This guide will help commercial organisations understand the different content types and identify which ones will help achieve strategic goals.
Content isn’t just written copy but can include a mix of styles, mediums, and assets. From visual to audio, creative to informative, content provides the foundation for your commercial website to engage with your target market, influencers, and your customers. As a result, you need to the right content to sit on your company’s website, third-party websites where your target audience is active, and social media platforms.
For the purposes of this blog, we are going to consider four types of content: optimised ranking content; optimised on-site content; link acquisition content, and brand awareness content.
Content marketing and digital PR tactics are used in every content type to achieve different objectives.
We have focused on these four types of content for two primary reasons:
- They are the main types of content that commercial organisations produce.
- They are frequently confused. By categorising them in this way it will help business owners and content creators understand the purpose of their content in line with their aims and KPIs, as well as how to create, launch and measure their success.
This isn’t to say that the content pieces can’t overlap, i.e. a piece of optimised ranking content could acquire quality links, but is unlikely to do this on a significant scale and would not have been the original aim of why the content was created.
Optimised ranking content
Aims
Content that has the primary aim of improving rankings for key phrases through informative, topical, and optimised content.
Benefits
- Improve website rankings for target non-brand keywords
- Generate high quality organic traffic
- Generate warm leads
- Could provide a linkable asset to outreach.
Example
A travel company produces a guide on what to pack for a weekend city break:
Optimised on-site content
Aims
Assertive, sales-driven homepages or landing pages which highlight products and services through persuasive copy.
Benefits
- Improve website rankings for target non-brand keywords
- Generate high-quality organic traffic
- Drive sales and conversions.
Example
A company that sells women’s dresses produces informative landing page copy on maxi dresses.
Link acquisition content
Aims
Content with the aim of generating authoritative and relevant links to the site from tailored content that appeals to target publishers
Benefits
- Improve domain authority
- Create natural and authoritative link profile
- Close competitor link profile gaps
- Drive traffic from authoritative publishers
- Widespread coverage from a diverse range of publishers.
Tactics
Industry newsjacking, thought leadership content, digital PR campaigns, snackable curated content, linkable asset creation, events, interactive landing pages, creative, video.
Example
A home insurance provider creates a data-led piece looking at the safest cities based on crime rates, local hazards and weather conditions:
Brand awareness content
Aims
Generate traffic to the site from content reach and virality and increase overall awareness of the brand online.
Benefits
- Widespread coverage from targeted publishers
- Qualified traffic from PR activity
- High reach across variety of channels
- Natural and authoritative link acquisition
- Increased search visibility
- Engagement with target market.
Tactics
Thought leadership content, digital PR campaigns, industry surveys, snackable curated content, linkable asset creation, events.
Example
An airline produces a campaign around cabin crew revealing the most outrageous requests while in the air:
To see our content in action, check out our latest case study with Citrix ShareFile and find out how we boosted keyword performances by obtaining 114 links and coverage.
If you have questions for us or would like to talk about your content strategy in more detail, please get in touch, we’ll be happy to help.
Insights
