creative content

“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. … Read more