If you’re just joining us, we’re exploring the world of content marketing templates! But why? Well, because templates can play a major role in improving the speed, quality and efficiency of your content marketing process. Who doesn’t want that?
Part 1 delved into content strategy templates and provided some guidance and template examples that could be used to templatize your strategic process. In part 2, we covered ways in which you can templatize portions of your ideation, planning and production workflow processes.
Part 3: Templates for Different Content Types/Formats
As the practice of content marketing has evolved over the years, experimentation and analysis of content performance data has helped us identify specific tactics and attributes that can significantly boost the quality, relevance and engagement of specific types of content assets. For example:
- Buzzfeed has taught us a lot about creating juicy headlines
- Joe Pulizzi has pushed us to narrow our target to a single audience
- Neil Patel has shared the science behind good call-to-action buttons
Turns out, there is some science to this art and the content practitioner community has been gracious in sharing what they’ve learned, as well as helpful templates, for a wide variety of content formats. Below is a curated, alphabetical list of some of the best content format guides and templates that we’ve found (or built ourselves).
Blog Content Templates
In our experience, the best blog posts are those that use a compelling, memorable story to achieve some sort of desired outcome. The outcome could be purely awareness-based, entertainment or a knowledge exchange, or it could be some action that the writer wants the reader to take. These stories can be challenging to create consistently in a corporate environment, especially if the environment mandates that the content overtly sells something. To aid in the generation of effective blog content, we developed a template that you can tailor to your needs.
EBook Templates – Great Guide from Hubspot
If you’re thinking about adding some beef to your content mix, ebooks are a great method for fully exploring a big topic and generating a variety of top-of-the-funnel marketing wins (leads, links, social love, etc.). To get acquainted with the ebook development process, look no further than to Hubspot, who has certainly preached and practiced the gospel of ebook development for years. The link above includes a very thorough guide for the ebook development process as well as a downloadable package of 18+ ebook design templates for PowerPoint & InDesign.
Email Content Templates
Email is certainly a unique animal since the three main components (subject line, email body content & email layout/design) will all be unique to each email’s audience and objective. And of course, there are best practices and templates for just about every situation you can think of. But here is a short list of some of the most common email scenarios with guides and templates for each.
- Mailchimp’s Best Practices for Email Subject Lines
- emailmonday’s Marketing Email Content Checklist
- Postmark’s Transactional Email Best Practices & Checklist
- Examples of Really Good Emails from ReallyGoodEmails.com
Landing Page Templates
As web technologies have evolved, building and deploying landing pages has become super simple. Chances are you already use some sort of platform for this, and said platform comes equipped with various templates or layouts that can be deployed in minutes. All you need is the content. Check out this guide and checklist from Unbounce, who I would consider to be one of the top landing page platforms on the market.
Presentation/Slideshare Templates
There is certainly no shortage of presentation design templates out there for just about whichever platform you choose. But presentation experts will steer you away from most of them. They will also tell you that creating your slides is actually the last part of the process. Here’s a great guide from TED’s lead UX designer that should be your template for creating any new presentation.
Press Release Templates
Despite the numerous articles out there saying that the press release is dead, it is not. People are consuming more content than ever and much of that content still comes via a wire service and it’s called NEWS. Those of us who graduated college with a journalism degree can probably bang out a well-formated release in our sleep. For those who don’t have that background, understand that there are some rules to developing press releases (via KissMetrics).
For actual press release content templates, check out this resource.
Social Content Templates
Social content obviously comes in many forms, shapes and sizes, so it’s helpful to find and prepare specific templates for the types of social content that your team needs to publish regularly. Doing this can significantly speed up your overall workflow process and even increase the volume of content that can be published every day. Buffer curated a nice batch of social media templates that can be used both for planning, producing (text and graphics) and even tracking/reporting your social media content.
Visual Content Templates
Certainly much of your visual content might fall within the social spectrum, but other such visual content assets like interactive banners/graphics, GIF animations and infographics have become commonplace in our digital marketing world. A while back, our UX designer, Wes Mikel, wrote a great post with guidance and resources for creating animated GIFs (hard g).
For infographics, platforms like Piktochart, Canva and Visme offer amazing design templates at a low cost. This guide by Creative Bloq, “10 Steps to Creating the Perfect Infographic“, is solid.
Web Content Templates
Last but certainly not least… We should all be trying to get better at producing website content. We all have websites to support. Our virtual front doors need to be awesome and the immediate first impression (the design) won’t get us very far if the visitors can’t find what they are looking for, and our content stinks. Couple that with Google analyzing every detail of our website’s experience, and BAM, website content is a full time job for lots of marketers.
Here’s an article that I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute a while back: A Template for Killer Website Content.
Series Recap
Well there you have it folks, a huge batch of content marketing templates, guides and best practices to help you templatize pretty much every facet of content marketing. Before you jump into any sort of templatization effort, remember this… Doing content marketing well can be pretty time consuming, and straying from “your template” will happen often, but you shouldn’t stray from being consistent (consistent quality, consistent publishing frequency, etc.). Hopefully we’ve introduced a few content marketing templates that you can tailor to your world, and will help you move the needle faster.
P.S. We’ve packaged several of our favorite and most popular templates into one simple download. Get it now!
