Big 3 for GROWTH - These 3 Types of Content Bring Real Growth

Scattering countless types of content indiscriminately across all possible channels in the hope of attention, greater reach or even gaining customers is certainly a strategy, but definitely NOT the right one to achieve the goals mentioned above.

Yet many do exactly that - without a goal, without a plan and without a real strategy for sharing content. The most important thing for successful content is: it must hit the bull's eye!

Everything you share on social media, in blog posts or other corners of the internet, creates impressions with your target audience and therefore needs to be well planned. Because it all adds up to form a convincing overall picture - your status as an expert.

Your target audience reads content that provides them with added value, picks them up exactly where they currently have a pain and helps them achieve their goals. And this is exactly the content you should focus on. Only this way you can get your target audience to come back, build long-term relationships and receive customer inquiries.

However, it's not just about talking consistently about the problems and goals of your target audience and positioning yourselves as the best possible solution. No, this is just one piece of the Content Mix.

So pay attention to the right combination of information, industry news and extraordinary highlights or success. This way, you provide your target audience with exactly the infotainment that creates long-term loyalty and optimizes conversion.

So which content types should not be missing in any growth strategy?

Personal-Content

Personal content helps people identify with you and learn more about you and your company. What is behind the façade? What failures have you experienced, what learnings could you take away? Allows your users to glimpse supposedly exclusive insights. For example, introduce your team or the people behind your product. These insights become more tangible with the post for your followers and at the same time build proximity and sympathy to you and your company.

This type of content builds up little trust in your technical expertise, but allows readership to establish a connection with you, gives a feeling of approachability and has the greatest chances to build big reach and achieve growth.

Examples and inspirations for Personal-Content:

1: Employee presentation

If there are news about the team, you should definitely report about it. Introduce the employees and give a direct insight into what tasks will be taken on in the future. P.S. a joint photo is even better

2: What Learnings did you take for yourselves

You might be founder or new in your field. Let your users share in all your learnings, successes or even failures.

• What did you take away from founding, which you want to pass on to others to do better
• How was your onboarding in the new company
• What makes your company special (which benefits are there etc.)

There are endless more possibilities to let your community participate in your changes, news or even happenings.

Expert-Content

The Expert-Type contains all technical information from your area of expertise. News that nobody knows yet, first evaluations or feedback on events from your field, future trends, etc.

All in all, it's about setting individual impressions with your target audience, positioning you as a topic leader in your area of expertise. Expert content strengthens the trust in your abilities and skills, but is usually not the content type that builds the biggest reach.

Even though personal branding lives by sharing personal content among other things, you should always be clear about which goal you want to achieve with which type of content. As described in the first content type, personal content forms the basis and is a must-have especially on social media. This way you build reach and relationships.

Expert content on the other hand is rather impersonal, here it is not about your last learning or the last job change. It's more about creating very technical contributions to your own area of expertise, so that you are considered a pioneer in this area.

What does Expert-Content mean now in concrete terms? Here are some very concrete examples and approaches for Expert-Content:

1: News from your industry

If there are relevant news from your field of expertise, you should be the first to report about it. You should not publish the hundredth post on the same topic, but always be the person who finds topic-relevant content first.

Nevertheless, social media is not a news magazine. Besides the news itself, you should take a stand on the topics and provide an interpretation or analysis.

2: Insights from your work

As an expert in a field, you certainly have exciting daily insights from working with customers or your own projects. You can share exactly these somewhat more technical insights and use them as Expert-Content. 

There are countless more possibilities and approaches to create Expert-Content. This type of content is not often shared or polarized, but addresses exactly those people who are precisely in your target group.

The Conversion-Content-Type

Conversion-Content should encourage contact with you, to engage more closely with you and your offers and ideally to become a customer.

But beware! The type of content is usually used too often and clumsily and thus leads to the opposite result: no reach, no followers and no customers at all.

Maybe you know the statement: "Social Media is not a Sales-Pitch" and you should avoid that. Does this mean that Conversion-Content has absolutely no place in the Content Mix?

No. However, you must use it purposefully and match the content perfectly to the needs of your target audience. Don't use it with the direct goal of using your service, but to download further content, visit a webinar or read an E-Book.

You can build additional trust through this and ultimately invite to purchase or consultation. In addition, you improve the user experience on your profile or your website and thus, together with other measures, not only ensures good ranking, but also organic traffic. So for clicks, leads, sales and more.

P.S. In the Conversion-Content-Type, the Call-to-Action (CTA) must not be missing at the end, because you wanted to encourage a specific action.

The perfect CTA, is short and meaningful. So avoid too long formulations or even sentences for your CTA. The formulation should therefore be chosen in such a way that it already has a strong expressiveness for itself.

Examples for effective CTA-formulations and approaches to placing them:

• Now register
• Arrange free consultation
• Now participate in the workshop
• Download E-Book for free

1: Now participate in the workshop for free

To make your product or your service even more appetizing to your customers, without directly prompting them to buy, you can, for example, invite them to one of your free workshops. In this way, you enable them to get to know you and your business even better and set another purchase impulse.

2: Testimonials of the results of your customers

As an expert in your field, you celebrate the successes of your customers. Talk to your customers and take joint testimonials of the success story. In this way, you enable your potential customers and your target group to be convinced of you and your services.

Important: spontaneous posts are of course also still possible, the content types are only intended to help you find topics faster and on the other hand to ensure a balanced content strategy.

And now, where you know the Big 3 for GROWTH the basis for your content strategy is laid. The next step is to make the whole process efficient and planable, because you certainly have other responsibilities such as social media content.

Meanwhile, there are countless software solutions that support you and can also be used for free.

My top 3 favorite tools, which simplify your content planning and publishing significantly

Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers cross-platform social media management with its software, where you have the opportunity to prepare, plan and automatically publish posts. LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are just the spearhead, which you can manage with Hootsuite from one account.

Tip: you work with a clear weekly structure and Hootsuite takes care of the rest. Many take the time on weekends to write their posts and schedule them in Hootsuite. That way, you're free for other topics during the week.

Asana

Asana, unlike Hootsuite, is a free planning tool where you can not only easily organize your projects or facilitate teamwork, but also write, plan and schedule your content. But you have to post here yourself.

The advantage of Asana is that you can also use it for other planning purposes and task management - for example, I also use Asana to record spontaneous content ideas that come to me in everyday life.

Canva Pro

Do you know the problem of creating graphics for your profile and your posts? Whether LinkedIn, banner or insta-story? To get the cool font into the picture? With Canva you save all worries. Because Canva offers you preformatted or customizable graphics, templates, symbols and much more for all occasions.

All important information, about these and other tools that can help you with your social media content creation and planning, you can find at OMR Reviews and in the category Social Media Suites-Tools.

Conclusion

With the right content types and a planning and graphic tool, you can also convince your audience with your content, gain growth and get visibility!

But don't forget one thing: Besides all the strategies, tools & tricks, content marketing is mainly about sticking with it and not giving up. It might take a while to build up real traction here. So enjoy the process and give the whole thing the time it needs.