As this matrix illustrates, content should address needs and interests of your audience on both a rational and emotional level and help you engage with your audience from the very first point of contact with your brand through to their purchasing decision.
Content marketing doesn’t stop there, though – it also aims to maintain this relationship with your customers by turning them into brand advocates and delighting them after their purchase.
Each of these four purposes can be met through different types of content.
Entertain
Content marketing can enable you to engage with your audience through entertaining them. This purpose relies heavily on triggering an emotional response and is especially suited to get in touch with people that either haven’t heard of your brand yet or haven’t identified your product or service as a solution to a problem they might have.
Emotional content is likely to create a deeper relationship with your audience and contributes highly to brand loyalty.
Great formats for entertaining your audience are branded videos, quizzes, games, competitions, and viral campaigns (the latter of which is, of course, hard to achieve but very effective if successful).
Inspire
Inspiring content reaches your audience on a similarly emotional level but is usually addressing people further down in the purchase funnel.
Be it widgets, community forums provided by your brand, celebrity endorsem*nts or reviews and ratings – these types of content are aiming at pushing your audience towards the purchasing decision while inspiring them on an emotional level.
Educate
Depending on the type of product you offer and your buyer persona’s needs and interests, educational content can be crucial for a successful content marketing strategy. It is less emotional than entertaining content and aims at helping your audience solve challenges they might be struggling with.
Types of content that fall into this category are infographics, eBooks, PR, whitepapers, guides and trend reports. As they are typically positioned at the beginning of your funnel, they should enable your audience to successfully identify their problems and suggest solutions that help solve them, one of which would be the product or service you offer.
Convince
Convincing content aims at giving your buyer personas the last push they need to become customers. Demo videos, events and webinars are content types that are still in the middle of your prospect’s buyers journey, while case studies and price guides are typically decision-level content offers.
As opposed to inspiring content, this category convinces through facts and figures and addresses rational interests of your buyer personas.
Support all four purposes for successful content marketing
Many of these types of content can be situated in between purposes (such as eNews, for example) depending on the actual content you fill them with.
Nevertheless, this matrix offers the opportunity to make sure to have covered all four main purposes of content before launching a new campaign.
2023 update
We no longer work directly within marketing, but you can still find out about our data, analytics and SEO services.
