To be successful, the content you provide must resonate with your audience so they will follow you where you want to take them. The content you create should be focused on fulfilling your customers’ needs and interests, so that they come to build a trusted and emotional connection with your brands.
There are several lists out there on the ‘genres’ of possible content, but for business purposes we find these categories to be some of the top topics to move the needle:
Content that Entertains
Content that entertains is often humorous, often highly shareable, and has the power to quickly transform a “company” into a “group of people just like me.”
Content that Educates
Content that educates fosters interest and awareness of your brand and builds trust between your consumers and your company. Content that’s created specifically to educate achieves the same goals as content to entertain, but is often a next step in showing your audience why they should listen to what you have to say.
While content to entertain appeals to a reader’s emotions, content to educate appeals to their rationality.
Content that Inspires
Don’t be panicked by this category. Quite often, the best inspiration comes in the form of case studies, customer testimonials and stories of failures and challenges that successful people (and products) have faced along the way.
Content that Converts
Meant to nudge the reader in the direction of taking action, content created for the purpose of conversion can include things like signing up for a newsletter, taking a free e-course, or signing up for a free demo.
Below is a visual to help you plot the types of content you can create and what ‘genre’ they fall under. You don’t have to have each of these ‘genres’ in every piece of content you produce, but they’re a good foundation to build your content marketing plan on.
