Mixing up the types of content you use can be an effective way to re-energize your content marketing campaign. Incorporating more infographics, videos, and humor into your content plan can increase engagement levels and raise your social signals.

Blending in vs. standing out

Even if you’ve just landed a great contributing author on your blog or co-wrote an article with one of the top thought leaders in your industry, it’s entirely too easy to blend in with your competitors when it comes to social media channels.

Even the best blogs and articles can quickly get buried in your followers’ already busy newsfeeds. Standing out from the crowd is critical when it comes to content marketing. You have to attract and engage followers and prospective customers with your original content.

A recent Forbes article stresses originality and differentiation in regard to content marketing. According to the article, you can achieve them by targeting a sub-market or posting on different platforms:

“Find a way to differentiate yourself from the competition, on a general level. If you try to do what they’re doing, you’re going to come up short—they’ve been doing it far longer, and you aren’t going to stand out if you merely try and replicate it. Instead, look for key ways to differentiate yourself. Can you target a different segment of your shared demographics? Can you utilize a different approach, or leverage the power of different content mediums?”

Switching up the variety of content you post is another way to stand out from the crowd. You can maximize attention of your followers just by posting a mix of visual, written, and interactive content.

The effect of different types of content

What is it about memes, image macros, infographics, and GIFs, anyway? Why have these emerged as the most popular content formats on the Internet?
Well for one, they convey a message using little to no words. They require little more than a quick glance to be fully understood. That’s what people want on social media: ideas condensed into bite-sized content formats.

Businesses have all the incentives in the world to embrace these types of content. Infographics, for example, are optimal for sharing content and getting highly coveted social media shares.

Infographics are “sticky” in the sense that they cater to the methods humans learn best – through text and imagery. A lively and easy to digest infographic does well on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t ignore others such as Instagram and Pinterest if your audience also spends time on those channels.

Memes and GIFs can help you boost “likes” and help your overall brand identity,
Of course, incorporating these types of content into your strategy isn’t as easy as finding a meme generator and recycling every hackneyed idea of the past few years. In fact, you can even alienate some of your followers by misusing a meme and forever making it lame.

How hard the transition will depend on your background and your ability to create original content. Many businesses have embarrassed themselves because they started posting trendy memes and GIFs with no self-awareness. We’ve all seen it happen before – it’s ok to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Bottom line is that no matter your line of business, consumers and audiences crave creative. And how lucky are you to get to deliver?