B2B organizations create, run across and discover some of the most highly tailored, specific and exclusive types of content on the planet.
This content might take the form of statistics on product use from target audiences, success strategies from customers, or even new alternatives relating to how certain products can be used.
While some of this B2B information gets classified as “proprietary,” and isn’t immediately published, in other cases this base of knowledge can spur a collective “aha” moment for the organization, and it should be shared. What’s the biggest reason to share this valuable information? In our view, sharing these uncommon findings is a key way organizations can establish thought leadership and engineer demand for their products and services. And the content mediums you choose to share this information can be equipped with calls-to-action allowing prospects to identify themselves.
That said, you want your content to get noticed. Blog posts and articles remain the classic avenues for many organizations. And while these two presentations continue to hold merit, why not also consider other formats to enhance the appeal and digestibility of your new information.
Here, we provide a rundown of seven major types of website content improvements to implement now, including some you may not have considered, and the benefits they offer to help you engineer demand.
Blog posts
This website staple is a well-accepted and search-engine-optimizable medium for distributing narratives, personal perspectives, and information, usually presented in a story format. Ideally written to be quick and easy reads for your audiences, these types of blogs are sometimes written in first-person and often are enhanced with photos or other artwork. These brief narratives tend to gain wider appeal when not too lengthy or complex. As such, blogs are a great opportunity for sales managers, technical experts and communications officers to share experiences, perspectives or insights from day to day. While many blog posts are copy-heavy, the best types of blog posts include one or more images to tell the most engaging stories.
Articles
The next level up in complexity from blog posts, web articles tend to provide more time-sensitive, technical or newsworthy information for specific audiences. Often written with the assistance of one or more contributing sources, articles can help organizations build authority and thought-leadership. As such they may also contain embedded links to other web resources, both internal and external, to back up claims, attribute findings or allow readers to gain background knowledge of a term or event. Web articles also typically feature photography or artwork, to attract interest, add SEO functionality, and convey the information visually.
Infographics
One of the most popular types of website content these days, infographics provide a fast, customizable and fun way to tell a story visually, share statistics or show your products and services and how they work. They also can be used to illustrate a trend or concept that is difficult to photograph or put into words. As an added bonus, infographics are perfect for sharing on social media. Creating them does not need to be difficult or expensive, as there are numerous tools available these days to help you create infographics from statistics or sequential, cause-and-effect-type information, like Infogr.am and Canva. However, to make the most impact, you may want to consider enlisting help from a graphic designer to bring it to life.
Online Polls or Surveys
Similar to infographics, organizations can post brief, interactive, online surveys as an offbeat way to engage audiences, collect valuable tidbits of information and feedback, and trigger enlightening conversations in the industry. These sorts of surveys are intended to be both informative and fun, while also increasing the website user experience while allowing you to discover prospects’ expectations and concerns going forward. There is a range of services you can tap to easily build one of these surveys, such as Qualtrics. Incorporating the resulting survey tool into your website can be as simple as altering a few lines of code.
Short Animations or GIFs
Adding video to your website content strategy need not be limited to embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos. You can also build in shorter animations triggered in a number of ways, to show products or services as selected or in use. Hover animations begin playing when the viewer’s mouse moves over certain components on the site and can be used to show product options and operations. Background video offers movement and interest. And GIF-style animations are more straight forward presentations that allow you to convey sequential experiences far more efficiently than the written word.
Slide Shows
If you’d like to present a series of images showing a range of options as to how your products can be used, consider posting a slideshow to your website. As with the other types of content above, there are a myriad of tools available to help you create and customize your own slideshow for posting on your site. Like videos, slideshows can be uploaded to an external platform and then embedded in your site, or they can be built using a variety of applications and uploaded to your site. The keys here are optimizing file sizes so the show loads quickly, and selecting images that put your products and services in their best light.
E-Books
An e-book is similar to a slideshow in that it allows viewers to control the pace of information they digest, however it offers both copy and imagery to convey a story or educate prospects. Creating an e-book can be as simple as writing long-form content, then breaking it down into short sections that are designed into “pages” and optimized for viewing on both computer and mobile screens. While you may opt for outside help to write and/or design this type of asset, the end result should be a relatively simple, visually appealing, and responsive implementation that’s easy to host on your website. It can also be implemented as gated web content, requiring viewers to share a bit of information with you before they can access or download the asset.
Interested in examples of these assets in practice? Contact Point to Point for ideas on using these forms of website content to engineer demand for your organization.