Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
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As a digital marketer, you should know about several kinds of content. These include pillar content, evergreen content, visual content, and viral content. When developing your content plan and overall digital marketing strategy, you should keep these in mind.

Pillar content

Do you know what pillar content is? You’re probably using it even if you don’t know the term. Pillar content is quality foundational content that you create to represent your brand. This content can be ebooks, tutorials, or other substantial content pieces that provide value.

From this content, you create a variety of other pieces of content that function as a pillar “supporting” a topic. This means that you can take the tutorial you created and turn it into a

  • Video
  • Podcast
  • Mind map
  • Google Hangout
  • Guest post
  • Webinar
You really have no limit to the amount of pillar content you can create.

Evergreen content

Evergreen is an important concept that you should consider when developing your content marketing strategy. Evergreen content is content that can be enjoyed without regard to when it was created. For example, a blog post about “how to be a productive entrepreneur” can be read any time of the year in any recent year. It’s timeless and can keep readers interested whenever they come upon it.

Some examples of evergreen content include:

  • Tutorials
  • Support content and FAQs
  • Ebooks
  • Online tools lists
  • Favorite resources
  • Company stories
So what should you keep in mind when creating this type of content? You should
  • Make it easy to consume: Visitors appreciate content that doesn’t take a long time to read and isn’t overly complex. Read this article for tips on creating evergreen infographics.
  • Create only high-quality assets: If the content is going to be around for a while and represent your brand, you want to ensure that it can delight and engage customers.
  • Include visuals: Visuals are key to creating great content. Make sure that all evergreen content has graphics, photos, and so on.
  • Create a series: It’s helpful to create evergreen content that is in series form. Readers look for the other articles in a series after they find one of them.
An interesting article by Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers called “Why You Need to Start Creating Long, Evergreen Content Today” was published in the Search Engine Journal.

In the article, she discusses why small business owners specifically benefit from long evergreen content. She lists several reasons that could also apply to any size business:

  • Google rewards more in-depth content, and places you higher in search results.
  • Your visitors appreciate content that is not overly complex but is instructive and useful.
  • You can get leads over a sustained period of time with less effort.
  • Evergreen content keeps you relevant and provides quality content whenever visitors find it.

Graphics and other visuals

Throughout this book, you see how visuals enhance your content marketing efforts. To emphasize that point, here are just a few stats that show how using visuals powers up your content:
  • When you include an image with a tweet, you get 18 percent more clicks than those without images, and you get 150 percent more retweets (Buffer).
  • ighty-six percent of buyers want interactive/visual content on demand (Demand Gen Report).
Your customers respond to visuals, and taking advantage of this responsiveness is imperative for digital marketing. A wide variety of choices are available to you, such as infographics, memes, comics, doodles, sketches, photos, wireframes, custom graphics, and more.

Viral content

What about viral content? Everybody wants to create it, but do you really know how? Some research done by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman suggests some of the components that make up viral content.

Berger and Milkman published an article in the Journal of Marketing Research called, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” They analyzed New York Times articles and determined that emotion played a large part in creating sharing behavior.

Specifically, they found that:

  • Positive content is more likely to go viral than negative content.
  • High psychological arousal fuels viral content. Content that evoked such strong emotions as awe, anger, anxiety, and sadness was more likely to go viral than weaker emotions.
This research can help you when you’re creating content with an eye toward going viral, but it can’t ensure your success. One sure-fire way to get some power from viral content is not to write it, but to curate it.

Make sure you are providing some content from each category. A well-rounded digital marketing strategy https://www.dummies.com/business/marketing/the-5-components-of-a-digital-marketing-strategy/has the most likelihood of success.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Stephanie Diamond founded Digital Media Works, Inc., an online marketing company. She has more than 20 years of experience building profits for both small businesses and multibillion-dollar corporations in over 75 different industries.

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