
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), a strong content marketing strategy is no longer a nice to have – it’s the key to being visible online. A well-crafted content strategy is essential for building brand awareness and reaching your target audience through search engines and social media.
By producing original, engaging content, SMEs can position themselves as trusted authorities in their field. A diverse content mix helps businesses meet their audience’s needs at every stage of the customer journey, driving organic traffic, boosting brand recognition, and converting leads into loyal customers.
What is the content marketing mix?
When we talk about the content marketing mix, we are referring to the blend of various content types – such as blog posts, videos, graphics, social media updates, landing pages, case studies, and more – that are created as part of your digital marketing strategy.
This content is designed to reach a specific audience, growing awareness of your brand and website, and converting people into customers. By using lots of different content types in your strategy, you cater to audience preferences, enhance SEO, and reach prospects at various stages of the buyer’s journey – from awareness to decision-making.
Why is balance necessary in content marketing?
As the saying goes, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. One type of content might work particularly well at bringing in new users to your website. But if you concentrate on this alone, you’ll miss out on the other users you could reach using different tactics. The content marketing mix helps you widen your net to reach more of your target audience.
The other reason to maintain a balance in your content marketing activity is that people will switch off without variation. Say you create an explainer graphic that performs well on social, and you want to build on this success. If you only keep producing very similar content, the engagement will peak, flatline, and eventually fall. The reach will be limited as people will become used to – or go ‘screen blind’ to – your activity.
How do you know what the right content marketing mix is?
It’s crucial to develop an understanding of your audience and business goals when crafting your content strategy. By understanding who you are trying to reach, and what types of content they typically respond to, you can plan effectively for what content you need to create.
Think about your business objectives and how these can be supported by your content efforts. Consider what might engage people at different times. It’s no good creating loads of content for brand awareness (social posts, blogs) if you don’t have content that sells the benefits of your products and services (landing pages, case studies) to convert.
Understanding your audience to inform your content strategy
Before planning your content, you need to be clear on your overall digital strategy. Content is just one element of your wider marketing, and all your activity should tie back to your business positioning, the audience you are trying to reach, and your core messages to them.
Use buyer personas to identify who are speaking to, what drives them, their concerns, and what they base their decisions on. By categorising your audience, you can begin thinking about the potential types of content that might appeal to them at different stages.
1. Awareness stage
A prospect becomes aware they have a problem or need, and they begin looking for informative content to explain the problem or explore their need.
Example content: blog posts, graphics, and tips videos.
2. Consideration stage
The prospect is researching possible solutions. They may want to explore comparisons, expert insights, and information that guides them toward understanding their options.
Example content: case studies, comparison guides, in-depth articles, and results videos.
3. Decision stage
The prospect knows what they need and is deciding on a specific product. They are looking for information to confirm they have found the best solution and reduce any concerns.
Example content: demos, product sheets, FAQs, and reviews.
The main content types to include in your strategy
Your content schedule should include a mix of content to appeal to the different stages of the buyer journey. This makes sure you are reaching the widest range of prospects, and you’re meeting them where they’re at in terms of readiness to enquire.
Here are some of the main types to consider as part of your content strategy:
Blog posts: help you build authority on a topic and improve SEO by answering questions and targeting the key terms and long tail phrases your audience is searching for.
Landing pages: are designed around a specific call to action and help convert people by sharing compelling information that helps them make the decision.
Videos: capture and hold attention in the feed, and improve SEO by providing useful information in an easy to consume format.
Social media posts: build awareness and grow your network, helping you reach and interact with your audience on the platforms they use.
Graphics: simplify complex information into easily digestible visuals.
Case studies and testimonials: build trust and showcase proven success to your potential customers.
How to create a varied and diverse content mix
Your content strategy can’t be entirely product-led, as people will feel ‘sold’ to and switch off. When content planning, you need to put your audience first, and design content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them. A varied mix of topics helps to hold attention and increases the likelihood of your content resonating with a wider range of people.
Some ideas for content:
- How to guides and explainers – to demonstrate your capacity for solving problems.
- Expertise and knowledge sharing – to position your business as a voice of authority.
- FAQs – to answer the common questions and concerns of your audience.
- Top level product benefits – showcasing improvements to people’s day-to-day lives.
- Compelling success stories – to provide third party validation and context.
- Employee-generated content – sharing your culture and demonstrating the specialism of your team.
- User-generated content – to display the real-life experiences of your customers.
- Behind the scenes content – to show the people and processes behind the brand.
- Opinion content – to join in with the wider industry conversions of your audience.
- Company focused content – sharing the history, value and culture of your brand.
- Interviews and Q&As – diving deeper into the stories if your team and customers.
- Business milestones – to demonstrate your legacy and experience.
- Data driven insights – to highlight trends relevant to your audience.
- Polls and surveys – to gather views and reactions from within your industry.
Balance short-form and long-form content to serve different purposes
Depending on what stage someone is in the buyer journey, they will have different levels of interest and varying amounts of time to dedicate to consuming your content. This may go from a few seconds scanning a social post, to spending several minutes reading a long article. You need to create content to serve all stages.
Short-form content is quick and bite-sized, such as social posts, graphics, and short videos that capture attention in the feed. This content grows awareness of your brand and provides a regular engagement touchpoint that keeps you front of mind.
Long-form content addresses deeper customer concerns and builds trust with your audience, positioning you as a voice of authority within your industry. This could include long-form blogs, webinars, podcasts, and downloadable guides.
In most cases, both types of content are necessary as part of an effective content strategy. Short-form content does the work to make people aware of your brand and regularly touch in. Long-form content is there to nurture that relationship and provide credibility once someone moves from the awareness stage into consideration and decision.
Make SEO an integral part of your content strategy
Your content strategy will not succeed without search engine optimisation (SEO). To make sure your website content is found and engaged with, it must be visible to search engines, and you must be actively trying to be found ahead of competitor websites.
The SEO practices that underpin your content strategy:
- Keyword research and optimisation: identifying the short-tail and long-tail keywords that tie naturally into your content to match user search intent.
- High-quality, relevant content: making sure your content is informative, valuable and relevant to your audience’s needs.
- Internal linking: structuring content around topics with supporting subtopics and interlinking them to make it easy for users to navigate around your website.
- On-page SEO: optimising meta tags, headers, image alt texts, and URLs to improve search engine understanding and ranking potential.
- Backlinks: building credible backlinks from other authoritative websites to boost domain authority and search engine rankings.
- Mobile and speed optimisation: making sure your content is mobile-friendly and loads quickly to improve user experience and SEO performance.
Your SEO strategy serves to feed your content strategy with regular keyterms to cover, but it also determines the performance of content. Without a healthy, SEO-friendly website, your content will struggle to reach people, meaning it can’t have the impact you need it to.
Don’t neglect content distribution and repurposing
Crafting an effective content strategy means adapting your content to different purposes and platforms. A good content marketing mix isn’t based around churning out more and more, but instead, making your strongest content travel and work for different circumstances.
For instance, your very best case study should appear within your schedule in numerous different formats – short videos, case studies, blogs, emails, testimonial graphics. This increases your chances of it being seen and making an impression.
Repurposing your content is all part of a healthy content strategy. It allows you to maximise the return on your efforts by sharing content in new and interesting ways, across various channels, and expanding the distribution as far as possible.
Measuring the success of your content mix
Tracking how your content performs is an important part of the planning process and should be a regular exercise. Without looking at metrics like engagement rates, views, and conversions, you can’t see the real impact on your business.
Analytics help you understand what content your audience is engaging with, so you can refine and improve your strategy. By reviewing performance data, you can spot trends, discover new opportunities, and make adjustments for better results. These insights guide your future content creation, helping you stay relevant and impactful.
Craft a balanced content mix for lasting results
A successful content marketing mix is all about balance, variety, and alignment with your business and its audience. By understanding the different stages of your buyer’s journey, you can create the right types of content to deliver a seamless experience.
With a varied mix, your content strategy simultaneously engages people, nurtures the relationship, and drives those all-important conversions.
An effective content strategy for SMEs requires regular reviewing and adjusting. Closely monitoring your search performance and repurposing high-performing content helps you stay one step ahead of other businesses in this increasingly competitive digital landscape.
Do you need advice on your business’s content strategy?
We’re a digital marketing agency that generates original content for our clients, suited to their target customers. Our specialism is B2B content strategies, however, we work with all kinds of businesses to help them create better content for their website and social channels.
The place to start is with a digital marketing audit. We take a look at your business’s digital activity to take stock of what’s working and locate easy changes you can make right away – things you can do yourself.