How to be creative with your content marketing

Content marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with and advertise to your target audience.

Given that content marketing is so popular, it can be difficult to create content that stands out from that of your competitors.

In this article, we’ll share six highly effective content creation strategies to help you produce high-quality content that sets you apart from your competitors.

1. Be honest

Always be honest in your content, as audiences can often tell when a company is being genuine. Content writers and marketing agencies that make false promises to their target audience will often get called out, particularly when a company has a presence on social media platforms where they speak directly with their customers.

It’s essential that your content includes valuable information that’s relevant to your target audience. If your content helps them, they’ll start to realize your product or service might help them too.

2. Play the “Wonderland” game

Try the “Wonderland” game. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the question is asked: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” Sure, this question has been answered many times but does it apply to your product or service? How is your product like a person, place or thing that appears to be completely unrelated to it? Thinking about this could lead you to more creative solutions.

Say “content marketing” is your product. By playing the “Wonderland” game and using items that are either in the news or around us, you could end up with topics like “What I learned about content marketing from my grandma” or “How I increased my open rate by 174% with a roll of duct tape”.

3. Use different types of creative content

Different types of content have different functionalities, but when thinking about content, some marketers often only consider article-style blog posts.

Long-form blog content is a pillar of search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing, but don’t forget the plethora of other content formats that you can use to communicate with your potential customers and raise brand awareness and improve your brand positioning.

These include:

• Visual content such as infographics

• Memes

• Podcasts

• Social media content

• Ebooks

• Email marketing

• Interactive puzzle games

• Webinars

• Surveys and case studies

• Email campaigns

• Video content and video marketing

• Research papers

• Data-driven white papers

When initially designing your content marketing campaign, keep your primary objective in mind and work your content around achieving those marketing efforts.

We suggest making a variety of templates to use in your strategy. This will save time while you design numerous variations of similar pieces of content.

4. Study what others are doing

People love teaching others. Try typing “how to” in a Google search with auto-complete on and you will see that there are many teachers out there.

When thinking about creatively bringing your message to others, look at what other people have done in the past. Is there a marketing campaign that particularly impresses you? Are you able to deconstruct it and use its principles in yours? The best marketing managers can see what’s worked for other companies in their space, take a similar concept, and make it their own.

5. Collaborate internally

Collaborating with your internal team is one of the most efficient ways of developing a creative content marketing strategy. The best digital marketing companies use their whole team to brainstorm different ideas and concepts.

Bring your vision to the team and talk to them about it. See how that idea is transformed into something better. It is challenging to work in a vacuum and the content marketing arena is no different. Let your thoughts breathe and evolve with

6. Forget shortcuts and hacks

The goal of content marketing is to create leads (or lead generation) and, in many cases, to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

There’s no hack to achieve this - the only way is by regularly publishing great content that conveys your company culture and service to your target audience.

Approach your creative content marketing with a wholesome and diverse mindset, one that aims to fulfill all potential avenues for you to communicate with your potential customers. To do this:

• Leverage social media. Use social media sites and social media marketing, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, to communicate with your target audience regularly. This will keep you top of mind and make it easier to notify them of updates and developments.

• Optimize your landing pages. Make sure your landing pages are optimized for conversions, as they’re often the final destination before your audience chooses to buy, sign-up to your email list or bounce.

Final thoughts

Hopefully, this article will help you generate creative content marketing ideas. (We can’t give you creative ideas ourselves because then your content wouldn’t be original!)

These tips for generating your own creative content should help you build unique content marketing collateral to stand apart from your competitors' content and boost engagement.