Do you have some awesome topic ideas and great content marketing planned out, but you accidentally forgot to write it down? Or, you might have hundreds of sticky notes around your office?
15 Tips for Staying Organized with Your Content
Organization is key to having successful content because you are going to have a hard time remembering everything if it isn’t organized well. Just how do you get organized with your content ideas and flow? Let’s look at a few tips that will help.
Use Programs Such as DropBox. If you are looking for a great way to keep things organized but want to be able to access it whether you are on your own computer or not, programs like DropBox are perfect. You can easily put your content folders into this cloud-based system, and be able to do your marketing from anywhere in the world. This is also great because, we all know computers like to be finicky, and might just crash one day. If that happens, all of your ideas are not only saved on your computer and an external hard drive, but also on DropBox.
Utilizing List Apps and Programs. One of the best ways to stay organized, whether it is for personal life things or marketing, is to keep a list of everything you need. A big mistake many people make with lists, however, is having a master list for every single thing both business and personal, and all the little things in-between. By using list programs such as the Reminders app on iPhone and iMac, or Remember the Milk, can help you create multiple lists for multiple things. I love lists, because they help me get through my busy content days and helps me remember what I need from the store or other non-work life related things. Try some lists out today and watch that organization and flow improve!
Planning Out Your Schedule for the Next Week or Two. Another thing that helps me immensely with getting organized is not just having a plan for the upcoming month (which I will talk about later) but is also scheduling out my week and two weeks. This helps because you don’t just have content marketing going on, you have other things pertaining to your business, and, again, personal life. When you sit down and plan everything out, you will be able to delegate time to different tasks and know when you should start and finish something. While this might not always go to plan, you will find that you will be more productive and get things finished on time. You will also notice things aren’t quite as stressful if you already have a plan in place!
Using an Editorial Calendar to Keep Your Topics Organized for Months. When it comes to content, you need to make sure that you are not only prepared for the current month, but also for the next few months. A great way to do this is to sit down with your topics and campaign ideas and implement them into an editorial calendar. This will help keep your thoughts and topics organized, and you will be relatively stress-free for the next few months. Many places suggest having an editorial calendar set up for about six months or having one in place for the entire content year. Are you not sure how to create an editorial calendar? Don’t worry! Hubspot offers a great, free calendar!
Create a Content Inventory. A content inventory helps you keep track of the content you’ve done, as well as what areas you haven’t covered. It can even show you areas you have covered some, but not enough. A content inventory is also a great way to keep track of every web page you have from your about section to a contact page or anything else you have or need. What you can do is open an excel sheet or a Google Doc and catalog each page you have by name, link, and a small sentence about why you need it. This can help you figure out new pages you need and how you can also organize your web page. It can also help you see if you might have a landing page or two that you don’t really need. However, it will take quite a bit of time to create a content inventory, so be sure you have enough time set aside to do this.
Don’t Hesitate to Use Good Old Fashioned Paper and Pencil. Technology is great and can really help you get organized, but you shouldn’t ignore good, old-fashioned practices of staying organized. Consider getting a planner and writing down your content schedule or what you need to do in the future. Keep notes of your different topics or simply use pencil and paper to brainstorm. Many times, this can help people stay more organized than a calendar on a computer because writing it by hand can commit it to memory easier. I know that writing down things on paper is quite a big help for me and I find that I get a lot more done that way.
Use a Sitemap to Keep Your Flow Organized. Sitemaps can be incredibly helpful when you are trying to stay organized. This can show you which pages are the most important and that you want more clicks to, but it can also show you which pages you need to change and improve to make them more impactful. It can be a simple thing to make either on your own or with a program. You will find that, when you have this written out in a diagram format, it will be easier to see what you need to do and make necessary changes. A sitemap will also show the relationships between pages. However, this can be difficult to decipher, which can make a sitemap a little harder. You should still give it a try and see how it benefits you!
Use a Post Tracker to Help Stay Organized. A post tracker does exactly what it sounds like it does – it tracks your posts. This is great because you are able to look at your previous blog posts and access them easily. It can also help you see which posts are more popular, and help you tweak your blogging strategy to follow the most successful posts. However, a post tracker doesn’t just focus on past content but can help you plan out future posts by coming up with topics and planning out a blogging schedule to get the most out of your content. Consider using the post tracker shared in the link above to get started and see just how much easier it is to organize your posts, write great, relevant content, and come up with newer topics!
Have a Specific Place for Brainstorming Ideas. This particular point refers to two different things – have a digital place where you write your brainstorming ideas, such as Evernote, and consider having a physical place you go to write like outside at a park or in a coffee shop. We all have areas that help us brainstorm better, and if we go to those locations, we can come up with some great topics! In addition, we need to have a central, digital location to keep those ideas because, if you write them on scraps of paper or napkins, it is likely you’ll quickly lose your ideas and have to start all over again. I enjoy Evernote because it provides you with cloud technology and can help you craft and organize some awesome ideas.
Use Programs to Track Buyer Personas. You can utilize a variety of programs to create and monitor buyer personas to help you organize your content and get the most out of it. There are programs like Trello that allow you do to this in a form of Pinterest model by letting you create a board for each persona and tracking or making any changes you need for it. A buyer persona is vital to help you get the best results from your content and bring in revenue. In fact, this is one of the best ways to research your audience outside of actually asking your audience questions. Building buyer personas will help your content tremendously so create some and use something like Trello to track and improve personas as time goes on.
Have a Time Each Month to Look at Your Content. You need to make sure you are looking at your content consistently and making any tweaks and changes you need to improve it. While you can’t sit down and look at it every day or week, you should set aside time once a month to look it over. This will help you see if you are meeting your intended content goals. If you aren’t, you need to research and see what changes you need to do. Look at which blogs were the most popular in the month and which weren’t to see what changes you should make. If you are constantly getting in a rut, you will be able to notice this quickly and seek the help you need to improve your content and make it powerful.
Use Excel to Track Keywords that Work and that Don’t. Excel is a great program that often comes with any Microsoft Office package, which means you most likely have it. If not, you can always use the spreadsheets available over at Google Docs. According to Buzzsumo.com, Spreadsheets are a great way to track keywords that you are using, and keeping a tally of how successful they are. It can show you if you are paying money for a keyword that is actually ranking well organically. Write down the keywords you intend to use and constantly follow Google Analytics to research those keywords and see how effective they are. Write it down in the excel sheet, and look at it when you look at your content each month. This way, you can quickly make the necessary changes to help improve the impact of your content.
Set Up a Pinterest Board for Ideas. Just like with Trello and buyer personas, Pinterest is a great place to track ideas. You can use it to track your content ideas and save or bookmark things that you think will be helpful for your content and business. Pinterest isn’t just for moms and DIY enthusiasts, it is a great place to gather up ideas and learn something new to improve your content flow!
Schedule Out Social Media and Blog Posts. This is a great way to stay organized and to not forget to post to social media or your blog. Each week, you should take the opportunity to schedule out your social media posts to make sure that you don’t get too busy to remember. In fact, if you are able to, you can also schedule it out for a whole month, especially if you’ve created an editorial calendar and know what you are expecting for your content. The same goes with blog posts; try writing and scheduling them out to save time and get more organized.
Delegate Tasks to Trusted People in Your Company. Sometimes we can get so overwhelmed with everything we need to do that it can be difficult to maintain everything. The busier we get, the less organized we become and the less likely we are to produce quality content. Because of this, a great way to get organized is to ask trusted individuals within your company to help with content creation. This can be in various ways whether brainstorming ideas, creating an editorial calendar or writing the posts up. You can even hire a copywriting agency if you are a very small business and don’t have enough people available to help.
Ready, Get Set, Let’s Get Organized!
These tips will help you get organized quickly and before you know it, you will have things in specific places and your stress levels will significantly decrease. I know that when I have everything organized and planned out, that I am able to accomplish more than when I am scrambling for ideas.
Take a few of these tips and start using them today. Which of these do you think you will try first? Will any be more of a challenge for you? Let me know in the comments!
If you love award-winning historical movies that motivate you to pursue your most ambitious dreams, chances are that you have enjoyed (or will enjoy) The King’s Speech. This 2010 masterpiece directed by Tom Hooper won 4 Oscars in 2011 for Best Writing, Best Direction, Best Actor and Best Picture, outshining all its counterparts. Most people who watch this movie are inevitably moved by King George VI’s efforts to cope with his frustrating stammering.
This speech disorder stands in the way of his success and forces him to get expert help to be able to make his first radio broadcast in 1939. Naturally, skilled content creators will read through the lines and realize that The King’s Speech is not all about the new King’s attempts to control his stuttering, eliminate his fear of public speaking and find his own voice. This heartwarming story also encompasses a plentitude of useful copywriting lessons that can help marketers and content creators improve their tactics and obtain better end results in the long run. Here’s what I’ve learned from the King’s Speech.
1) Originality Is Not a Capital Sin. To overcome his stuttering condition that is putting his position at great risk, George VI decides to see a specialist. This is how he meets Lionel Logue, a respectable and highly controversial Australian speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush. The problem is that Lionel Logue is far from being the submissive servant that a member of a royal family would normally expect to rely on.
His methods are often unorthodox and innovative and he doesn’t seem willing to make any kind of compromises because he is fully aware of the fact that he provides top-notch, extremely effective services. Originality is not a crime; on the contrary, original content allows you to make a name for yourself, become a valuable source of inspiration for other players in your niche and stimulate the curiosity of your readers. You don’t have to adjust your methods or dilute the original quality of your content just to please the masses. If you do compromise, this will only make you lose repeat customers and put your reputation on the line. Once you’ve finally managed to come up with a good content strategy, personalize it according to your own needs, goals and expectations and stick to it.
2) Let Them Leave, But Keep the Door Open. We all know how frustrating it really is to invest time, money and energy in a successful content marketing campaign without actually managing to please your clients or collaborators. Some clients and prospects just don’t get your modus operandi. Some of them just need a little bit more time to get familiar with your unique approach, your marketing strategies or your writing style. This is perfectly understandable. This doesn’t mean that you have to cling to their feet and stop them from leaving.
Keep Up the Good Work. If you’re good at what you do, keep your head high and your standards higher. They will eventually come back. The King’s Speech supports this idea. Shocked and intimidated by his therapist’s radical approach to addressing stammering, Bertie, the new king, decides to find another specialist who could stimulate his progress. After a short period of time, he realizes that the tough love method set in place by Logue was the only one that could actually favor noticeable improvements. Therefore, Bertie goes back to Logue’s office and continues his therapy sessions.
Implement Your Own Selection Criteria When It Comes to Choosing Your Audience. In his instructional guide for business owners, entitled “Book Yourself Solid”, Michael Port talks about the so-called “red velvet rope policy,” and its impact on (content) creators. In short, the key to success is to filter your clientele and your business partners and eliminate nutcases who could make you feel insecure without a reason. To perform optimally, content creators and marketers should be surrounded by people who energize them, share their methods and creative vision and actually inspire them to come up with meaningful content pieces and distribution tactics that exceed every expectation.
Developing a Negative Feedback Obsession Isn’t Healthy. According to Copyblogger, “dangerous” feedback from your readers can make you steer in the wrong direction. If you focus solely on complaints and any other kind of negative feedback provided by your crankiest readers, chances are that you’ll lose your voice and drown in a sea of uncertainties. You don’t have to divide your visitors into two categories: Brand Evangelists and the Devil. The main idea is that you should deliver great value to the targeted audience that represents a good fit for you and worry less about minorities. You can’t please everybody.
3) It Is Highly Recommended to Get Up Close and Personal with Your Clients. In orderto stimulate Bertie’s self-corrective abilities, Logue creates a powerful connection with his client. In a nurturing environment that supports the king’s progress, Logue tries to identify the factors that triggered his patient’s speech disorder in the first place. He makes Bertie relive the past and digs deep to tackle the real root of the problem. By understanding the unique impediments that stop Bertie from preparing and delivering a flawless speech, Logue manages to come up with the right solution to George VI’s pressing issue.
The Definitive Guide to Copywriting by Neal Patel and Joseph Putnam reveals that the web content that you write shouldn’t be about yourself, your brand or your personal ambitions and business goals. It should be about your readers. This is precisely why great copy involves a deeper understanding of your audience. Just like the great David Ogilvy once said, “advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” Therefore, you should realize who you’re writing for, how your readers think and what exactly they want from you.
All in all, The King’s Speech provides a few useful valuable lessons enabling copywriters to enhance the quality of their work and build solider bridges between themselves and their clients and prospects.
Today, one of the biggest investments for your online marketing is content. Just how big? Check out this interesting formula on how to calculate how many “questions” you could possibly “answer” with content for your niche audience.
Take the example of a typical business content marketing flow and need. Let’s say you sell dog food. Some possible content marketing for that simple, down-to-earth industry would include newsletters, blogs, print brochures for your local clientele, and possibly an infographic or two if you want to be trendy with your content.
Now let’s take a look at the content need for just one of those avenues. Since blogging is one of the best ways to rank with Google (confirmed by SocialMediaExaminer experts) and long and frequent blogs are better, you’ll need at least 3 topic ideas per week. Getting those topics can be easy, if you know from which bucket to pull ideas. For example, what do your clients often ask you when they call in? If it focuses on grooming, come up with countless topics based on toenail grooming instructions, hair grooming, and then God only knows how many breeds you can come up with for different grooming instructions, from Pomeranians to Labradors.
How to Keep Up With Your Content Demands
Your content demands are going to be simple, but they sure can overwhelm you quickly. We are going to take some time to go through various ideas to keep up with the demands.
1. Make Your Content Available Everywhere. There is no greater letdown then trying to access the company’s website on your smartphone and realize it is only available in desktop mode. Another letdown is that a website may have a mobile platform but when you load it on your tablet, it is terrible. A great example of this is Instagram. You can only view the app on your tablet in mobile mode, but it is the size of a phone screen. If you resize it, everything is blurry and ugly looking. It makes using Instagram on a tablet difficult.
It might be silly, but that frustration is real and it can make someone ignore your site. Make sure your site content is available in different formats from desktop mode to mobile to tablet. By doing this, you will limit the amount of complaints you get each month, lessening the overwhelming feeling that your content strategy is way too big to manage.
2. Have A Focused Campaign. If your campaign is all over the map, you will definitely feel overwhelmed with your content, B2BMarketingInsider.com writes. You’ll feel like it is impossible to keep up with and this can cause you to burn out and not reach a wide audience. Keeping with the dog food motif, make one campaign solely based on keeping your pet healthy with natural foods, run some blogs during that campaign that deal with why it is important to feed certain foods to certain dogs. You can even break it down into breed or age specificity. For the next campaign, talk about how food can help a dog’s coat and write a blog with various grooming tips. This helps you stay focused and sends a clear message to your customers.
3. Utilize Different Formats and Repurpose. You don’t have to keep using one format. More formats equal more viewers and will help generate more buzz for your product. We listed some of these great formats above such as blogging, infographics, newsletters, and brochures. We think you should give them a shot! Now, you are probably wondering if you need to craft all sorts of new content for these different formats, the good news is you don’t. You can repurpose the content you’ve already written and use it in multiple formats. Quicksprout offers a really handy guide to do just that and this will definitely ease your content demand woes.
4. Make Accessible Goals For Your Content. A major reason your content demands are becoming overwhelming is because you have set some unattainable goals. Sure, your goals might be what you want in the future but right now, you’re going to have to give yourself time. Start by making smaller, more accessible content goals and grow your goals along with your company and how much content your clients are expecting. The demands won’t be as overwhelming for you by starting out small and slowly growing.
5. Work With Everyone, No Matter His or Her Language. Are you getting comments in French, Spanish, or Russian? Well, those comments probably aren’t spam like many people think and thankfully most browsers (i.e. Google Chrome) offer the ability to translate on the spot. Utilize those available translations and see what people are writing. This could be a very good indication that your product is starting to go global. Now, don’t let this overwhelm you! There are many tools out there that can help and you can start working on a strategy for global content writing.
First off, start by using a translating tool to respond. Always make sure the person knows you don’t know their language when using a translation program. This will help you engage with your customers, no matter what. Secondly, if you are getting more comments and views from overseas, start considering the steps to write for a global market.
6. Dedicate A Staff Member For Content Purposes. If content planning and strategy are becoming way too overwhelming for you to maintain, consider hiring someone solely for content. This can be either someone who is an outside source or someone who works within your company. You will still have a say in the matter, but let them do the ultimate crafting to keep the pressure off of you. This will be a great way to ensure you have quality content all the time.
Stick To These and Everything Will Be Fine
By following these 6 tips, you will find that you aren’t as overwhelmed with your content demand as when you started. These tips will help relieve a lot of unnecessary stress and will help keep your content top notch. Take a deep breath, implement these into your next content strategy and feel the unwanted stress of meeting demands disappear! This is perfect for crafting that awesome content you’ve always dreamed of.
Are you stuck in a content rut and just can’t get out? Do you like TV and movies? TV and films can be incredible for content inspiration and you may just find yourself able to come up with some great ideas by spending some quality time binge watching your favorite show or having a movie night. So get settled in with a bowl of popcorn and get ready to learn some neat tricks!
Exterminate the Content Myths!
First off, let’s discuss the myths of how detrimental Netflix can be to writers. You have no doubt seen articles that bash streaming services or movies as time wasters and that in order to be productive you have to avoid them at all costs. The reality is, a television show or a movie might just get you out of a content rut or may even give you a T.A.R.D.I.S full of ideas. Writer’s block happens to the best of us and we all need something that will break the horrible wall in our brains.
Here are a few ways TV and film inspire and help your content:
1. Bow Ties and Fezzes … Are Cool. In the age of viral media, you want to be relevant and cool. Watching new television series or films will help keep you up-to-date with what is popular and trending. However, don’t limit yourself to what you think is popular because you may find that there are many older shows or films that are still quite trendy or are rising in popularity again. Take A Clockwork Orange for example – a lot of people in the 70s watched this Kubrick classic, but it became the film of the counterculture. Because of this, it eventually lost mainstream popularity, until now. Now Alex’s signature style and Nadast language is everywhere. People are constantly doing A Clockwork Orange mashups. It is trendy again, and this time it is not just for a small counterculture (though many still argue it is more of a counterculture film and book). The best way to know about classics becoming popular again is to watch Twitter and Facebook to keep up with all the current trends. You’ll be surprised just what all is popular.
2. What Would River Song Do? Do you remember those times in English class where you had to write character comparisons? Wasn’t that fun? When it comes time to write your content you should do just that, compare and contrast things in a way your favorite character would or write it from their point of view. It will provide some unique insight into your product and promote more involvement for yourself and your readers. You’ll find that you have a blast writing content in a different character’s voice; try it the next time you hit a rut.
3. Daleks Are Not Cool (To the Doctor, That Is). If you’re always rolling around with an egg beater for a gun and screaming “Exterminate” readers will leave you faster than the Doctor (9) running away from family dinners. TV and films show that being negative is a sure fire way to lose readers and customers. Sure, you may post a few “do this, not that” posts but try to keep them at least somewhat nice. We write some heavy hitting pieces, but we make sure to put humor throughout to lessen the blow and help make it memorable instead of making readers furious. Also, another uncool move is spoiling things for readers, whether it is your own content or the show you are using as inspiration. Spoilers are a big deal on the Internet right now, and while many have valid arguments on both sides, you don’t want to be responsible for saying who died on that really popular show.
4. Don’t Pull a Moffat. You want to pull on heartstrings occasionally, but it isn’t the best method to make every single piece of content something that will make your readers violent. Stephen Moffat is a prime example of this with both the Doctor Who series and Sherlock. The fandoms are ready to riot after any episode he films, which are usually season finales or other major episodes (Christmas specials and the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary). Readers will not appreciate it if you continually try to manipulate emotions via headlines or other content. In fact, people are slowly pulling away from Upworthy titles because they really don’t like feeling manipulated. Keep the emotional posts for occasional use only and you’ll find you have a perfect piece of content – just like Vincent and the Doctor (not directed by Moffat, but a great example of expertly using emotion).
Inspiration Can Be Found Anywhere
“But I am not much of a TV person. How else can I get inspired?” Well, you don’t need just to watch TV or films; you can gain inspiration through video games, reading, magazines, museums, and so many other things, Copyblogger writes. Use history as a framework for your next content piece or do a whole month based on dinosaurs. Anything can be used for inspiration; so don’t let the Daleks get you down.
In The End, The Doctor Likes To Read and Learn
The Doctor has had several adventures that have been pretty fun. Some of these adventures center around authors and, as we find out, the Doctor knows a lot about them. He has read and met Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and Agatha Christie. Sometimes, he just sits around the T.A.R.D.I.S reading about quantum mechanics. This Time Lord loves to learn and his adventures are made so much more interesting because of it.
Take inspiration from the Doctor and read or listen to a wide selection of different authors and on several different subjects. The more you read, the more you learn. Always being willing to learn will help you as you try to write new and exciting content. Learn about science, the English language, history, geography and the world will open up to you. So take some time and sit on your couch to tune into documentaries or the latest trendy show or head on over to your local used bookshop and pick up a few paperbacks on subjects you know nothing about and watch your content soar!
“I’m sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same.” – Angus Young, AC/DC
No one wants to listen to the same songs on repeat for years. Television shows that go into syndication eventually stop being shown entirely. Repeating content can be dangerous business. Some people make a career out of it but most of the time it simply doesn’t work out. And, really, if you’re churning out the same content day in and day out, you’ll get incredibly bored. It’s like repeating a word over and over again. Eventually it just becomes meaningless.
And think of your audience. If you’re in the business of making guitars and you put some content on your website about how to play popular songs and every week you put up some variation of “Smoke on the Water” then your audience will quickly go somewhere else.
The question becomes clear: how do you avoid putting out the same content? Funny you should ask. Actually, it’s not really that funny; it’s probably what you came here for.
17 – The Educational Series
According to Copyblogger.com, the educational series is commonly thought of as how-to guides but it can be any number of things that teach the reader or viewer about an aspect of your company that they otherwise may not have known about. If you’re a clothing company then you might talk about the material that your clothes are made out of or how your company was founded.
One of the best ways to get ideas for topics is to allow your customers to come up with them for you. Good creative ideas include Q&A videos that will allow you to have new content that actually addresses real questions and concerns your customers may have.
After all, PlayStation did it and is your company bigger than PlayStation?
16 – Conversation
There is no reason that you can’t have a down to earth conversation with your customers. The most common way that companies do this is by getting on social media and really getting an interaction going with their followers.
Notice the words “conversation” and “interaction.” You don’t want to treat your social media presence as this huge, untouchable, unknowable thing. You’re not the monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Your company has a persona and a way that it interacts with the world, even before you get it on social media. After that, you should accentuate that personality. Make your company human by talking directly with customers via Twitter conversations or even Reddit AMAs. It will give you an idea of your market and give them an idea of who you are as a company and what you stand for.
15 – Relevance
Look in the news. Take inspiration from current events. Every so often there is an outbreak of some kind of disease on certain types of foods. Salmonella is usually the disease in those cases. Regardless, if your company grows tomatoes and this is the year for a salmonella outbreak on batches of tomatoes then you can quickly talk about how to prevent the spread of disease on your food as well as the requisite “our product doesn’t have salmonella” post. Frankly, if that happened and a company didn’t have that post up then they would look mighty suspicious.
14 – Podcasts
FDR began a weekly tradition during his presidency of addressing America every week on the radio. Your podcast can be kind of like that (if you want to think about it that way). Creating content through podcasting gives your company a sense of humanity that it may not otherwise have.
As far as creating original content, having a few people banter about issues related to your product or industry may allow new topics to naturally come up that wouldn’t have been brought up otherwise. Quite a few podcasts and radio shows rely on just those types of organic topics (while obviously having an outline of other points if necessary).
13 – Old Content, New Sides
Just because this article is about bringing out new content for your readers doesn’t mean that you can’t deliver old content with a new twist. Entertainment journalists do this all the time when they look back at past media with a new perspective or if they get new information on an old piece of work. There are endless stories about products and services if you look at it from the point of view of everyone involved.
12 – Before and Afters
Before and afters aren’t just for weight loss products anymore. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling or doing, you can create content using before and after photos, videos, or stories. There are the obvious transformation stories: home damage repair, the aforementioned weight loss products, or exfoliating creams.
But that’s just scratching the surface of documenting a transformation. It doesn’t just have to be your customers in the transformation. You can show your product in phases or even the company itself at pivotal points of its life cycle. Car and Driver has done product retrospectives for several different car manufacturers over the years. Why? Because their readers are fascinated by the inner-workings of vehicles and the way that they are improved upon over time.
11 – Presentations
Surely someone at your company is a great writer and great presenter with amazing ideas that can be shared with the world. Maybe they’ve shared some of them with the company through a PowerPoint presentation. You might even be able to put that kind of presentation on video and broadcast it to your readers.
Moz does this type of thing a lot with Whiteboard Fridays. We can’t definitively say that it stems from a presentation that someone gave to their peers, but it has that presentation feeling to it because of how it’s structured.
10 – Contests
Providing content doesn’t necessarily mean providing pure information. People love stuff, too. Contests are great ways to spread exciting content (read: “free stuff”) to your customers. Another thing about contests is that sometimes people enter contests just to enter contests. They specifically search out contests, meaning that they’ll find your company because they’re looking for free stuff. Maybe they’ll even become a paying customer.
9 – Industry Relevant Information
Give your customers an inside look at the industry that you’re in. Many sports do this, especially leading into a big event or even in the off season (think the NFL draft). You will also see this in music when people ask a musician or band about a writing or recording process.
And it doesn’t have to be a main person talking about the industry as a whole. It could be something tangentially related to the industry you’re in. Talking to a stockbroker about how a certain activity within your industry will affect prices works just as well. It can bring in a group of economy buffs that may not have even heard of your company until then.
8 – Problem Solving
Your customers have problems. As much as you don’t want to admit it, even customers that buy your products have problems. Sometimes those problems are with your product or with something relating to your product. Don’t leave them out to dry. Take those concerns and problems on. Own up to them and recognize them.
Shun makes kitchen knives. If you’ve ever used a kitchen knife (and we’re going to go out on a limb here and say you have) then you know that sometimes they can become dull. Sometimes you don’t know what to use those myriad knives for. Navigating kitchen tools can be confusing for a casual home cook. They know that their customers may have some general problems so they made a series of problem solving, instructional videos.
7 – Targeted Marketing
If you know about point of sale systems then chances are that you’ve heard about targeted marketing. It sounds exactly like what it is: marketing aimed specifically at a group of people. It’s an acceptance of the idea that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. It’s fine that you can’t please everyone with everything that you do, but you can please them all at separate times, can’t you?
Korg realizes that they can’t always please everyone, so they get endorsements from many different artists in many different fields. They get that not everyone will know or care who many of the artists on the list are, but they know that there will be one or two that turn your head. This isn’t really a case of targeted marketing as it’s not directed at anyone, it has the same principles at heart: offer something to everyone, but don’t offer everyone the same thing.
6 – Infographics
Infographics seem to be all the rage now. In fact, here’s an infographic about infographics. They engage your customer in ways that text or video simply might not be able to and, because of how the images are structured, may give your readers a bit of a mnemonic device to recall the information later.
5 – The Why
Your loyal customers probably know what you do and maybe even who you are. But do they know why you exist? What are the goals of your company? Why did it start? Why do you love what you do?
If you want to get a taste of the “why” of any company, go to their mission page. For many people, if the mission of the company aligns with the values of the person they may be more likely to deal closely with them. If you went to an auto shop whose mission statement was “We’d like to outlaw chocolates, make babies cry, and burn all of the books” you’d probably take your business elsewhere.
4 – Ask Your Staff
If you’re a business owner you may not like to hear this but, in some cases, your staff may know more than you. If you have a retail store then you may want to ask your cashiers what customers are asking about and what their opinions are. After all, they interact with them day in and day out.
You don’t just have to ask your staff about what customers are wondering either. It’s just as good to ask your staff about their questions and opinions. This can serve many purposes. It can give you ideas for marketing content but it can also facilitate a sense of trust between you and your staff. It also may let you in on who is actually interested in moving up and where they want to go.
3 – Other Industries
You may have exhausted every who, what, when, where, why, and how that you can think of regarding your company. But have you considered how your product is used in other industries? It’s likely that your customers are from other industries and use your product every day.
If you’re a fishmonger, collaborate with the chefs that come in to buy your products every day. These people are just as valuable as your customers because they are your customers and they have stories about how your product has enhanced their life and their business.
2 – Get Out of the Office and Keep a Notebook With You
Salvador Dali was frequently inspired by dreams and his wife. Andy Warhol was inspired by popular culture. Jackson Pollock was inspired by the act of painting itself. What do all of these people have in common? They weren’t inspired by white walls, a cubicle, and humming halogen light bulbs. Most of the time, you won’t be either.
Get out of the office and take a notebook with you. Write content that fascinates you. We don’t know where the Sony Bravia ad came from, but we’re sure it didn’t come from staying inside and having a boring day.
Go out. Do stuff. Bring a notebook.
1 – Customers Create Content
Crayola has held a few contests to allow people to name crayon colors for them. People of all ages have submitted and named their products. Unlike an average contest, this isn’t just giving someone stuff (which they also did). Crayola was allowing customers to actually create a part of their company, giving them a sense of ownership and others a sense of investment in the company.
If that contest had gone on today then you’d better believe that Crayola would be tweeting and posting about it quite often and discussing the contest from different angles, announcing the winners with profiles on their blogs, and discussing the color names as well as those who almost made the cut.
