With millions of bloggers writing content every day, you need creative ideas to help you stand out and reach more people.
Long gone are the days of “build it and they will come.” Now, just writing for the sake of writing won’t produce results. Your content needs a laser focus, a direct market, and perfect execution. Even with that, your reach could still be close to nothing. Traditional blogging isn’t the end all be all. But, it’s very effective. To expand your reach both with blogging and other forms of content, you need to get creative. Here are four ideas to do just that.
1. Repurpose Your Blog into Podcast Topics
Blog content is fantastic for driving top of the funnel, organic traffic. It can often drive great bottom of the funnel traffic too, depending on your niche and topics. But, blogging is crowded. It’s saturated. It’s being done by every business in your industry who also wants the same organic traffic and leads. So, what can you do to stand out? Turn that blog content into something else: a podcast! Your blog topics can easily be repurposed into a new content marketing medium like podcasting. For example, take a look at the last few blog posts you published. Do any stand out in particular as solving common pain points? Or covering highly searched keywords? Those are perfect for podcast topics.
Plus, podcasting requires little to no setup now when just starting out. All you need is something to record your conversation, edit the audio file, and upload it. With good mic technique, listeners will be less focused on the talking and more on the content, as Buzzsprout notes:
Start by compiling a list of your latest blog posts. If they are long-form, you can even break them down by H2s and subsections. For example, if your podcasting about
2. Drop Simple Posts and Focus on Ultimate Guides
Unless your brand has established authority, not all kinds of content will be a success. For example, take this post you are reading right now. It’s a shorter post focused on actionable tips for creative content ideas. It works because TweakYourBiz is an authority when it comes to business growth. The higher your domain authority/rating, the easier it is to rank for keywords. When you are just starting out, ranking for high difficulty keywords is rarely possible. So, what can you do instead? What content can you produce that will get your brand established in your space? Complete guides.
Ultimate guides allow you to cover a wider variety of topics, often long-form ones, reaching a wider and more specific audience.
For example, take a look at this guide on when to visit Hawaii:
It starts with a more basic keyword but actually covers more detailed and specific keywords in the guide. Complete with countless sections, it’s a one-stop-shop for users looking for information. They don’t have to click back to Google to get more answers:
This is how you build a brand. By creating ultimate guide content that is complete, from start to finish. This establishes your brand as an authority and a credible resource to visitors.
3. Make Case Studies a Priority
Case studies and original research have been dramatically successful in the last few years of content marketing. For example, case studies like Codeless’ content farm Olympics, where they bought and ranked popular content services:
Or OrbitMedia’s blogger survey, that’s conducted and surveys thousands of bloggers:
These original research case studies are fantastic pieces of data for both businesses looking to implement marketing ideas and businesses looking to create content. Why? Content creators need statistics and proven tactics to talk about, and businesses need those proven tactics to implement themselves. Original research is both compelling and a goldmine when it comes to driving backlinks. Check out the backlink profile for Orbit Media’s study:
Thousands of links. More than most brands could hope to get in years of outreach. Original research gets referenced and talked about far more than XX tips posts. If you want to get creative and drive more links and awareness, develop your own research study. Pick a topic that is widely searched and conduct a new study on it. The results speak for themselves.
4. Create Distinct and Segmented Content
Personalization is the holy grail of content marketing. Consumers more than ever want businesses to produce personalized content for them. The only problem is: personalized content at scale and to multiple target markets is often complex. It’s not as simple as tailoring a blog post to one target market, as the others will find zero interest. It’s about creating and segmenting specific pages and campaigns to each target market, instead. How so?
Take a look at the landing pages of Housecall Pro. Here’s one for plumbers, in specific:
This landing page is directly targeting plumbers for service software. But, they don’t stop at just plumbers. They also have custom landing pages for dozens of niches that fit their software, from maids to electricians and more.
Doing so allows them to rank for more keyword searches, target more markets with specificity, and deliver better experiences.
For instance, instead of just targeting “service business software,” they can now target long-tail variations for dozens of service-types, like “maid service business software.” This personalized content appeals more directly to each segment, increasing the chance of conversion, too. So, what are you waiting for? Get creative and start developing landing page content for each distinct segment your brand caters to.
Conclusion
Content marketing goes way beyond simple blog posts and tips. Content can be anything from video to podcasts to case studies and custom landing page campaigns. If you are looking for creative content marketing ideas you can run with, implement these four today to drive more organic traffic, awareness, and leads:
- Repurpose your blog content into podcasts
- Drop simple posts and focus on ultimate guides
- Make case studies and original research
- Create segmented landing page content
