Value added content is exclusive content that your audience cannot get anywhere else. Such content is the core of any content marketing strategy. According to the Content Marketing Institute, marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget to content marketing. 28% – that’s a lot! Marketers pay attention to content because content drives leads and sales.
Content marketing works and should be the core of any inbound marketing strategy.
Your audience has needs and your business is designed to meet those needs.
Value added content serves as a bridge between your audience’s needs and your solutions. You aren’t giving away what you do – rather you are giving away content that helps lead your audience to what you do.
For R Creative, a marketing and tech agency, this post is another example of value added content.
Value added content will keep your website fresh, give you plenty of content to share on social media, give search engines more to index, and convert website visitors into leads and sales.
Here are five of the most common – and most effective – types of value added content:
Blog posts
Blogs began (in the late 1990s) as web-logs – series of informal and personal posts that read somewhat like a diary. They have since evolved to include almost any style of writing on any subject. Today blogs have become an essential element of most websites.
Example:
If you run an auto-body shop, you could publish a blog with posts with crash safety tips, examples of complex jobs you have finished, and customer testimonials.
If you are considering adding value added content to your website a regularly updated blog is an excellent place to start.
Tools
Whether you own, manage, or work for your organization you have surely developed tools to help you work and live more efficiently. Or, perhaps, you have developed tools for clients that could be useful for others as well. You can revise such tools and generalize them to share as downloadable content.
Example:
If you run a print marketing company offer a downloadable sales toolkit with a few spreadsheets and templates.
How-to-Guides
How-to-guides may come as videos, articles, or blog posts. Different guides will lend themselves to different formats. Use these guides to help your audience accomplish something with ease.
Examples:
If you run a data analytics business you could publish how-to-guides on how your audience can leverage specific data points to help their own business succeed.
R Creative recently published a guide on How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan for Your Business.
Infographics
Infographics are images that display data and make it easily comprehensible. They usually include multiple graphs, short explanations, and quick statistics on a unified subject.
If your business has original research or data you should certainly consider designing some infographics. Infographics make your data easier to understand and more convincing and they’re also more sharable than a wall of text.
Examples:
If you teach communication skills consider designing an infographic on the importance of non-verbal communication cues.
R Creative has published our own info-graphics like when to hire a content writer and the anatomy of type faces.
e-books
Have lengthier original content? A blog series that could be combined and revised as an e-book? Original research or data requiring lengthy evaluation?
Your website should offer a downloadable e-book!
Whether you offer this as a PDF, Kindle download, or both – offer it exclusively on your site or also on Kindle – e-books are a type of content your audience expects to pay for. Surprise them – give it away in exchange for their contact info. Offering e-books as value added content will then benefit both your audience and your organization.
Example:
If you run a fabric shop, you can release an ebook of children’s clothing patterns called Quilting Cottons for Children’s Couture.
R Creative can help develop value added content that drives leads and sales
Many organizations find that they do not have the time to both do what they love and regularly create and publish useful content. That’s what we’re here for. Your next step to improving your content marketing is as east as contacting us.
