Content Marketing Ideas for All Businesses: Tips to Get Started!

Content marketing is one of the key cultures after digital disruption. They are often seen as the enhancement of marketing strategy, which, unlike traditional marketing, is made to build visibility and trust with the target audience rather than just giving them information about the products or services. How does it work, and how can you utilize it for your own business? Follow this article to find the content marketing ideas along with the type of content marketing. Along with the benefits, we can encounter when implementing content marketing for many types of businesses, including B2B, B2C, SaaS, and others. 

What is Content Marketing in Common Terms? 

Content marketing is an activity of creating and distributing meaningful content to attract the target audience or consumers. The main goal of content marketing is sales improvement and profit. However, instead of merely introducing products or services by giving away features and information, content marketing is designed thoroughly to build a sense of trust with the audience. 

This marketing strategy was introduced as people get bored with traditional advertisements and, in general, have a shorter attention span. Instead of watching ads diligently, they have options to skip or scroll away. This is what content marketing is made for. They are designed to soft-sell products and services, not just mindlessly shove information at consumers. Thus, instead of hard-sell products, marketers now tend to make valuable content to get the audience’s attention before slowly introducing a commercial product. 

Common Types of Content Marketing 

These are the most popular forms of content marketing. Nowadays, you can choose between these. 

1. Blog post or articles 

This is the simplest and earliest form of content marketing. In the early 2000s until the 2010s, blog writing was the best way to get organic engagement on the internet. Despite the invasion of visual-based content like pictures and videos, articles are still relevant today. Many news outlets and magazines opt for digital media to get views and gain trust from the audience. Text-based content might sound outdated, but they have an everlasting impact on the internet, particularly if they are SEO friendly. 

2. Short video 

As many social media platforms allow users to create content, many marketers use this for their own benefit. One of the most effective types of visual content within those platforms is short-form video (less than 60 seconds). This is challenging, but can be fun and effective.

3. Featured video 

Despite the short-form content trend, some marketers found that featured video with high-quality production can be another effective way to introduce a brand. Yet, unlike traditional commercials, the featured video can expose behind-the-scenes of the product making, or the people behind the service. By giving the human side of the brands, enterprises may prove their authenticity and professionalism. 

4. Infographics

While talking about meaningful and valuable content, infographics can be a great example. As it is filled with facts, this can be seen as educational content that helps many people understand things they care about. Not limited to consumers and regulars, infographics may attract wider audiences. 

5. Carousel posts

Carousel posts are the new trend in social media platforms, particularly Instagram. Despite the hypnotic reels and Video TikTok (VT), many users now see the magic of the carousel (a series of pictures featured in one post). Not only pictures, but you can also actually put text on them and create information-dense content with grabbing hooks and eye-pleasing design.  

6. Email marketing (newsletter) 

Another common form of content marketing ideas is a newsletter. It is also known as email marketing, as they use emails to distribute the content instead of social media. Email marketing works like a routine bulletin or magazine subscription, where we get routine updates directly to our email. Again, it is important to vary the content. Thus, rather than merely flooding subscribers’ emails with companies’ promos and events, it is important to gain their respect by giving them general or specific useful information. 

7. Podcast 

A podcast is an audio-based content that emulates a radio station where the audience listens to a conversation or music without having to seek visual content. This form of content marketing is great to reach audiences with busy schedules, as they can listen to podcasts while doing other things, such as cooking, crafting, writing, driving, commuting, etc. 

8. Webinar 

One of the most effective content marketing ideas is a webinar (online seminar). At this point, you offer knowledge while at the same time exposing your company’s value and professionalism. For several sectors such as an education agency, a news outlet, or a course platform, even a software developer can maximize this type of marketing strategy to gain attention and new customers. 

Unorthodox Content Marketing Ideas 

Making content marketing ideas can be overwhelming. This is due to the fact that content is abundant and many brands use the same method over and over again. Do you need unorthodox content marketing ideas? Try these at your own risk. 

• Day in a life  

Day in a life is the least risky content marketing idea. It basically uses the concept of a mindful showcase of someone’s routine. This works well for both employees and owners of a business to show what they do all day long. Another human side of the business that is proven to be effective in getting engagement. 

• Employee-led content 

Another human side of the business that you can explore and take advantage of is the employee. Involve them to make fun content, both directly or indirectly related to the products or services you sell. For example, if you are running a bookstore, ask them to share their best read of this month. But you can also make content about nostalgic favorite music despite operating a social media account for a design agency. Try to vary these types of content. 

• Celebrity cameo 

If you have the budget, exposure from famous names can be an advantage. Try to collaborate with influencers or celebrities within your budget to promote your brand.

• Show outcome, not features 

Another useful tip on content marketing ideas is the importance of pointing out the outcome of your products or services, rather than just showing audiences the features. For instance, if you sell a hair product, try to show them how to apply it and how it affects the hair of your talent. 

• Fear-mongering 

This is not very recommended, but many marketers and brands use this to get engagement. Fear-mongering is basically a marketing strategy that benefits from the fear, anxiety, and survival instinct of consumers. For example, a paid scholarship mentoring platform may show you statistics of failed applicants due to their lack of preparation. This gives you anxiety and a sense of urgency to prepare better, while they offer you a learning template or mentorship programs. A financial influencer can remind you of an example of failed financial decisions that led to crises, offer you classes, financial planner templates, or even introduce you to an online investment app. 

• Rage bait 

Rage bait is another controversial content marketing ideas. They work by instigating your subconscious mind with discomfort and anger. They may make a fake real-life drama as the hook to grab your attention. Once you are hooked, they will carefully slip service or product placement within the frame. Or they may merely want you to interact with their content by leaving comments or multiple shares in order to get viral status. 

Storytelling as the key element of content marketing 

If we may resume, all those content marketing ideas stemmed from the art of storytelling. It is basically a skill to use narrative as a way to convey messages, objectives, and interests of a brand. This is proven to be crucial and effective in converting views into real engagement as it provides authenticity and sincerity. 

Why is it important and effective? Narrative in the form of film or fiction literature evokes the consumers with emotion, memories, relatability, and even empathy. This is what marketers realize these days. Despite their main interests to gain profit, they need to foster those to grab attention, increase visibility, and maintain their reputation. Hence, instead of just flooding consumers and audiences with what they have on the plate, why not try to share stories behind the product creation? Why was it made in the first place? What is the motivation or inspiration of the product or service? Companies or brands can tell how they make products based on their own needs and insecurities, for instance. By sharing this vulnerability, they create bonds or red strings with strangers who share the same issues. 

In many cases, sharing stories like that effectively motivates the audience to affiliate themselves with the products, the brands, or the face of the companies (whether they are the owners, employees, or brand ambassadors). Do you remember Buzzfeed? It was one of the perfect examples of storytelling marketing strategy. They started as a media company that created text and visual content for both their own website and social media platforms. They use their employees to lead the content creation; they make them show their faces, personalities, and interests to create comedy sketches, reality shows, streaming sessions, etc. It worked wonderfully. Their content went viral and became popular on the internet, and people started to identify those employees as the faces of the company. Even long after they resigned, many still remember them as part of Buzzfeed. 

However, Buzzfeed’s success did not last long. Independent YouTube creators have become one of their biggest rivals to tackle. Unlike BuzzFeed, which controls what its employees share on its platform, independent creators on YouTube and other social media platforms have greater autonomy, resulting in more versatile and unpredictable content.

Types of content marketing ideas based on the target market 

Other than the forms, it is also important to classify content marketing ideas based on the target market. Here are the examples. 

• B2B 

Business-to-Business (B2B) is one of the most promising types of business. In short, enterprises or companies sell their products or services to fellow business units, instead of consumers. As an example, a bread factory has regular purchasers such as cafes and retail stores. As they are not people who directly consume the finished products, you, as a bread factory, need to provide deeper insights and knowledge about your commodities. 

• SaaS 

Similar to B2B business, most Software as a Service (SaaS) companies sell products to fellow business units. Only they focus on cloud-based software instead of physical products. The business model relies on trust and service, as users do not have much control over the accessibility, maintenance, and customization. Most of those features are provided by the provider, who will give routine updates to solve bugs, security issues, and guarantee seamless access. Cloud-based products like this have their own challenges, which require companies to educate the users regularly in order to familiarize them with their features, and therefore, resulting in loyalty. 

• SEO 

The main output of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is high visibility in search engines. This type of marketing strategy relies on how their content works with the algorithms of organic search, both in search engines and on social media. There are some tricks to make this happen, such as the use of keywords, relevancy assurance, and regularity. Now, with AI-driven algorithms, the new challenges and shift began. Instead of just relying on keywords, search engines now analyze the relevance with a semantic approach (using understanding, context, and relationship of the words instead of mere keyword density). 

Content Marketing Planner Template 

Content marketing needs consistency to adapt to algorithms within the search engines and social media. Considering that, it is wiser to have a content marketing planner or calendar. You can try free or paid templates available online to make this. However, the template might be similar and basically mimicking a regular monthly planner you can find in stationery stores. To make it yourself, follow these steps. 

1. Pick your favorite data processing program, it could be Excel/Spreadsheet, Notion, Google or Apple Calendar, etc. 
2. Create a grid of dates to post content marketing. It could be monthly, weekly, biweekly, or whatever is suitable for your plan. 
3. Fill the columns with your ideas and insights. Make sure it is aligned with your brand images and objectives. You can also use each column to track views, engagement rate, and overall metric performance of each post. 
4. If necessary, use a color code to track the types of posts you have made, which will help you avoid possible blunders such as double-posting. It can also be used to track the work matrix of your employees responsible for content marketing creation and distribution.  

How to Maintain a Content Marketing Ideas Calendar

Creating a content marketing calendar is relatively easy, you can also download free templates from many platforms on the Internet. The real challenge is to keep it updated and relevant to your marketing strategy. Here are some tips you can use to maintain and manage a content marketing calendar. 

1. Make plans ahead, but we recommend you dump ideas for 1 to 3 months. 
2. Make a list according to the best and most relevant ones and transfer them to the grid. At this phase, you can manage the patterns and variations of content. You can mix between evergreen content, hot/viral posts, and content about your brand awareness. 
3. Consider the time to make content to make sure you post regularly, while not pouring excessive burden on your social media team. 
4. If you are stuck, try to repurpose high-performing content. Modify and try to offer something new in the newer post, or you can simply transform articles into visual-based content (video, infographics, carousel). 

Tips for Curating Content Marketing Ideas 

Finding content marketing ideas is indeed exhausting because we need to ensure that the content attracts more attention from the audience. However, to achieve the target, we need to try some content marketing ideas first, and sometimes we also make some errors. Making a mistake is okay in a marketing campaign because it is part of the process. 

To tackle the complexity of finding content marketing ideas for the business. We have curated several tips for finding fresh content marketing ideas for many types of marketing strategies implemented in businesses below. 

1. Follow what the audience wants

One of the best ways to gather content marketing ideas is by listening to the audience. As we know, content marketing is not a one-way process, and it must include the audience’s voice to make powerful content marketing. By articulating the feedback from the audience, we can see what they actually want to get the new, fresh ideas for creating content marketing. 

So, it must be noted that we must see the comments consistently on the social media channels or engage with them. This process might need some time because not all of the followers have the willingness to give feedback. Still, we must try to make them give a comment about what they need and what the problems are, and give a solution with our products or services. 

2. Compare with the other published content 

Since the business always has competitors, we can compare with our competitors to gather content marketing ideas. This method is mostly used in SEO strategy to make a great content and improve the website ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). Although the topic is similar, we must alternate the article content to align with the internal company marketing strategy. 

By comparing with the other SEO content, we can evaluate what makes them perform well and include them in the first ranking of Google or other search engines. Thus, we can define our strategy to enhance the area performance to become in the first rank of SERP. Whether the strategy is to increase the keyword volume or find an alternative keyword in order to get better results. 

3. Explore the trending topics

Content marketing cannot be separated from the trend because it is a way to attract the attention of the audience. Therefore, the trend must be a source of inspiration for gathering content marketing ideas for all types of businesses. Even though finding a trend perhaps seems easy these days, it requires extra effort to know where the trends are that align with the business sector. 

There are ways to find trending topics these days, but we normally find them through social media. No wonder that trend is mostly used as a source of ideas for creating social media content. The trends can be turned into many types of content, including videos, infographics, and carousels.  

Different than the SEO that is designed for the long run campaign or evergreen content, while trending content is only for a while. After the trend has been replaced by another trend, the attraction to the audience about related content will gradually decrease. That is why we need to publish the trending content right in time in order not to miss the moment to appeal to the audience. 

4. Stay focused on the products or services

For collecting content marketing ideas, you must be in line with the products or services of your business. Then, you can find the content marketing ideas that are relevant and can answer your targeted audience. For instance, if your products are toys, we have to know what the relevant topics are to toys, including the toy’s character that is most in demand.  Imagine if we are selling toys and we are just creating haphazard content marketing for construction. 

A combination of attractive product-related content will boost the customers’ knowledge about your company’s products or services. If they think that the product-related content is useful, they will follow along the way and may recommend their colleagues who need your products or services. This content can perhaps lead to the action of buying your products or services. 

Conclusion 

Since content marketing has become a critical part of the marketing strategy in most companies, the need to find content marketing ideas is increasing. However, finding content marketing ideas is not an easy thing to do. It requires strategy and time to analyze and decide the best content marketing ideas to put on our lists. The ideas must be related to the products or services to ensure that they are aligned with the marketing strategy and goals. It is important to you to know what your target demographic audience is by comparing to other published content and hearing the audience or follower voices. Then, you know what similar content is, and try to create similar content and analyze content that attracts more engagement. Furthermore, you can focus on the marketing channel that you need more, but you do not need to insist on doing all marketing channels at the same time. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Content Marketing Ideas 

1. Do content marketing ideas and content creation have the same meaning? 

No, the main goal of content marketing is sales or profit. However, business units adopt a content creation approach that is intended to grab attention. Content creation, on the other hand, may have a different set of goals that is not always profit-oriented. It can be utilized to get sympathy and attention, for educational purposes, to gain connections, publications, and much more. 

2. What is the challenge of making B2B content marketing ideas? 

Unlike the business-to-consumer (B2C) model, the B2B model requires an understanding of long-cycle sales journeys. This is a crucial consideration in the process of creating content marketing ideas. For instance, if you supply bread for cafes and retail stores, you have to make sure that you can guarantee that your products are perfect in certain storage conditions. This understanding may lead your social media manager to create content about bread storage and packaging before handing it to the consumers. 

3. Give one piece of advice to a SaaS content marketing manager? 

SaaS is a specific business model that relies on your ability to guarantee easy and seamless access to cloud-based software. This is a challenge because you have to make sure that your users are familiar with the features within your products. Thus, it is going to be useful to create content marketing that is directly related to your products. Articles or videos to answer “how to” are very recommended. This will allow you to introduce your features and the possibility of using them for various purposes that customers miss.  

4. What are the most valuable skills in content marketing creation? 

Well, storytelling skill is one of the most precious assets you can learn and master to create content marketing. This will make your content stand out and be distinct in the sea of digital content. 

5. What are other ways you can do besides content marketing?

Content marketing is one of the tools to promote your products, but do not treat it as a sole tool. As a business unit, you need to consider traditional methods such as offline networking. That is when you can get direct interaction, feedback, and trust from potential partners and clients.