WORKWEEK

Content teams can’t do it all. You can’t fulfill every ask. You can’t focus on every good tactic, or even good strategy. Content marketing requires hedging your bets, and then shifting your strategy based on what’s working and/or your company needs. 

Here are three types of content your brand needs to produce:

• Thought leadership content: This includes product launch content, event content, POV or opinion content from executives or partners, proprietary research content (which can often be used as campaign content, too), etc. The goal of this content is primarily to drive impressions, traffic, and earn press. Rarely is pipeline a concern, though it never hurts. In the case of proprietary research that is also used as campaign content, lead gen is important, too. 
• Campaign content: This is content created to drive pipeline. It started by piquing the interest of your prospects, and driving leads. But it’s important those leads are high-quality, or else your pipeline numbers won’t be pretty. Assets in this type of content are typically gated––ebooks, research, webinars, interactive content like quizzes or calculators, etc. Campaign content also typically includes sales enablement material. 
• Performance content: This is content created to rank on Google or in LLMs. This is typically part of a larger web strategy to support the site’s information architecture. But it’s not enough for this content to drive traffic. It also needs to convert. You’re looking for roughly a 200% increase in conversion to MQLs on performance content versus thought leadership content, for example. 

Depending on the size and maturity of your company, as well as your specific strategy, you’ll focus on some of these more than others. Let’s look at this handy little chart to help think through your mix based on your company needs. You’ll see that each type of content is used no matter what the company needs. It’s just the content mix that changes.