What is content marketing? 16 ideas to get you started

Content marketing is an effective marketing strategy that helps you attract and retain customers. Whether you run a café or have a small online shop, content marketing lets you tell your company’s story, share your expertise, and build trust with your target audience. Best of all, you don’t need to be a marketing expert to get started. 
 
In this article, we review what content marketing is and what its benefits are. You also get 16 ideas to kickstart your strategy.  

What is content marketing? 

Content marketing is a marketing strategy where the goal is to attract and retain customers by creating valuable content. Instead of marketing products and solutions directly, you give the target group something of value, such as good advice, inspiration, or guidance. 

An example could be a bakery that shares recipes and baking tips on a blog. The blog gives the bakery’s audience the opportunity to learn something new while showcasing the bakery team’s expertise. It creates positive awareness around the bakery, even if the blog posts do not promote the bakery’s products as such. That is the essence of content marketing.

What are the benefits of content marketing? 

Content marketing has many benefits that typically have a longer-lasting effect than a short-term marketing campaign, so investing the time to create valuable content can really pay off. Here are some of the main benefits: 

• Achieve better search engine rankings: Search engines like Google favour websites that are frequently updated with new, valuable content. Content marketing can therefore help you reach the top of the search results, where you have a greater chance of being discovered by potential customers.
• Attract valuable organic traffic: Good content tailored to the target audience will help you attract visitors that are genuinely interested in what you offer. For example, if you have an online clothing store, sharing fashion tips on your website makes it attractive for fashion lovers to visit your site and shop in your online shop.
• Gain loyal customers: If your customers love the content you share, your chances of winning their loyalty improve because you offer them more than just the opportunity to buy your products.
• Increase your conversion rates: Combined, the effect of the three above benefits will have a positive impact on your conversion rate, because you will be discovered by new customers, get more visitors to your website, and gain loyal customers who will happily buy your products, subscribe to your newsletter or book a table at your restaurant. 
  

Content marketing – 16 ideas

 
There are practically no limits to what type of content you can include in a good content marketing strategy. The most important thing is that the content you create is created with your target audience in mind.  

Here are 16 ideas for content that can be easily adapted to many different small- and medium-sized B2C and B2B companies. 

1. Attract more visitors to your website with a blog

A business blog is an effective tool that can help you get more traffic to your website. Blog about topics that are relevant to your industry and target group. 

Top 10 lists, step-by-step guides, recipes, beauty tips, comparisons, and reviews are often popular. You can find more inspiration in our article with ideas for blog posts. 

2. Create engaging video content

Video is one of the most popular content formats online. Funny videos, as well as educational videos such as tutorials and product reviews, are favourites among many users.  

If you have a yoga studio, you can, for example, share videos with short exercises that your visitors can do at home in the living room. If you have a B2B company that offers technical solutions, you can create video content where you share good tips for optimising a work process or show creative ways to use your company’s solution. 

3. Start a podcast

Everyone loves a good podcast! According to a study from 2023 there were, at that time, 464 million podcast listeners in the world, and the number is increasing year by year.  

Although a podcast may seem like a big project, it’s an investment that pays off because it can help increase your business’s reach. Virtually all topics are suitable for a podcast, so whether you want to share beauty tips, talk about graphic design, geek out about coffee beans or delve into the functions of an accounting solution, you can do it in a podcast.  

The most important thing is that you engage the listeners and seem genuinely interested in the topic yourself. 

4. Share industry reviews

Conduct interviews with experts or important players in your company’s industry and share the interviews on your website or blog, either as text or as a combination of text, images and/or video. If you have a bookshop, you can, for example, interview authors, publishers, or book reviewers to attract customers interested in literature.

5. Showcase your expertise in whitepapers and e-books

Content in longer formats such as whitepapers and e-books can both show your customers that you’re an expert in your field and help you generate leads. Create a simple landing page with a sharp CTA asking customers to register their name and email address to be able to download your e-book.  

If you use one.com’s Website Builder, the built-in AI writing assistant can help you write the text for your landing page and all other pages on your website.

6. Offer ready-made templates

Is there anything better than not having to start from scratch? Create ready-made templates that visitors to your website can copy or download to get started with various processes faster. Examples of popular templates include spreadsheet templates, invoice templates, resume templates, flowchart templates, and meal plan templates, but templates can be made for almost anything.

7. Invite your customers to webinars

Webinars are a great opportunity to interact with your audience. Schedule a live webinar or pre-record it. Share your expertise, talk about your company’s products and solutions, go through a process step-by-step or reveal new discoveries.  

If you’re planning a live webinar, it’s smart to market it well in advance, e.g. 1 to 2 weeks before in an email or on your website. 

8. Give your audience new skills with online courses

Online courses are popular because they make it possible for everyone to learn something new at home from their living room. For example, if you have a physical yoga studio, you can consider offering simpler online courses on your website to give potential customers a taste of your courses.  

If you would like to earn extra from your online courses, you can of course choose to charge for them or only make them available to customers who already have a membership with you. If you have a WordPress website, you can create an online course using an LMS plugin. 

9. Write newsletters that are good reads

Engage your target audience with newsletters that are worth sitting down to read with a good cup of coffee. A great newsletter is usually not one that contains a wall of text. Stick to sharing something exciting, thought-provoking, informative or entertaining in bite-sized paragraphs, and break up the text with nice pictures or illustrations.  

Remember that the subject line of your newsletter is decisive for whether the recipient opens it.  You can find inspiration in our article Write good subject lines for your newsletters.

10. Answer your customers’ questions on an FAQ page

With a good FAQ page, you can hit several targets with one arrow. You save time on customer service by answering frequently asked questions before customers contact you for answers.  

An FAQ page can contribute to increased sales, because customers who quickly find answers to questions about delivery, returns, shipping prices, etc. are much more likely to complete a purchase. In addition, an FAQ page is a good opportunity to highlight the best of your solutions.  

As a useful SEO bonus, by answering questions on your page, you can also increase the chances of achieving a better position in the search engines. 

11. Create buzz with product news

Make it easy for your existing and potential customers to stay informed about your new products, solutions, and features. You can create a dedicated page where you regularly share product news.  

By sharing product news, you make sure your customers won’t miss out on all your new initiatives, and at the same time you show all visitors that your company is dynamic and adapts in line with the development of the industry and the needs of customers. Let yourself be inspired by our product news page. 

12. Strengthen social proof with customer testimonials

Social proof is one of the most effective types of marketing, because stories from existing customers show customers in the consideration phase that you deliver what you promise.  

Share customer stories where existing customers tell how they have enjoyed your product or service. If you have a beauty salon, you can share before-and-after photos with testimonials from satisfied customers.  

Customer testimonials can be shared both as texts and videos, but the effect is greatest if you combine the text with a picture of the customer or a short video.

13. Create infographics based on your own data

Great infographics make complex information more readable, manageable and, frankly, just a little more fun to look at. Create infographics that show the production chain behind your products, improved workflows with a B2B customer, developments in the industry, the effect of weight training, the popularity of coffee, or a hair care routine.  

The infographic is a format that can be adapted to all types of companies and industries. With design tools like Canva, you can easily create a stylish infographic, even if you have no experience with graphic design. 

14. Be easy to love on social media

Social media is a direct connection to your audience. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are great if you want to stand out and remind current and potential customers of what you do best.  

If you have a cafe, you could share videos from your kitchen, funny staff presentations, or pictures of new dishes to keep your followers engaged and tempt them to stop by. Be personal and authentic, and don’t be afraid to try something new, but be sure to stay true to your brand’s identity and tone of voice. 

15. Create an industry glossary

Industry jargon can be confusing, so why not make life a little easier for your website visitors? Build a lexicon or glossary where you briefly explain terminologies and concepts important to your industry.  

If you have an online shop where you specialise in selling bean to bar chocolate, you can explain terms that are important in the process when the chocolate is made, such as “conching” or “tempering”.  

Your industry glossary will have a positive impact on your website’s SEO, because here you will also provide answers to questions people ask Google and other search engines.

16. Repurpose existing content

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to share content. Save time and squeeze more impact out of the content you’ve already created by repurposing it in a new format.  

You could make a video based on one of your blog posts, a post on social media with one of your customer stories or include an infographic from your website in your monthly newsletter.  

Content can be reused in countless ways. The most important thing is that it’s good, relevant and has value for your audience. 

4 tips for a successful content marketing strategy

Know your target audience

It’s difficult to create good content if you don’t know your target audience and their preferences, so the first step in your strategy should be to get to know the target audience better.  

When you zoom in on your target audience, you will typically make discoveries that will give you ideas for content. If you find, for example, that many in your target group have a specific problem or face a similar challenge, you can create content where you share tips that can help them solve the problem.

Remember SEO

When you create content for your website, the goal is of course that as many people as possible see it and spend time on your site. By working with search engine optimisation and writing SEO-optimised texts, you can significantly increase the chances that your content will appear in the search results and be discovered by potential customers. 

Create a content plan

If your goal is to share new content regularly, you need a content plan so that you can easily form an overview and plan the content in good time.  

In your content plan, you can note what content you have planned for your various channels, such as your blog, your newsletters and your social channels, and when the content should be shared.  

Make it easy to work with the plan by creating a template that can be filled out quickly. Here’s a suggestion for a simple template that can be filled out every time you add new content to your content plan: 

• Title 
• Format (e.g. 40-second video, blog post, webinar, etc.) 
• Channel/platform 
• Responsible person 
• Release date 
• Status 

Increase sales with content marketing 

Content marketing is an effective and budget-friendly marketing strategy that can be used by all businesses. If you create a razor-sharp strategy where the content is so adapted to the target group that they want to spend time on it, content marketing will help you acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and increase sales.  

The formula is simple: giving your audience interesting content that answers questions, entertains, or solves a problem = positive awareness around your company and your products.