whenever they have the opportunity.
So, curating content can be very easy for someone who doesn’t like to write, but love to read and wants to educate and inform his/her followers.
3. When Visual is sexier than Text
Let’s say you don’t have enough time to stay on social media and curate all the content that you see in your feed. Or you don’t have the voice that somebody wants to hear it.
But you got that super power that people want to look at, consume it and share it with their friends and community – the visual superpower.
[Tweet “Visual marketing today is getting more powerful than ever before.”]
This point will be a little different than the other 2 where I showed you what you can do. Why? Because this is a blog where I write a lot about the importance of visual marketing and I just don’t want to repeat myself.
So for this, I will leave you with 2 ideas to read and find out why you should do visual marketing if you don’t like to write a blog post.
Why Visual Marketing is important?
If you don’t believe me when I say visual marketing is important, I’m just gonna leave you with these stats that prove how visual is more vital now than ever before:
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Colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. (Source)
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46% of marketers say photography is critical to their current marketing and storytelling strategies. (Source)
- Research has demonstrated that people only read about 20% of the text on an average web page. (Source)
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34% of marketers selected visual assets as their most important content (Source)
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Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. (Source)
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55% of content creators plan to prioritize creating visual content in 2016. (Source)
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Mobile video plays exceeded 44% — up 74% from 2014 and up a whopping 844% since 2012. (Source)
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According to Syndacast, 74% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video. (Source)
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Infographics are loved on social media 3X more than other any other type of content. (Source)
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60% of marketers predict the use of infographics will increase in 2016 . (Source)
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Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. (Source)
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49% of consumers have purchased 5 or more products they’ve pinned. (Source)
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52% of teens use Instagram, and nearly as many (41%) use Snapchat. (Source)
Now what do you think about these stats? Is visual marketing important for your brand or not? If you believe it is, you can go forward and read my link about
How to use visual marketing for your business?
SNAPCHAT
- Infographic: Snapchat Visual Marketing Strategy
- Why should you introduce Snapchat in your Visual Marketing Strategy?
- Snapchat Strategy: The Not-So-Perfect But Real Content in the Context
- The Snap Generation: A Guide to Snapchat’s History
- How to Create and Use Snapchat’s New Custom Geofilters
- Instagram’s New Algorithm Requests Engagement and Advertising
- 3 important pillars to be studied in Instagram’s communication
- Instagram will be Destroyed by Many Marketers
- Now is the time for brands to start using Instagram
- http://www.robertkatai.com/brands-3th-step-instagram-collaborating-instagrammers/#.Vvleuj8SOb8
- A brand’s 3th step on Instagram: Collaborating with Instagrammers
- The First Step Of a Brand on Instagram: The Decision
- What Did Instagram Teach Me?
- Why are instagrammers the next thing in visual marketing?
- Battle Tested Tips: How to Use Instagram to Generate Sales
VISUAL MARKETING
- Questions That Will Help You Create Your Visual Marketing Strategy
- 5 Visual Marketing Trends You Should Check in 2016
- 3 common mistakes in visual marketing
- 2 good practices in visual marketing strategy
- The Clash of the Visual Titans: Slideshare Presentation vs Infographics
- 3 Situations in Which Visual Content Meets the Needs of the Customers!
- Why More Blogs Quit the Sidebar?
- Instagram and Snapchat are the King and Queen of Visual Marketing
SLIDESHARE
- 8 types of presentations that can be uploaded on Slideshare
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Driving Qualified Traffic From SlideShare Presentations
- How to Get Featured on Slideshare: 3 Effective Tactics to Be a Pro
- Learn How to design a Slideshare Presentation in 5 Steps
- Pinterest can be a game changer in the e-commerce industry
- How Stitch Fix’s happy relationship with Pinterest helps customers
- Pinterest is offering a high-end data service to brands spending millions
- Pinterest’s New Visual Search Tool With Vincent Ng
- The Power Of Promoted Pins
INFOGRAPHICS
- 8 Mistakes You Can Do While Designing an Infographic
- How to promote your infographic in 3 simple ways
- 5 important elements for a good looking infographic
- How to design an infographic in 9 simple steps
- How to Design an Infographic. The Theoretical Part.
Are these links enough to show you how important visual marketing is and how you can use visual content and tools to make your brand more important in this digital world?
And maybe you’re not a designer, but there are plenty of tools that can help you design a great visual. But I strongly recommend you to work with designers and let them do their job!
Conclusion
Content Marketing is not only about writing blog posts or long articles that will hopefully gain a lot of traffic and good SEO for your website.
This is why I recommended you only 3 types of content you can create even if you don’t like writing.
Let me know in a comment if you know other types of content you can create besides writing articles and blog posts!
Image | Bannersnack
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