At Filament, we like to celebrate a great year by looking back at what we’ve learned. To that end, we’ve put together a digest of our top blog posts from 2016 that encapsulate key takeaways and content marketing best practices from the past 12 months.
Visual Content
As one of the top trends for 2017, visual content is a key part of your marketing mix. When creating visual content, the best place to start is by developing a documented visual content marketing strategy.
Audiences are very much into video right now. Your brand should be too since they can help improve brand awareness, lead generation, and online engagement. Learn more about why video is here to stay in our blog post “Video Content Marketing is the Future.” If you’re looking to include video in your visual content strategy, check out our 10 video marketing best practices.
Integrated Content
Marketing integration helps you create smarter content that works harder. In the early part of this year, we offered a thorough series on integrated marketing. We started by sharing the benefits of marketing integration, which include building trust, efficiency, and morale. You can get a quick rundown of the steps it takes to build an integrated campaign in our blog post “Content DIY: Build an Integrated Digital Campaign in 8 Steps.” Or you can get an in-depth look into the steps with the following blog posts:
- Know your audience.
- Identify prime channels.
- Identify key content types.
- Devise an integrated strategy.
- Establish a unified identity.
- Create content that can be repurposed.
- Align your marketing teams.
- Track and optimize.
Technology
New technology continues to change content marketing best practices. This year we explored voice recognition and artificial intelligence technologies in the content marketing context. We also examined the benefits of content marketing automation and 4 key strategies for best making this technology work for our business.
Storytelling
Storytelling is another top trend for 2017. Check out our tips and techniques for visual storytelling for help in creating a compelling visual story with your content. The tips are accompanied with great examples of visual storytelling. You might also check out our more recent post on best practices for content marketing storytelling, which offer ways to integrate storytelling into what you’re already doing. It details the benefits of storytelling, too.
Last but not least, writing is a major part of storytelling. Where writing is concerned, it’s always helpful to have great models. We offered writing best practices just a couple of month ago in the form of 10 writing tips along with examples of the best content marketing writing to be found on the web today.
We hope you’ll be able to use these content marketing best practices to shore up your strategies as you move into 2017. Please share key learnings from your year in the comments section below.
Wishing you a happy and productive holiday season!
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you reach more customers with your content marketing.
