10 Types of Content Marketing and How to Use Them in Affiliate Marketing
Using suitable types of content marketing is a crucial element of your success as an affiliate marketer. Sometimes, figuring out what content works for your brand takes a few tries. With our handy guide, content marketing should be more enjoyable and less stressful.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before discussing the different types of content marketing you can use, let’s define content marketing.
Content marketing strategically uses creative and informative material to promote your company’s core product or service. For example, you can produce podcasts or blog posts to increase awareness of your brand. In time, brand awareness creates leads. It also results in a higher conversion rate from potential client to actual client.
How Do I Get My Content Marketing Right?
To nail your content marketing, there are a few things you should always keep in mind:
1. Figure Out Who Your Target Audience Is
Drawing up a profile of your target audience is a crucial first step in content marketing. If you don’t know who your audience is, how will you know where to find them?
Understanding your target audience will help you determine what they care about and what content they seek. Additionally, a profile of your target audience will help guide you on where to find them.
2. Produce Content That Your Audience Values in a Format They Enjoy
If you want to win your audience’s trust in the long term, finding out what kind of content they value and how they prefer to consume it is essential. Do they choose affiliate marketing blog posts or infographics? Should you look into developing a white paper or a DIY video tutorial?
You have a few tools at your disposal to understand the kind of content your target audience values. You can use surveys or social media analytics tools on your platforms to determine which previous content has performed well. Alternatively, you can look at Reddit threads or other social media threads to perform social listening. Evaluating the conversations on social media will help you figure out what kind of content your target audience is talking about.
Alternatively, you can use tools like Buzzsumo and Google AdWords to figure out the kind of content people are searching for and the most popular search results that pop up.
Finally, you can try the trial-and-error route, where you test specific types of content and see how your audience responds.
3. Focus Less on Attaining Attention and More on Retaining It
When working as an affiliate marketer, it’s easy to assume that achieving a certain number of views or clicks on your content is the ultimate goal.
As lovely as getting views and clicks is, attracting an audience that will stay with you long-term is more important. How do you do this? By promising a worthwhile experience and delivering it.
4. Stop Trying to Promote Yourself and Start Trying to Help Your Audience
People are very wary of blatant advertising, so don’t use your affiliate marketing content as a tool for advertising. Focusing more on the value you can offer your audience is a more effective way of earning their trust in the long term. Remember, trust is a valuable currency in any industry. Over time, people who trust you will likely purchase your core product or service.
What Types of Affiliate Content Marketing Can I Choose From?
Given the buffet of options, developing an affiliate content marketing strategy that works for your brand is not too complicated. Let’s look at the options at your disposal:
1) Blogging
Blogging is an excellent way to share informative content and build a reputation for your brand as an affiliate marketer. Provided you can offer valuable information, your blog can help you establish positive relationships with your readers, who will soon rely on your wisdom.
To run a successful blog, you must optimize your content by writing for SEO, using the cluster model, and writing consistently. Writing for SEO and using the cluster model will help your blog rank higher on Google’s results for keywords and topics you’ve written about. Similarly, writing consistently will help you rank higher on Google and build a reputation as a reliable source of information.
Your blog will be more effective if your published articles focus on topics related to your industry instead of your core products or services. At the same time, dropping a few calls to action in each post by mentioning your core product or service is a good idea.
2) Infographics
Infographics are a fun, simple way to simplify statistics and other complex data into a more understandable form. Since they are visually appealing, your audience is bound to enjoy them.
You could go one step further to give your infographic more weight by quoting data from other thought leaders.
3) Video
Like infographics, videos are an enjoyable and engaging way to teach your target audience how to do something complex. If the content you’re sharing is a tutorial, DIY guide, or guide for using your product, video is a great format.
4) Case Studies
No matter how many impressive figures you quote, real-life stories about how your product has changed people’s lives will always have a more significant impact. With time, your case studies might just be the social proof you need to build trust with potential clients considering your products or services.
Real stories about clients you’ve worked with before are more relatable than impersonal facts and figures. Potential clients can put themselves in your client’s shoes and picture how using your product will add value to them.
You can make your case studies even more effective by talking to clients who will allow you to use their “before” and after “metrics” of success. While it’s true that numbers aren’t everything, they will still help you build a solid case for your ability to help clients achieve their goals.
5) eBooks
eBooks are a more informative, long-form version of blogs that educate your target audience or help them solve a problem. They can be independent content or a combination of blog posts you’ve already written and published.
If your eBook is very long, it’s best to have a table of contents to guide your readers. You can display this table of contents on a landing page to entice curious website visitors to read the rest of your book.
You can offer someone an eBook in a gated format in return for their email address or other contact information. This helps you build a target audience to which you can market your core products or services in the future.
6) White Papers
Similar to eBooks, white papers help your audience solve a complex problem. However, they are more focused on data. White papers are the ideal type of content to use if you operate in a B2B environment.
As with eBooks, you can also use white papers to build an audience of contacts to pitch your core business.
Ebooks and white papers help you build a reputation as a trusted authority in the industry. Use them correctly; people will rely on you for information and guidance.
7) User-generated Content
User-generated content can be just what you need to generate long-term engagement with your brand. For example, retweeting a client’s tweet can create a conversation about issues surrounding your industry. Engaging in this kind of conversation further solidifies your status as a thought leader in the industry.
8) Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to reach people on the move with educational or entertaining content. With the right equipment and content marketing strategy, they can humanize your brand and make your founding team more relatable to your target audience.
9) Webinars, Training, or Demos
Webinars, trainings, or demos are a creative way to teach your audience something complex related to your industry. Alternatively, you can use these types of content marketing to familiarize people with your product or service.
If potential clients know you can help them understand how to use your products or services, they are likelier to try what you’re selling. Overall, people who know you offer industry support through webinars and training are more likely to trust you.
10) Interviews or Q&As
When done right, interviews and Q&As are an excellent way to share your expertise and engage your audience.
You can encourage engagement by allowing them to ask questions beforehand and answering them in a video or audio interview. Alternatively, you can invite your audience to ask questions in real-time and answer them on a live stream.
Now that we’ve discussed the different types of content marketing available to you let’s discuss how to make your content marketing stand out.
Affiliate Content Marketing – Best Practices
To give your content the boost it needs, consider using some of these strategies:
1. Repurpose Your Content
Did you know you can boost traffic to an old blog post by summarizing it in the form of an infographic or video and sharing this on social media? Repurposing this content will make people curious about the original content, boosting traffic to your website over time.
2. Find Gaps in the Market
Doing things differently from your competitors will help you stand out as a content marketer. For example, the crypto industry is saturated with long-form textual content such as blog posts or white papers. If the client you’re producing content for operates in this industry, videos and infographics will help them stand out.
3. Adapt to Your Platforms
While deciding which types of content marketing work well for your brand, it’s essential to consider the platforms you’ll be using to distribute this content. For example, on Instagram, visual content like photos, infographics, and videos would work well. However, textual content would work better if you’re using LinkedIn to reach your target audience.
4. Ask for Feedback
An excellent way to boost engagement among your audience is to ask for feedback. Take time to find out how they feel about your content. Find out what isn’t working as well as you thought it would and what they want to see more of. You’re helping your target audience feel involved in your content creation process by asking for feedback. Clients who think they’ve been heard start to trust you over time.
Ultimately, when done right, content marketing should give your or your client’s brand the boost it needs and build trust among your target audience. Once you’ve developed a content marketing strategy, you can use a creative brief to work on your project as a team.
