Having a solid content marketing strategy and program is crucial to your marketing success. There is a reason the cliché “Content is King” has lasted for decades. Content drives engagement and sales, but only if you master the three types that drive conversions.

Most companies create a variety of blogs, social media posts, videos, white papers, and other content forms. The people who are doing the marketing at these companies are often times not marketers, but owners or others who can create campaigns. They may understand that they need to use a “variety of content” to lead their prospect through the buying journey, but not many know how to do that.

To begin with, you need to understand that there are different types of content, and some work better than others. They need to be used strategically, and programmatically. The three content types that have been proven to work well are Informational, Promotional, and Transactional. I hope you were not waiting for me to say social media, email, and blog posts. Those are content forms, not types.

Let’s look at each of these types.

Informational

Informational content is designed to educate, inform or engage your potential customers. It works because it helps the prospective client get to know what you do, why that is important to them, how they would determine they need your offerings, and what makes you different.

Promotional

Promotional content is content designed to promote your value, application and benefits of the offerings, and is a crucial element of any marketing strategy. This type aims to raise awareness, generate interest, and drive action within your target audience. It is commonly used, but some find it frustrating because it doesn’t covert well. It doesn’t convert because that’s not its function.

Transactional

Transactional marketing content is designed to be highly persuasive and directly drives a specific action, like a purchase, subscription, or contact. This type is typically only effective at the point of a decision or immediate conversion. It is transactional content that will help convert sales contacts, sales, and generate loyalty. Unfortunately, if this content type is used incorrectly or at the wrong point in the buying journey, it is more likely to cause disengagement and the loss of a sale.

All three types are crucial to the success of your marketing program, and the strategy you are using should be designed to leverage each of them. Often a marketing team leans too heavily on one type of content and ignores the other two. That will cause underperformance. If you are following me on LinkedIn, have seen my Marketing Medic^®  Minute videos, or heard me speak about the marketing process, you know I encourage business leaders to think of marketing as an exercise in engineering engagement and interactions. The strategic use of these content types is how to engineer those experiences.

If you are not satisfied with the performance of your content marketing program, reach out for a complimentary review of your content strategy and suggestions for improving it.