Today consumer marketers had to drastically change their content marketing plans because of the pandemic. But the significance of content is still growing as more and more people use digital channels for getting information than ever before.
According to SemRush, 68% of content marketers want to maximize their marketing budgets by 2022. Despite the increase in the overall budget, one of the biggest challenges a lot of content marketers face every day is continually creating new and engaging content.
Most of them frequently say that it would be nice to take some inspiration to get the wheels moving in their heads for what they could do to 10x their content marketing.
And today, it seems like there’s no better time than now to recite some new and user-friendly content formats. I hope that they can help you get even more organized and inspired than ever before.
1) Educational podcasts
Podcasts are one of the lowest-lift ways to create engaging content. According to Podcast Insights, there are over two million podcasts and over 48 million episodes as of April 2021. Nowadays educational podcasts are picking up steam, and a lot of business owners are set to get on board with it.
Educational podcasts focus on teaching about a variety of topics, such as building a profitable business or improving your cooking skills, and have high potential as a content marketing strategy.
The best thing about it is the ability to build authority in your niche and make your audience involved on different levels. For example, you can easily create additional content like full courses, PDF downloads, or videos. Unfortunately, some topics are difficult to teach without supporting visuals and you should direct people to your site for showing some notes.
Educational podcasts work well with social media pages and you can use them in addition to your blog content for customers who want audio. Make sure that podcasts have a human touch. To make them succeed, you can add some funny and inspiring stories from your experience or experiences of business owners.
2) Data-informed content
Data is a must-have to every content marketing process. The capacity of data and the technology that is collecting and packing it are continuously progressing, but for 2022, the main focus must be on getting better at analyzing it, said Mariano Rodriguez. “We create highly specialized content for law firms, and every day we work with different content marketers whose data maturity levels differ widely. They should aim to connect more systems and more dots to tell a complete story”.
So, planning your content for 2022 should be extensively engrained to better understand what the data tells us, and content marketers need to have more experience with analyzing their data. You have to focus on different inputs, but just pure data. I mean inputs like personal experience, customer feedback, competitive data, and stakeholder input will come into play.
The key aspect to creating data-informed content is to combine data with human intelligence and validate what the data suggests by running it past. Make sure that dark data can be a source of groundbreaking ideas that would lead to competitive advantage or missed opportunities in your content strategy. Content should be planned to keep both the user and the buyer in mind.
To analyze your data and plan your content, you can try out ContentCal to better understand what works for your audience and gather insights into engagement, best time, top performers, and audience growth. You can easily collect all data you need and export it to PDF for detailed review and sharing with your team members.
3) Short-form videos
According to this source, 54% of content marketers consider that video is the most successful content type to achieve their marketing goals, and for good reason. With the advent of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest Idea Pins, and Instagram Reels, short-form video on social media goes on dominating the social space through all platforms thanks to their high engagement rate.
If you have a lot of long-form videos, you can easily adapt them to shorter versions. Luckily, due to advancements in DIY and remote video production, you can create great videos without any budget and be successful. Here are some video ideas that you should never run out of:
- Product demos that focus on features and benefits of your product or services;
- FAQs to help customers watch only whose videos that are relevant for their requests;
- Behind the scenes videos;
- Teasers for upcoming events or product launches;
- Highlights of past events;
- Customer testimonials;
- Messages directly from executives;
- Leverage trends;
- User-generated content.
With all these options for creating short-form videos, you can reach more new customers and get maximum benefit for your company.
4) Customer Success Stories
This content format serves as not the typical one-liner testimonials on your website. Customer stories set out a clear picture of the benefits of working with your product, service, or company. They serve as a bigger, separate piece of content that gives your audience a better understanding of your product or service and takes it on a journey with your customers.
Customer stories can be useful for people who need a last push to buy your product. In these stories, they can find out about the problems, outcomes, and solutions your customers have experienced. This allows them to better understand how to overcome the same challenges if they meet the same outcomes.
In other words, customer stories act like a referral letter to companies that also trust your clients. Once you start creating compelling stories, make sure to give incentives in the form of freebies or discounts for previous customers to share their stories. For example, this law firm created two standalone pages with video client stories and their results from each case.
5) Storyboards
Martin Scorsese once said: “Storyboards are not the only means of communication for what I imagine, but they are the point where I begin.” It isn’t a new visual content format, but today it is becoming more popular thanks to enhanced attention to the video and interactive content.
To be brief, storyboards are a visual sequence of useful information such as text, images, design, and illustrations. It is great for video production as it allows content creators to visualize the whole picture frame by frame.
Creating a storyboard is a good way to organize any type of information that needs a systematic approach. You can easily use it for brainstorming, increasing your content productivity, and setting out visual cues for a copy.
6) Whiteboard videos
Whiteboard videos are trending right now because they successfully explain a point, process, or product. They do so in a simple and step-by-step manner using visually-attractive images hand-drawn by a graphic designer. Well-prepared videos can quickly become popular and attract millions of views.
Today many companies use this type of content for corporate video training. Because they have a stronger impact than pure text and static images. You can deliver the main point to audiences in ways you never thought possible. Prepare your employers for your company, and save time on your corporate training.
It is easy to create whiteboard videos without any special skills. Just a little bit of practice, some imagination, and inspiration to explore the topic well. There are a lot of great tools to create this kind of video content like VideoScribe or Mango Animate.
7) Screencasts
Screencasts are great to show how to do a specific task or solve a problem, step-by-step, using your computer screen and audio narration. Screencasts can be a real boon as they save your time by answering the most important questions over and over. According to Single Grain, 80% of viewers can recall videos they have seen in the last 30 days.
Using this content format, you can create video lessons, tutorials, training videos, and recorded presentations. Screencasts give a personal touch in ways that other tactics can’t do. Recoding your screencasts help people to hear your voice, your atmosphere, and convey important context to your words.
8) AR-Powered Visual Storytelling
Well scientifically speaking, people process visuals faster and consume more information than text. Using visuals enables to improve learning by 400% and content with engaging visuals get 80% more changes to be digested by users today.
To avoid boredom in your content, you need to give people a reason to yearn for more content. Adding more AR experiences will enhance your content. It makes them interact with characters, offer gameplay, or provide an additional narrative.
Create your interactive stories with the power of AR technology. Social media networks like Snapchat boost their AR ambitions with new features and updates like voice search, local lenses, and snapML. With a bunch of multiple filters and lenses, you can create engaging and fun visual content. Here is a good example from Taco Bell that had a custom filter that turned users’ faces into a giant taco shell and resulted in more than 224 million views per day.
In the long run
No surprises here. Your online marketing strategy hinges on your content. You need to have a clear idea of what content format to use based on your audience, your goals, and your brand identity. To make you feel confident about your content strategy, here are the specifics of the content you can create and make sure that you’re developing innovative content.
