What Are the Best Content Marketing Ideas For 2020?

With time, digital marketing has grown into a vast industry. Nowadays, the digital presence of businesses has become unavoidable. Companies need to be active in this periphery, so they can gain credibility for their brands. Digital marketing includes search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), content marketing, social media marketing (SMM), affiliate marketing and email marketing. 

Content marketing is one of the most important types of digital marketing. According to field experts, content marketing will continue to gain popularity and is here to stay for the long run. However, many professionals aren’t entirely adept at this powerful way of marketing and end-up losing out on golden marketing opportunities.

“Content marketing success is about the wizard and not about the wand.”

— Jay Baer (a veteran business strategist) on content marketing.

Baer is 100 percent right. Businesses make use of various tools to enhance their content marketing.  However, no matter how many advanced tools you are using, if you don’t have a well-planned vision behind your content marketing strategy, then it isn’t worth implementing.

Your content marketing endeavors should concentrate on the customers. Your intention is to offer the audience content that can add value to their daily lives and provide them with insights and useful information.

How Content Marketing Got so Big

According to studies, content marketing started in the late 19th century. At that time, businesses like transportation made use of advanced communication and technology to engage with their audience at large. History has seen various evolutions as far as content marketing is concerned.

More recently, television commercials and radio ads were prominent sources of marketing for businesses. But, nowadays, social media has become an all-in-one landscape for brands to get closer to their customers. Without a doubt, content marketing on social media platforms — like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — is one of the reasons many businesses are now enjoying increased profits.

Content Marketing Ideas You Need Up Your Sleeve 

Present Your Best Work as Gated Content

As we all know, gated content is a type of digital asset that businesses offer to the audiences in return for their personal data. This includes but isn’t limited to their name, email address and contact number. Users cannot access the gated content without filling out the form. 

This is a great way to boost your content marketing strategy. You might find it hard to develop gated content from scratch, but it just requires a little effort. As a beginner, combine your old blog posts on a relevant subject matter and create an ebook from this repurposed content.  Ebooks, white papers and case studies on trending topics are the best forms of gated content you can provide to your target audience. There are some of the great examples of gated content by Jon Loomer and Armchair Marketing. Their language and visuals are very appealing. They are no doubt setting a great example about how to create gated content that will generate potential leads for your business.

Generate Backlinks With Guest Posting

In this constantly evolving digital world, you can understand the value of backlinks that redirect to your website. When it comes to generating valuable traffic to your website, there is nothing better than guest blogging. This practice is when webmasters or bloggers reach out to other sites to share their content. 

Guest posting gives you the opportunity to position your brand in front of potential customers. It’s best to pitch similar niche businesses for guest blogging as it’s likely their buyer personas will be interested in your services. 

You have to do proper research before pitching your idea for guest posting. Use Google to discover websites interested in guest posts. Use keyword sets like “write for us”, “contribute to us” and “submit guest posts” to pull up results of websites that accept guest posts. 

Leverage Social Media Platforms

Social media has become a primary source of marketing for many modern businesses. So, if your company doesn’t have an optimized profile on each of the main social platforms you’re hindering your overall online presence. 

Making use of social media platforms for content marketing is not difficult but does require commitment and management. 

Consider this Instagram post curated by Content Marketing Institute as a prime example of an excellent Instagram post by a business. Look how skillfully CMI informed its Instagram followers about its upcoming live tech summit as a part of its content marketing strategy. 

Hubspot, a leading software developer and inbound marketing firm, promotes its blogs brilliantly on social media sites such as Facebook:

To ensure you don’t get a headache managing your multiple social platforms, make use of automation tools such as Socinator, Buffer, Instazood, Gramboard and Hootsuite.

Using social media hubs for content marketing helps you remain informed about your audience’s likes and dislikes. On social media, you can interact with your target audience or existing customers directly and assess their reactions to your brand. 

Create Interactive Landing Pages

Content marketing does not confine the creativity of marketers but provides them more freedom. A goal of businesses nowadays is to present their products in an eye-catching way. Content marketing has made it quite easy to achieve this and using landing pages is one of the best features of content marketing. You can create separate landing pages on your website for different campaigns and easily monitor the success of each one individually. 

If your landing pages aren’t converting as you expected here’s how to improve them:

1. Pick a credible landing page builder and choose the right template for your landing page 

2. Do proper research and note down the details you want to include on your landing page

3. Keep the language of your lander page simple, straightforward and informative

4. Make sure you highlight the benefits 

5. If possible engage your audience with video content

Up Your Blog Game

Currently, there are more than 500 million blogs live on the web. That makes it quite difficult for you to stand out from the crowd. Everyone is vying for first place. But if you apply the appropriate SEO tactics, research your topic clusters and ensure your writing is what Google would consider high-quality content, you’ll find your blog reaching the right people at the right time.

You can use your blog to market different types of gated content you’re offering. The blog section of Hubspot sets a perfect example of how to up your blog game for content marketing.

Final Thoughts

Somewhere down the line, even the most captivating things start seeming redundant and monotonous. The same goes for your content marketing strategies as well. In this era of social media exposure, the audience gets bored quickly unless, if you have something extraordinary to offer. That’s why it’s vital to embrace all digital trends and implement them in your business.