30 Popular Content Marketing Tactics
In this article…
- Why Are Marketing Tactics Important?
- Types of Marketing Tactics
- Let’s discover the marketing tactics right for your campaigns
While your marketing strategy is a plan that helps you meet your goals, marketing tactics are the specific actions that make up your strategy. When making a marketing strategy, you can use several different tactics to promote your brand’s content. But you need to know the differences between each content marketing tactic to help you choose the ones that are right for you. Read on to learn about 30 popular marketing tactics and how you can use them in your marketing strategy to help you achieve your goals.
Image via Flickr by Limelight Leads
Why Are Marketing Tactics Important?
Marketing tactics are important because they are specific actions that make up your marketing strategy to help your company achieve its goals. Choosing the right marketing tactics for your campaign and understanding each tactic that you choose is an important part of building an effective content creation campaign.
Types of Marketing Tactics
Marketing tactics are the specific, strategic techniques your company chooses to help you achieve your goals. Marketing tactics can be made up of several types of content. Here are 30 popular content marketing tactics you can begin using today:
Animated Videos
Animated videos allow you to convey informative complex information and data in a manner that is easy for your audience to digest and understand. This marketing tactic combines well-written content with carefully designed illustrations, animations, and audio to engage your audience while you share your message. You can use animated videos to create explainer videos that identify your audiences’ pain points and show how your solutions solve their problem.
According to Cisco, video content will continue to account for about 80% of all internet traffic. Audiences engage more with video content than any other type of content because it is memorable and easy to understand.
Articles
An article is a written piece of content that is published in newspapers, magazines, online, or another publication. Articles are a popular marketing tactic because they help you establish your brand as an expert within your field. As your audience sees more articles your company publishes, they develop trust in what your brand has to say. Articles can help you reach a wide online audience and build a more loyal audience base.
Strong keyword research is critical to use articles successfully in your content marketing strategy. Learn more about how we use our proprietary keyword and content management software to help your company effectively use articles in your content marketing strategy.
Automation
Marketing automation involves automatically sending strategically created content to your target audience and customers based on their interests and online activity. Marketing automation allows your business to target specific groups of people across multiple platforms to send them content that has been carefully created based on their interests. You can use marketing automation to send messages through email, social media posts or messages, and texts.
Blogging
Blogs are content hubs that can house written, audio, and visual content such as blog posts, infographics, and videos in the same spot. Using blogging as a marketing tactic requires a significant time investment and the ability to consistently create a constant stream of relevant and engaging content.
You can use blogging as a marketing tactic to help you improve your search engine results page rankings for a wide selection of keywords. Blogs are great for building brand authority and driving more traffic to your website. Bloggers publish content either by category or chronologically. You can offer your readers the ability to subscribe to your blog so they receive a notification when you publish new content.
Case Study
A case study is a form of testimonial in which you use a positive customer story to explain a problem the customer had, how your company’s product or service solved the problem, and what results your company’s solution produced for the customer. Case studies are often presented in videos, white pages, and web pages. Case studies are a powerful marketing tactic because they provide your audience with evidence that they can trust your product or service to solve their problem.
Content Curation
Content curation is a marketing tactic that involves gathering content from other sources you don’t own to share with your target audience and customers. Most of the content you share through content curation marketing is not original content you create, but rather content you believe has information that is valuable to your audience. Content curation is a popular marketing tactic to share through content hubs, blog posts, and social media posts.
Content Syndication
Content syndication involves creating content to be published on your own channel and then giving rights to other publication channels to publish your content as well. Content syndication is a great marketing tactic for promoting your content and increasing your return on investment. This marketing tactic captures the power of gaining access to the audience of third-party publications within your target industry to expand your brand’s exposure. The most common types of content to share through a content syndication campaign are videos, articles, and eBooks.
Custom Illustrations
Illustrations are becoming increasingly more popular as a marketing tactic because audiences desire visual content. You can use custom illustrations to replace stock images and boring photos and enhance your content with a beautiful, unique illustration your audience hasn’t seen before. Many businesses use custom illustrations in combination with other marketing tactics to enhance their social media posts and blog articles.
Earned Media
Earned media is a marketing tactic in which another publication, brand, or influencer mentions your company, brand, products, or services in content that they create and publish. While obtaining valuable earned media can be challenging, when done correctly it is a powerful marketing tactic because it exposes your brand to the audience of the publication, brand, or influencer who mentioned you.
EBooks
An eBook is a comprehensive piece of content that provides your audience with in-depth information about a specific topic. You can use eBooks as a marketing tactic to establish your brand authority and as a means to expand your email subscriber list. Because eBooks are robust pieces, it is important to make sure you make each page visually appealing and easy to scan and read. This marketing tactic is particularly popular for businesses that use a B2B sales model or that have longer sales cycles.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a tactic in which you send electronic letters to a subscriber audience with the purpose of influencing them to complete a specific action. A major benefit of email marketing is that you already know your audience is interested in what you have to say because they signed up for your email list.
You can use email marketing to send your subscribers a variety of content including newsletters, notifications when you publish a new blog post, special promotions, competitions, eBooks, event invites, and subscriber exclusives. It is important to make sure you are sharing valuable and engaging content with your subscribers to keep them interested and prevent them from unsubscribing from your list.
Engagement
Engagement is a relationship-building marketing tactic that focuses on strategically creating content to foster a connection between your brand or company and your target audience. Popular types of engagement content include social media posts and responses to comments, social media messages, surveys, and blog post comments. Engagement is a powerful marketing tactic because building a positive relationship with your target audience can increase your conversion rates and create customer loyalty to your brand or company.
Gamification
Gamification is a marketing tactic that involves including game-playing concepts and techniques into content to create a more engaging experience for your target audience and customers. Gamification in marketing can take the form of actual prizes, awards, reward points, and badges. It is a great marketing tactic because consumers love the sense of satisfaction that accomplishing tasks within the game provides.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a marketing tactic in which another blogger agrees to let you create content and publish it to their website for their audience to see. Usually, this type of agreement will involve creating relevant content that the other blogger’s audience will find valuable free of charge in exchange for your company’s exposure to the other blogger’s audience.
Popular types of guest post content include blog posts, podcasts, and webinars. When you create great content and share it as a guest post, it can be a powerful marketing tactic for helping you reach your target audience and increase traffic to your website.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves partnering with someone who is well known and has a large following to raise awareness for your brand. Influencers are often famous celebrities, but can also be someone who is not a celebrity and has built a large following on social media. The influencer you partner with provides public praise or reviews of your products, services, or brand. The influencers’ public praise raises brand awareness and encourages their followers to purchase the same products or services from your company.
Interactive Infographics
An interactive infographic uses a visual walk-through to help your viewer find the product or service that is right for their specific issue or to provide them with information that is tailored to their specific situation. Interactive infographics are a powerful marketing tactic because they involve the use of visual content that is specifically created to tell your audience something about themselves. Interactive infographics are popular with audiences because they are personalized to the viewer.
Interactive Media
Like interactive infographics, interactive media is a visual and interactive marketing tactic. Interactive media involves using interactive tools such as quizzes, tests, calculators, analyzers, and optimizers to create engagement between your content and your audience. Interactive media tools ask for user input and then provide customized outputs based on the user’s responses.
Mobile Marketing
As people are becoming more reliant on technology and the internet in all aspects of their life, the number of people relying on mobile technology also continues to increase. Mobile marketing tactics involve using applications and content that is specifically created for viewing on a mobile device. Creating and optimizing content and design to be viewed on mobile devices is becoming increasingly important for reaching your target audience and customers.
Native Advertising
Native advertising, also known as advertorials, are paid marketing campaigns that are designed to look like an organic campaign. This marketing tactic relies on advertising content that looks like a news story or article to draw the attention of your target audience. Examples of native advertising include sponsored article content online or more traditional advertising such as magazine ads and infomercials.
Newsletters
A newsletter is a great marketing tactic to use to inform and educate your target audience about your brand, products, and services and continue to engage your customers. You can send newsletters via traditional print mail or e-mail. Many companies use email to send newsletters to their subscribers at least once a month. You can use newsletters to share news and updates about your company, advertise specific products or services, and send your readers coupons or links back to your website.
Podcasts
Podcasts are another great marketing tactic to use for informing and educating your target audience about your brand, products, and services and increasing engagement with them. This marketing tactic requires building a listener audience and acquiring audio production resources and talent but it provides you another opportunity to guide your listeners to take the actions you want them to.
Press Releases
A press release, also known as media outreach, is an official statement issued to media outlets giving them information on your brand, product or service, in hopes that it will be published in the upcoming months. This tactic works by releasing news, updates, or changes about your brand, products, or services to several media outlets in hopes that a journalist or media outlet will pick up your message and share it with their audience. Creating press releases is usually inexpensive, but requires understanding how to write press release content that a media outlet will believe to be valuable for its audience.
Republish
Republishing is a marketing tactic that involves publishing the same content more than once in the same outlet. Bloggers often use this tactic to update and optimize outdated content that was successful in the past and share it again with their audience. You can also use a republishing marketing tactic with your social media messages to share the same messages with your followers on a consistent basis.
Repurpose
Repurposing is a marketing tactic similar to republishing but instead involves creating the same content in a different format. This tactic allows you to maximize the impact of your content with less effort. For example, you can take the content from a successful blog post, expand upon it, and optimize it to create an e-book. You can also use social media messages with high engagement rates as a foundation for creating a blog article.
Research Studies and Surveys
Research studies and surveys are marketing tactics in which you uncover data to share with your target audience as a way to advertise your business. This marketing tactic requires you develop in-depth research methods that aim to answer questions your target audience or customers may ask. Then, you compile the information from the results of your market research to create a report to share on your website, social media pages, or through news outlets.
Research studies and surveys help you engage with your target audience in a meaningful way that gives you valuable information about potential customers while creating content that is valuable to your audience. It can also help you expand your target audience and reach a wider range of people because many people like to share this type of content on their own social media pages when they find engaging, valuable information.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a strategic marketing tactic aimed at optimizing your content to rank as high as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs). It is estimated that organic search engine results drive about 51% of all internet traffic. This means optimizing your content to rank within the top search engine results is crucial to your content marketing strategy.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo constantly update their algorithms to determine what factors are important for ranking content. Common SERP ranking factors include the amount of content you have, the value of your content, the number of sources linking back to your content, how many people view your website, and how long a viewer stays on specific pages of your website.
Social Media Promotion
Social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are online communities where people can share quick messages with their followers through text, images, videos, and links. There are several different ways you can use social media promotions to market your brand, products, and services including posts, reviews, targeted ad campaigns, and more.
Your followers can also share your social media posts and campaigns with their followers, which can lead to your brand, products, or services going viral. Many social media platforms also offer valuable insights that can tell you how many people your content is reaching and how many of those people are engaging with your content.
As of 2019, Facebook, the largest social media platform, has about 2.4 billion users. Several other platforms have over 1 billion users as well. These numbers mean 1/3 people in the world are on social media and 2/3 of people with internet access use social media. This means social media marketing tactics are essential to any business marketing strategy. But you must commit to posting on your social media pages consistently as social media promotion is most successful as a long-term marketing tactic.
Static Infographics
A static infographic is a marketing tactic that allows you to present complex data or information to your target audience and customers in a visual representation that is easy for the viewer to understand. A static infographic breaks the information down into smaller, easy to digest pieces and then incorporates images into each piece of information to make the information more memorable. Static infographics are popular for sharing on social media.
Webinars
Webinars are marketing tactics companies use to sell a product or course. This tactic involves combining visual graphics in a slideshow or video presentation with audio to offer your audience valuable content as a sales pitch for your product or course. Usually, the offer or sales pitch for the paid product or course is made at the end of the webinar.
Webinars require you to be creative, entertaining, and engaging to ensure you maintain your audiences’ attention and convert them into buyers. When done correctly, webinars are a great marketing tactic because your audience will trust the value of your paid course or product because of the value of the information you offered them.
White Papers
White papers are authoritative guides or reports that educate and inform your audience about a complex topic in a manner that is easy to understand. Typically, the purpose of a white paper is to convince readers that a specific solution is the best solution for their problem or that a specific position is the right position to have. White papers are an effective marketing tactic because they provide a deep-dive into difficult topics and break the topic down so the reader can easily understand it.
Let’s discover the marketing tactics right for your campaigns
Choosing which marketing tactics to use may feel overwhelming. But when you know the different types of tactics you can incorporate into your marketing strategy you can begin thinking about which ones will work best for your business. Contact the content marketing experts at CopyPress if you need any help choosing the right marketing tactics for your business or if you need help successfully implementing the tactics you choose.
CopyPress writer
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