5 Content Marketing Ideas for July 2024

This July offers plenty of content topics thanks to Independence Day and the Summer Olympics in Paris. But even less apparent ideas — must-have items, humor, giveaways, junk food — can make for compelling content.

Content marketing involves creating, publishing, and promoting articles, videos, and podcasts to attract, engage, and retain customers. It is crucial for search engine optimization, social media marketing, and more.

Unfortunately, coming up with new content topics month in and month out can be a task. What follows are five ideas for July 2024.

Summer Product Tutorials

In many ways, July in the Northern Hemisphere is summer itself.

Celebrations such as U.S. Independence Day on July 4, with picnics, parades, fireworks displays, and community events, make us all feel like summer has arrived.

The weather calls us outdoors, making July an excellent time to publish summer product tutorials, showing shoppers how to use your business’s items to work or play in the sun.

The Home Depot sells products to build raised garden beds, as explained in this tutorial.

Consider The Home Depot. The company’s ecommerce site has a do-it-yourself project section, complete with video tutorials explaining a project and the products. Examples include the building of garden beds, playground equipment, and more.

This concept could work for many products.

Must-have Items

Not every product needs a tutorial. Knowing how to use Velcro from The Home Depot in a garden project might be helpful, but instructions are not required for everyday items.

Mr. Porter addresses why its sneakers are a must-have.

Take shoes, for example. Content marketers could try a “must-have” article or video, such as the article from clothier Mr. Porter, “5 Must-Have Sneakers For Stepping Out In Style This Summer.”

A must-have article puts an editorial spin on product recommendations. The Mr. Porter article starts with a brief introduction, making the case for summertime sneakers.

“Summer dressing is all about fun and experimentation. It’s about trying new things and breaking out of the style comfort zone we’ve been stuck in through winter.”

Each of the five recommendations includes vivid descriptions and photography, emphasizing the shoe’s design elements and versatility. That’s critical, given that the prices are upwards of $990 a pair.

Must-have content is useful for organic search rankings, social media posts, and email newsletters.

Here are hypothetical examples:

• “10 Must-have Tools for the Perfect BBQ,”
• “5 Must-have Hats for Summer Sun,”
• “10 Must-have Dresses for Stylish Summer Soirees.”

International Joke Day

July 1, 2024, is International Joke Day. This pseudo-holiday reminds us to celebrate humor and laughter. It encourages folks to share jokes, puns, and funny stories with friends, family, and even strangers.

Tell a few jokes on July 1.

Jokes are prime, entertainment-focused content marketing. Consider assembling jokes endemic to your industry or products. Then publish them in a blog post, newsletters, and social media.

Jokes are an exception to avoiding AI-generated content. Here are five ChatGPT-produced jokes (with minor edits) for this article.

• In our store, we sell emotions — mainly frustration and impatience.
• I tried to buy a camouflage shirt online but couldn’t find it.
• I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I’ll let you know which comes first.
• I bought a belt online. It was a waist of money.
• Why don’t online shoppers get lost? They follow their carts.

National Give Something Away Day

The goal of ecommerce content marketing is to sell products. But too much selling can be counterproductive. An exception could be National Give Something Away Day on July 15, 2024, when marketers can combine charity giving with a sales promotion.

Use National Give Something Away Day for charitable giving.

Here is the idea.

• Identify a charity that makes sense for your business.
• Connect with the charity for a sales-based contribution, such as 5% of revenue on July 15.
• Interview folks at the charity about their work and impact.
• Produce an article, video, or podcast of the interview.
• Run ads and public-relations campaigns to promote the event.

Junk Food Day

Content can promote junk food or discourage it.

National Junk Food Day on July 21, 2024, allows content marketers to praise the fun of junk food or the opposite, healthy eating.

Content about healthy eating and lifestyles could include:

• Power equipment retailer’s newsletter: “Healthy Lunchbox Tips for Construction Pros.”
• Kitchen shop’s blog: “From Junk to Joy: Transform Meals with Healthy Ingredients.”
• Apparel brand’s podcast: “Dress for Success: 10 Nutritious Tips for a Busy Lifestyle.”

Conversely, content marketing could praise the temporary enjoyment of junk food. Here are more examples.

• Power equipment retailer: “Break Time Bliss. 35 Junk Food Picks for Hardworking Builders.”
• Kitchen shop’s blog: “15 Forbidden Meals for National Junk Food Day.”
• Apparel brand’s podcast: “Stylish Snacks for National Junk Food Day.”

Q&A: Joe Pulizzi, Content Entrepreneur

Joe Pulizzi is the author of seven books on content marketing, host of two podcasts, and a popular speaker. He’s the founder of multiple content-marketing businesses, including The Tilt (website, newsletter, publishing services) and the annual Content Entrepreneur Expo.

His latest book, “The Content Entrepreneur,” is a 40-chapter guide from 33 seasoned content marketers. Topics include choosing a content niche, technology and platforms, audience-building, revenue channels, and long-term growth. The book is available in hardcover ($45), paperback ($25), and as an ebook ($10).

I asked Pulizzi about the book, the industry, authorship, and more.

Practical Ecommerce: What’s a content entrepreneur?

Joe Pulizzi: A content entrepreneur is a mini media company. This means first building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. What are the members’ pain points? What keeps them up at night? If you solve their challenges consistently, you’ll be a content entrepreneur in no time. Produce a compelling newsletter, podcast, or YouTube show. Then monetize.

It’s different from launching a product — the content is the product, but you can’t make money until you build the right audience.

An entrepreneur’s life has crazy ups and downs — tremendous successes and incredible failures on the same day.

Joe Pulizzi, publisher of “The Content Entrepreneur”

PEC: Why publish “The Content Entrepreneur“?

Pulizzi: My VIP group from Content Entrepreneur Expo wanted to collaborate on a project. We believed a resource was needed for content entrepreneurs. We met at CEX 2023 and assembled 33 authors to create the book, which we launched before CEX 2024 in early May.

Collaboration among 33 contributors is incredibly difficult. I wouldn’t recommend it. Luckily, we have a group of content pros who know their areas well. Most are authors in their own right. A fantastic editorial and project management team through Tilt Publishing made it happen.

PEC: You’ve now published seven books since 2008 on content marketing.

Pulizzi: The book business has changed. Most authors assume they must publish and sell through external channels. That’s no longer the case.

Affordable technology can create amazing book experiences without a traditional publisher and sell directly from authors’ websites. Why create an audience and send members elsewhere to buy the book? It makes no sense.

I created Tilt Publishing to help authors create excellent books and then sell them directly to subscribers, fans, and followers. It’s essential for long-term success.

Tilt Publishing is a hybrid — not a traditional publisher but not a vanity (custom) press, either. We assist with the backend editing, design, and distribution. Authors no longer need publishers for credibility.

Yet books remain vital. The data doesn’t lie. In 2023, almost 1 billion books were sold worldwide.

A nonfiction book is a content entrepreneur’s mission statement. What do I stand for? What do I believe?

PEC: What’s the future of content marketing?

Pulizzi: Innovative companies will continue focusing on building or buying their own audiences. Ads will never go away. They serve a purpose and still work. But why rent when you can own? To own, you need to tell a compelling story. If you do it well, you can dominate your industry. It’s not a bad place.

AI Search, Cookieless Ads Boost Content Marketing

AI-powered search results and the oft-postponed demise of third-party advertising cookies could lead ecommerce marketers toward alternative forms of content marketing.

Ecommerce shops depend on website visitors for sales — no shoppers, no orders. Two concerning trends have the potential to pinch stores’ site traffic.

Dual Challenges

The first challenge is familiar. Soon, web browsers will eliminate the advertising cookies that track shoppers across websites.

Cookies help advertising networks learn about consumers to show them relevant ads, i.e., ads they are likely to click. More relevant ads, in turn, lead to lower costs per click, better return on advertising spend, and more sales.

As tracking cookies disappear, advertising networks will lose signal, meaning ads may become less effective and, therefore, more expensive. The impact of this signal loss could be similar to Apple’s change in 2021 in how it tracked consumers across mobile apps, making social media ads relatively less effective. Ecommerce marketers may have to spend more to get paid traffic.

Organic traffic could also be a problem. Since May 14, 2024, Google’s AI Overview feature has been available for many web searches. Bing has a similar feature, Copilot, and some in the industry believe these search summaries will dramatically reduce organic site traffic to many websites. Research firm Gartner estimated that organic traffic could fall by 25% within two years.

Ecommerce marketers must find a way to offset reduced paid and organic visits. Alternative content marketing methods are one possible solution.

AI search summaries could reduce the amount of organic search traffic to websites.

Content Alternatives

For many marketers, content marketing is synonymous with search engine optimization. These folks think of blog posts and even product detail content as a way to rank in search engines.

However, a broad view of content marketing may open folks to benefits beyond organic search, focusing instead on three alternatives.

Editorial newsletters

For many, email newsletters are the new blogs and a significant traffic source.

Consider, for example, an online garden supply shop.

This shop could start a “Gardening This Week” newsletter. Every Thursday, it sends an email broadcast with five gardening tips, three curated from the web. The other two link back to the garden shop’s own blog — the one that once received much organic search traffic. The shop could “sponsor” its own newsletter and include a link to a product.

This newsletter would have at least three positive impacts.

• It becomes an alternative source of site traffic.
• Knowing an email address helps with abandoned cart recovery.
• Featuring a single “sponsored” product in the editorial context can drive sales.

Podcasts

In 2017, an Idaho-based farm and ranch retailer (where I was director of marketing and ecommerce) started an editorial podcast that would eventually run for 191 episodes.

The show was available on top podcasting platforms and broadcast on three local radio stations. At its peak, it reached 800,000 monthly listeners. Whenever the podcast mentioned a product, sales of that item increased.

Circa 2024, monitoring podcast performance has gotten easier, and using a podcast for content marketing could help ecommerce marketers with both traffic and sales.

Here’s how.

Imagine an online wine retailer starting a podcast interviewing sommeliers, winemakers, and industry experts.

Episodes would appear on popular podcast platforms and social media sites such as YouTube. The host would encourage listeners to visit the shop’s website and also offer a discount code for a wine mentioned in the interview.

On YouTube, the episode description would include links directly to the wine merchant’s website and the weekly offer.

Courses

Some merchants sell products that require assembly or use instructions. This presents an opportunity to teach customers via courses, a form of content marketing.

Think about an online store selling knitting supplies. The shop could launch a comprehensive knitting course, teaching the fundamentals of holding a needle and following advanced patterns. The course could reside on the shop’s website, on YouTube as a playlist, and on a dedicated portal such as Skillshare.

In each lesson, the instructor could include a materials list with links directly to the shop.

Mitigating

Marketing performance is never certain. Some of that uncertainty now concerns advertising effectiveness and organic search traffic. Marketers interested in mitigating these challenges could try alternative forms of content such as newsletters, podcasts, and courses.

The Top 10 Content Marketing Skills You Need (Plus Tips On How To Master Them) via @sejournal, @brentcsutoras

Want to reach more of your target audience, connect with them, and have meaningful interactions?

Quality content marketing may be the ideal solution for you.

But gone are the days of simply writing and releasing content.

Effective content marketing requires various skills and strategies if you want to get it right.

If you’re looking to breathe new life into your brand and generate more interest in your target audience, here are the top 10 skills and strategies you’ll need.

1. Know Your Audience And Target Them Effectively

Ask anyone about content and content marketing, and chances are that audience targeting is one of the first suggestions.

But what does audience targeting actually mean? And why is it an essential content marketing skill?

First, understand who your audience is, what their day is like, their priorities, and what they’re doing or intending to do while they consume content.

Then, use that information to craft content that counts on a platform and in a format that suits your audience.

Take the Shoe Snob Blog as an example.

The content is photo-centric. The page has few distractions, and the storytelling and text are dense and chunked.

The topics range from stories of shoemakers, care tips, and all the insider info a lover of bespoke and top-of-the-line men’s shoes, shoe designer, or shoemaker could want to know about the objects of their obsessions.

These features tell us a lot about the blog’s readers.

Shoe Snob Blog readers are likely visual, busy, and view reading the blog’s content as almost a secret pleasure they indulge in while waiting in line for an expensive coffee.

The blog doesn’t have content on saving money, getting things for less, building shoes more cheaply, or reviews of shoes you’d find in your local department store.

Why? That’s not what the blog’s target audience is interested in. In fact, those topics would likely chase readers away.

For Justin FitzPatrick, the blog’s author, it’s about the luxury, the emotional connection and passion for the brands, and the smaller details most of us wouldn’t likely notice about a man’s dress shoe – in language that matches the audience’s expertise.

You might be tempted to skip audience exploration and targeting to this degree, particularly if you’re a B2B brand or sell something non-visual like insurance.

But this could be a fatal mistake for your content marketing.

Even if you’re selling to another company, that company is driven and shaped by humans you’ll need to get attention from.

2. Understand How Brand Strategy Influences Content

Content and content marketing could do more harm than good if they fail to blend seamlessly with a brand strategy.

So, if you’re looking to build content marketing skills, ensure you understand how brand strategy influences effective content.

Solid brand-driven content strategies consist of six core elements when it comes to content:

• Brand foundations – What matters to the company, such as the image it wishes to project, etc.
• Audience discovery and brand position – How the brand fits within the market.
• Keywords and language – How the company wants people to find its brand, and what language it will use.
• Authority building – Looking like an expert and a leader on a chosen topic.
• Content creation – Any content strategy must be manageable, affordable, sustainable, scalable, and effective.
• Organization – Utilizing an editorial and publishing calendar and post-publishing tracking and measurement to maintain and guide your content strategy.

3. Consider SEO, Search, And Search Engines

SEO and search are essential for getting found, gaining traffic, building authority, and overall growth.

If you want your content marketing to work, you can’t afford to avoid this content marketing skill because you’re not an expert.

• Users make 1.2 trillion searches on Google per year.
• 93% of all web traffic comes from a search engine.
• 46% of searches are made to look for something local.

In January 2023, searches for phrases that included “gifts” increased 45%, while searches that included “presents” increased 15% over 2022. This equated to $47 billion in the two weeks following Christmas.

So, search is growing and becoming more important – not declining.

If you want to take advantage of search traffic, you need to ensure you’re considering several aspects of SEO when developing your content marketing skills, including:

• Keyword research.
• AI and how to humanize your content.
• Link building.
• Building authority.
• Topic relevance and expertise.
• Site structure, website performance, and analytics.

4. Humanize Your Content

Once you get started with content marketing, you’ll realize pretty quickly that AI-generated content is highly problematic.

You need to follow basic SEO formulas to have your content rank, another formula to make it interesting and catchy for readers, and how to maximize the usability of your content.

However, you also need to ensure you stand out from the crowd and surpass your competitors.

To make your content more human-friendly, learn how to:

• Create content that supports a user journey rather than search engines or sections of a funnel.
• Utilize customer communications and social channels to understand and connect with your audience. Then, use it to market your content.
• Make use of internal experts. Not only is looking in-house a way to make excellent content more affordable, but audiences also love to see your brand’s passion for what it does.
• Take a smart angle, get personal, and have an attitude. Personality and branding are vital, but so is the information you provide. Ensure it is something of value to your readers, and don’t be afraid to tell stories to build emotional connections.
• Add personal videos to top-performing articles.

One of the best examples of all these tips for humanized content in action is the annual Christmas content campaign from WestJet.

5. Engage By Storytelling And Creative Writing

If you want to capture attention and use content to connect with your audience, you need to be able to tell a good story.

Stories make content emotionally engaging but also make it possible for readers to experience what it would be like if they purchased your product or service.

Want to strengthen your content marketing with storytelling?

• Create relatable, believable content. To do this, know your audience, understand their experiences, and create content that aligns with this knowledge.
• Have a clear message. Like an ad, every story or piece of content needs a goal and a clear message you want to convey to your audience.
• Choose the right type of story. Do you need to make an emotional connection? Compel a reader to act? Convey values, a feature, or a concept? Build community?
• Select the right platform and medium. If you want to share several statistics, video might not be the best option. Selling vacations? YouTube or TikTok might perform better than Reddit or a blog.
• Know where to start and stop. Your content needs to appear at the right point in the customer journey and push readers to the next step. What should readers do next?
• Organize and structure. Plan your content ahead of time. Make sure your stories have an arc, make sense, and take readers or views through an experience.

6. Do Your Research

The best content provides an audience with information or a look at something they normally don’t have access to.

To find this information, you must be prepared for deep research – and that means a lot more than just finding a statistic.

Find the original source or study. Ensure the number you’ve found is still relevant and accurate. Consider the source of the statistic and how they arrived at that number. What did the study not consider when finding their statistic?

To build additional authority, you may consider interviewing the source of a statistic or a subject area expert.

7. Improve Your Interviewing Skills

While it helps if you deeply understand the subject matter, it isn’t all lost if you’re new to the topic.

In fact, being a newbie to a topic can have advantages because you can see the topic with a fresh perspective.

One thing you must be knowledgeable about, however, is interviews. Interviewing is an essential content marketing skill.

Here are some tips:

Prepare

Arrive at the interview with an understanding of the topic. Know the pains and challenges individuals interested in the topic face.

Understand your priorities for your readers, the industry, and the individual you’re interviewing.

Have a list of questions that are thoughtful and organized, and work toward answering a single question or reaching a specific goal.

Set Interview Goal

Are you trying to get tips from an expert? A day in the life of? Solve or bring light to a certain issue? Make a human connection?

Choose a goal for your interview, organize it into an outline, and remove any question or information that doesn’t help you move toward that goal.

Be Personable And Make The Interviewee Comfortable

Awkward silences, a lack of rapport, nervousness, and other social aspects can interfere with an otherwise excellent interview and affect the information you collect.

You may want to consider using cognitive interview techniques, which have been adapted from criminal investigation for journalism.

Record Your Conversation

As humans, our brains prioritize stimuli to determine what is important and what we should pay attention to and remember.

This attentional filtering becomes more severe when you’re making notes, thinking about the technical aspects of an interview, and nervous. As a result, it’s easy to miss important details or implications.

So, save some time and improve your accuracy and insights into the information provided during the interview by making a recording that you can refer to as often as necessary.

Be Precise And Ask For Clarification

Some people love raisins in cinnamon buns. Others do not. And just like the raisins debate, how you define a word or concept may vary greatly from someone else.

So, if the information you collect during an interview seems vague, or you’re unsure of something the interviewee says, ask.

The worst thing you can do is assume that it isn’t true or deliberately influence the meaning of someone’s words.

8. Measure And Track Everything

Measuring something is generally easy. The difficult part of measurement and tracking is measuring and tracking the right things.

SEJ’s annual State of SEO Report reveals that SEO professionals often have a mismatch between their goals, the methods and strategies they use to reach them, and the variables they measure.

Content marketers and marketing are no exception.

Let’s say you want to use content marketing to increase conversions. So, you create a video for your hot tub company.

In this instance, tracking and analyzing traffic data to the video would be a mistake. Those numbers are only part of the story.

Instead, track clicks and use traffic data to better understand who clicks through to your content and where viewers go after they consume it.

And this is vital: Don’t stop your analysis at the click.

Every visit from a viewer is only one step in a larger journey – and this journey matters.

Returning to the previous example, your video might have generated fewer clicks and conversions overall.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you might discover that those few conversions were of much higher value than average, and the viewers return to your site more often than your average site viewer.

In this instance, while traffic numbers might make it look like your video failed, analysis of the customer journey reveals that your video was actually a big success, attracting a more qualified, valuable, and engaged audience.

9. Repackage Content With Purpose

You invest a lot of resources in creating amazing content. Don’t simply publish it in one format and waste the rest of its potential.

Before creating content, consider all the different formats and ways you can share it to get attention.

By planning, you can collect images, video footage, sound bites, expert quotes, and everything you’ll need to share and market your content in various ways to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

But refrain from repackaging content with the sole purpose of spreading it everywhere. Carefully plan your content to appear when and where you need to.

As explained in the video above, Search Engine Journal uses the data gathered for its State of SEO Report to create:

• White paper reports.
• Podcast.
• Articles on data not included in the main reports.
• Infographics.
• Carousels for social media.
• Video clips.

Some of these are released before the main report is published to help spread the word and generate interest while sharing interesting insights about the SEO industry.

Then, when the report is released, it is followed by additional content to help generate interest, links, and findings.

Therefore, instead of a week of interest, the reports generate traffic and attention while informing readers for months without significantly increasing the original investment.

10. Stand Out While Blending In

One of the more common pieces of advice is to copy successful content and do what others are doing.

Makes sense, right?

After all, SEO, good writing, and other skills all have best practices you need to follow. Your audience also has preferences, expectations, and requirements.

Your content needs to look like everyone else’s to some degree.

But here’s the problem with this advice: No one stands out if everyone does things the same way.

Therefore, learning how to blend in while standing out is an essential skill for content marketing.

So, instead of mimicking or copying successful content, collect several examples that have worked on a specific platform or for a specific audience and investigate to find out why they’re effective.

Then, you can use these insights to create and test your own content that allows you to stand out, be unique, and fulfill the needs of your target audience.

Conclusion

Effective marketing is more than choosing the right topic or quality writing.

By strengthening and utilizing these 10 content marketing skills, your content will help you generate the right traffic and connect with your audience in a way that will have you dominating the competition.

More resources:

Featured Image: Viktoria Kurpas/Shutterstock