3 inbound marketing techniques you might not have tried yet

Getting tired of the same old content marketing techniques?

Here are three methods gaining ground in today’s online marketplace — ideas that you may not have considered before. Each leverages online trends and takes advantage of engaged audiences who enjoy interactivity or sharing. We’ve laid out the pros and cons, plus possible use scenarios.

Infographics

You see them everywhere these days, and they seem to be wildly popular. But do they do a good job in terms of content marketing?

Advantages:: Infographics are (obviously) highly visual. Imagery is a great form of content for several reasons: it offers a break from text, provides something visually stimulating, and gives an illustrative form of the copy. People typically learn visually; this is a great opportunity to use infographics to deliver your marketing message or sales pitch — in a fast, effective way. Infographics create an easy-to-digest “story” from heavy information like statistics, bulleted tips, and definitions. This makes them more engaging and powerful. And easily sharable in social media. Win-win.

Disadvantages: Images are not crawlable nor indexible content; this means that infographics won’t woo any search engine bots or spiders. You’ll need to counteract this with meta descriptions and alt attributes, as well as some accompanying textual copy.

Content Marketing Uses: Infographics — especially ones you create yourself — prove your authority and have high viral potential. They are easily shared, and are thus very valuable for content syndication, creating external, one-way inbound links for your deep pages.

Document Sharing

Document sharing is an easy way to share presentations, keynotes, infographics, and other slide-show or longer-form content on your website. SlideShare dubs itself as the “world’s largest community for sharing” documents online.

Advantages: This is a great way to showcase quality content that was once difficult to share on a standard website. Think company presentations, slides from speaking engagements, e-books, white papers, and more. Another advantage: documents in portable formats like PDF can be used in a wide variety of devices — from desktops to tablets to smartphones. Also, device-compatible (e.g. MOBI) file formats can leverage specific features that are local to specific devices, personalizing the experience.

Disadvantages: This form of content marketing is used primarily on B2B channels, where case studies and research reports are handy lead-generating tools. For the B2C side, buyer guides and how-tos seem effective. These documents don’t typically lend themselves well to top-of-funnel activities — such as simply promoting awareness — and you’ll need to pay close attention to targeting. Costs for developing the document might not be worth the ROI.

Content Marketing Uses: Lead generation is possible via virtually any channel — from social media to landing pages to email. Document sharing also helps leads go further into the sales funnel.

Gamification

Games have had a second resurgence after the video game boom in the form of social games.

Advantages: Highly engaging and often visual, gamification (games that allow players to win badges, earn points, or increase status) easily entice target audiences. Gamifying your website can makes it more bearable to go through high friction points of your sales funnel like content gates/walls. Gamification is often skewed towards the social crowd already used to games in their social platforms.

Disadvantages: Gamification requires a commitment from the user: it takes up more time than reading copy and asks for participation/interaction. The game needs to be motivating and it needs to offer a reward worth playing for — otherwise, your users just won’t play. A poorly-designed game is time and money wasted, and it can also be damaging to your brand.

Content Marketing Uses: Gamify high friction areas of your sales funnel to help leads get over their objections and make general content marketing more fun and engaging. Gamified content shares a common thread with gaming in general: replayability. This means you can use the game’s replay value to gain repeat visits and more chances for conversion.

Based on the general advantages, disadvantages, and content marketing uses of these three techniques, which one would you think suits your business best?

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