Content marketing is a seriously competitive channel when it comes to promoting your website in order to gain more traffic and links to your site.
Writing the most interesting blog posts in the world may still not get the traction you hoped for if you are not making your blog posts and articles look and feel engaging.
So when you’re creating articles, here’s how you can improve your post using the following different content formats with the following content marketing plugins available through WordPress:
Provide Insight and Data Visually
Infographics are widely used across the web and some say they have been used to overkill, but Infographics often still engage readers more that many plain text articles if used in the right way to provide interesting insights and data.
For WordPress websites, one of the best plugins to look at is Infogram as it provides an excellent platform to create visual diagrams, charts and infographics from right within your article.
You can create a free account, however, the free version has limitations such as limiting the number of own icons you can upload, and the type of icons you can use in the Infogram library. Also, it’s not possible to download the graphics you create without a paid subscription and Infogram do add a watermark to the graphics you create.
For $25 USD a month though, all the limitations mentioned are lifted, so paying for the Pro version at this price means it’s up to you to make sure you keep getting your money’s worth and creating visually engaging content through diagrams, images and infographics.
Check out how it works below…
Ideas for using Infogram in your articles:
- To create visuals out of secondary research you have collected
- Creating visuals from primary research you have conducted such as a survey
- Creating visuals from existing content that has performed well on your site to date, therefore creating an updated version of your article or a “Part 2” article perhaps
Make Your Images Stand Out
Including feature cards for your images using Content Cards to help your images stand out along with something you are promoting.
Ideas for using Content Cards in your articles:
- If you are promoting a number of website elements or products this could be a useful plugin for you
- Could be used for listicle based posts
- If you are launching a new brand or sub-brand that is part of another part of the same website or another website, a content card could help visually feature the brand
Create a Narrative with a Visual Timeline
One way of telling a story or providing insight over time is to use a visual timeline in your content. Cool Timeline can help you to create this on your blog quickly and easily.
Ideas for using a Timeline in your articles:
- To provide users understanding of your brand’s journey over time
- Provide insights into how a certain industry has developed over time
- Use it to help recap on related stories when you are producing “newsjacking” type content
Creating eBooks from Your Existing Content
Creating eBooks is not a much hassle as you think when you use a plugin like Beacon, as you can use your existing posts and collate them into an eBook.
Providing a downloadable pdf of your blog content can help provide readers with a medium that can be saved to a learning repository and also shared with others through more “dark social” channels, such as Slack.
You can also create a resource that can be used as part of your CRM strategy by creating a lead capture pop up form to collect email information in return for a Downloadable resource you have created, with the help of your existing blog content of course.
Ideas for using Beacon to create eBooks:
- Reviewing existing best performing content on your site and turning it into an eBook format
- Creating eBooks for any blog series you may have produced on your website
Base Your Content Theme Around an Interactive Map
If you can position your content around localised or geo-focused themes, then using customized embedded maps in your posts can provide an interactive content medium that your readers may find very useful.
Intergeo Maps is one of the best custom map plugins you can use which allows you to use features as customized marker images and pop up captions of the destinations you want to feature.
Another alternative custom maps plugin to check out is MapsMarker Pro, which also has a number of customizable features.
Ideas for using customizable maps in your content:
- Reviewing certain products or services at specific locations within a specific locality, district or small country
- Featuring the best things of a certain subject within a certain geographical range e.g. Best places to get married for under x amount in area name
- Helping to promote specific features in multiple stores or branches for your brand
Including Polls, Surveys and Forms
Using more interactive mediums such as Polls, Surveys and Forms can really help gain more engagement from your readers.
These formats can be used to help collect data that you can then turn into another piece of content to provide the insights into the data that was collected, often through visual content.
Opinion Stage is one of the main tools available for creating content of this nature and can help you create some excellent looking polls and forms that your users can interact with and provide feedback from.
Of course, you may need to think about data capture regulations and privacy laws if you are going to use this content medium as a content marketing strategy, but if done correctly it could be a very effective tactic to use on your website.
Ideas for using Surveys and Polls in your content:
- Gathering data on specific issues related to your industry and then publishing the results in the form of an eBook or a set of graphs or other visualizations
- Using snap polls to get people’s opinions on specific key issues in an industry at any given time
- Gathering primary research that can help you partner with other industry related websites who are researching the same subject
Choose specific plugins to suit your content strategy
Before deciding what plugins you may want to use in your WordPress platform, we’d advise mapping out what you want your content strategy to include and creating a visual overview by content themes and the content formats / mediums that you want to use. This way you will have a plan and some goals of what types of content you want to create.
After the content idea generation and planning process we go through with our clients, we create a Trello board like the one shown below:
This helps us to see what content types could be used with which content ideas and themes.
So once you’ve done this you may be ready to try a few of the suggested plugins.
Give them a try and see if you can enhance your content marketing strategy!
