3 Content Types to Push During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The corollary of the Covid-19 crisis is that the majority of us were compelled to stay at home, and do things we wouldn’t normally do at home like study, work, shop, and etc. For businesses, the implications are far greater, especially the way they operate and market themselves. If they had not fully slashed their marketing budgets altogether, companies had to make a radical shift from traditional to online marketing.
But if your brand has been acing the content marketing game before and during the pandemic, what significant tweaks should you make to your plans to continue creating awareness for your brand, engage potential customers, and ultimately, drive sales and profit to the business? What types of online content should you do more of to achieve your goals, even when the looming cloud of Covid-19 still hangs above our heads?
Social Media
Because of mobility restrictions across the globe, being holed up at home made us turn to our devices even more. We now spend a disturbing amount of time burying our noses into our phones and laptops. Social media use, consequently, rose through the roof. Based on a Valassis Survey in March 2020, 39%of those polled said they used social media more during the onset of the coronavirus. As a marketer or a business owner, this is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up
Now is the time to capture your audience’s attention by pushing engaging content on your brand’s social media platforms and build a community around it.
To oil one’s social media machinery, businesses realised the importance of building a highly specialised team to execute their campaigns: Copywriters who write compelling captions; designers who create graphics in dimensions required by each social media platform; strategists who use listening tools and interpret insights from analytics reports; and community managers who manage the brand online and keep conversations going. For brands with limited budgets, they can hire social media marketing specialists who can wear many hats and perform multiple roles.
For starters, you can create a social media content calendar where you can organise your content. You can share both original and curated content on your social media page so long as it aligns with your brand. Moreover, you can create content around seasonality, trends, relevant news, and match it with a blinding variety of social content formats like quotes, polls, blog, picture cards, invitation to company events, Facebook or Instagram lives, podcasts, etc.
Video
While the world was at a standstill, a lot of us were sitting or lying down, fiddling with our handheld devices and remote controls, seeking entertainment. This led to an increase of digital content consumption. In 2020 alone, The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of subions globally to video streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, and HBO Max rose to 1.1 billion.
Video is easily one of the most engaging content types to publish because it is an audio-visual experience. Because more people are spending time watching videos, it is in your best interest to include video creation in your content marketing plan.
Depending on your industry, you can use different themes to shoot and create your videos. For food and beverage brands with brick-and-mortar stores, you can produce videos about store visits, menu offerings, “mukbang” or eating shows. For consumer goods, you can produce videos around tutorials, product reviews and comparison, etc. For services, you can produce demo videos and client testimonials.
You can also choose where you will publish your video. Most brands upload full-length versions of their video on YouTube and Vimeo, but create shorter versions and upload them on Facebook, Instagram, and increasingly now, on Tiktok.
For brands who have difficulty generating ideas for video content, they can do a swift content audit and identify the existing content that, with a little work, can be repackaged as a video content. For example, a how-to article can be a to a tutorial video. Or with the help of some creative editing, a listicle can be an attractive slideshow. You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch for the first video content you will put out.
The key is to get quick wins from the least amount of effort. You can use this time to test your strategy and learn more about the experience of managing a video content creation project— from brainstorming, storyboarding, production, to post-prod editing and launch.
Long-form Evergreen Gated Content
The Digital Marketing Institute defines EVERGREEN content as “search-optimised content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time. ”You may publish content that stays on the web virtually forever, but its relevance and applicability may only be at the time it was published. An evergreen content is the exact opposite of that.
It is GATED because visitors cannot access it unless they leave their names, email address, or phone number. You want to make the gated content worthy enough for people to want to give up their personal information. Typically, a gated content caters to people who are deeper down into your sales funnel, with a strong intent to know more about the content/service your brand offers.
It is LONG-FORM because you want to convey to the reader that your content is comprehensive and can provide the depth of information the reader needs. The visitor is no longer in the discovery or awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, he needs content that will help him make informed decisions about a PROBLEM he’s itching to solve or an OPPORTUNITY he wants to take advantage of. Your long-form content gives you the flexibility to posture your brand as the right solution for his wants and needs.
Some examples of long-form evergreen gated content are:
● E-books
● Whitepapers
● Case studies
● Pitch decks
● Templates and toolkits
● How-tos
● Tutorial videos, etc.
Most of the time, brands use long-form evergreen gated content alongside their lead generation campaigns. If the business wants leads for their mailing list, attendees to an upcoming event, or potential customers to be contacted in the future, they can dangle a long-form evergreen gated content as the “carrot”, for which the visitors will happily provide their information.
The takeaway for businesses here is that we should see the crisis as ringing the “alarm bells” to evaluate our current digital marketing strategy and formulate ones that can help the business skate through even the most precarious times. These new content types, if done properly, can be part of a brand’s content arsenal, and can be used even post pandemic.
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