How to find your content marketing style

There are many different approaches that you can adopt with content marketing. All is dependent on what type of medium you are marketing on, the target market in addition to the message you wish to portray. Here are a number of different types of examples of content.

Stock and Flow

Robin Sloan, who is a former manager on Twitter, stated on his blog: “Stock durable stuff … the content which you produce must be as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is at the moment. It’s what people discover via search … building fans over time”. Flow is “the posts and tweets … the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist”.

Stock content is more likely to be original, durable content that retains or builds value over time and keeps people coming back. It may be:

• Entertaining,
• Informative,
• Useful (such as a guide, or directory).

The type of content you put out onto your website may be one-off, or episodic content which you are able to follow or even subscribe to.

A straight-forward example may be an article that is written by a brand or a publisher which still ranks highly on high-volume search terms. This means that it is continuing to bring in a consistent stream of users to the brand or publisher site over a protracted period of time. Alternatively, it could be something more complex such as the content on a community hub or useful functionality on a site.

The user context for stock content will more probably be seeking information, entertainment or inspiration. Alternatively, this type of content could be exploring or engaging. Creating for stock content means designing assets whose fundamental characteristic is that their value is not restricted to a short period of time.

Flow content is more likely to be defined by a brief spike of audience attention. The user context is more identified with browsing, grazing, updating, sharing as well as interacting. Flow content lives in the stream. It is fast, ‘snackable’, highly spreadable and shareable, social as well as mobile-friendly. It is often (but not constantly) ‘distributed’ content, which is out there in the fabric of the web.

Always-on Marketing

We are in a time where ‘switching off’ can almost be detrimental to our emotional state. Whether it’s at home or office, we’re always on our mobile devices to ensure that we’re never out of touch. And brands can expect the same from their consumers. They ‘consume’ all the time if it’s the actual purchasing of a product or the content that’s out there.

For the identical reason, it’s vital that brands are able to capitalise on this so that their audience is consuming their content in a particular way or the other.

What takes place between the time that one campaign ends and when the other begins? Brand marketers are still required to make sure that their social channels are consistent with their overall content strategy. If the consumer never disengages, it’s the brand’s responsibility to never disengage if they want to continue building on brand awareness.

Tactical Marketing Approach

What this content marketing approach is about is capturing real-time events such as:

• Sport events,
• Trends

It then builds these events into your content marketing efforts.

Here are some guidelines when creating tactical content:

• Be quick and create content quickly as events come and go, as well as do trends.
• Be tasteful and remember not to write content that is too tongue-in-cheek that could offend anyone.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about content marketing? If you do, then you need to check out our Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing Course. For more information, please follow this link.