Creativity with content marketing is the trend, especially with a focus on visual marketing. Consumers are 44% more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media and viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.
Creative sourcing of content is important too, especially when it doubles as a way to improve efficiency and boost relationships with members of your community and industry thought leaders.
A classic form of this type of efficient content sourcing is the Oreo Cookie blog post: Find a compelling, informative article written by someone you’d like to better connect with and pull an excerpt of it into a blog post (the stuff in the middle). Then write an intro paragraph to identify a problem that empathizes with the reader and a conclusion offering insights into the way forward (the top and bottom of the cookie). Cite and link the source of course.
While everything from Google Alerts to Social Media Monitoring software can surface content opportunities, the rise of embeddable media makes it even easier to curate and source other content for excellent Oreo Cookie posts. Embeddable media can include visual rich content and more than just a snippet of text, giving your readers a much richer experience.
Here are 10 sources you can draw from for curate content that supports embeddable media:
1. YouTube – Embed Videos and Playlists
2. Slideshare – What is Embedding and How Do I Embed Content?
3. Twitter – Embedded Tweets
4. Google+ – Google+ Embedded Posts
5. Vine – Embedded Vine Posts
6. Instagram – How to Embed Instagram Photos or Videos on a Web Page
7. Pinterest -Widget Builder
8. Facebook – Embedded Facebook Posts
9. Branch – Embed the Discussion
10. List.ly lists – Embedding Lists on Your Blog
Using embeddable media in your blog posts does mean reliance on another website, so it could slow your pages load time down a little. But the net benefit of being able to source other, high quality content sources relevant to your readers and that also give a nod to industry influentials you’d like to connect with is worth it.
When we published our last Conference Speaker eBook for Content Marketing World “36 Content Marketers who Rock”, over half of the initial 40,000 views on Slideshare came as a result of embedded versions of the ebook. This wasn’t by chance. As part of our outreach to help promote the eBook, we sent embed code along with pre-written tweets and social share messages to make it easy for other bloggers to promote.
That’s a lot of what optimized online marketing is: making it easier for people (and search engines) to do what you want them to do.
One important tip: If you do embed 3rd party media into your blog post, be sure to also include a static image. Many social networks won’t pull an image from something embedded and social shares with a thumbnail image stand out a lot more than just text.
How are you using embeddable media to get creative with your content marketing? What embeddable media content sources would you add to this list?
Feel free to check out the List.ly we’ve created to crowdsource a broader collection of embeddable content sources.
Image: Shutterstock
