Do you put off creating marketing content in your business because your mind draws a blank any time you try to think about what to write or create?

This is a common problem if you’re feeling rushed or time hasn’t been taken to plan in advance of needing to take action. Ideally you would have a calendar with all the steps you need to take in advance of a publication deadline to avoid any last minute panics…

However, the reality is many people find themselves in this situation because they need a system that is more dynamic than a full blown content calendar and everything that comes with it. This might be because the nature of their business makes maintaining a marketing calendar challenging. For example, if things are constantly changing – e.g. they are a retailer that doesn’t want to draw attention to certain product ranges at a time when they experience out of stock issues that can’t be predicted etc.

I like to keep things as simple as possible and remove some of the barriers that prevent people from taking action on getting content ‘out there’. One of the biggest hurdles for many people is generating ideas about content. Below I have come up with a list of 10 things you can do to make sure ideas are at the ready, when you are ready:

1. Prepare a ‘brain dump’ of ideas as a reference you can pull from. Either by yourself or by using one of the methods mentioned below, dedicate some time to filling a page with all the possible ideas that you can come up with about what to write or create. Keep this list handy so that the next time you need an idea in a hurry it will either provide the idea or at least trigger you to spark another idea.
2. Brainstorm with a team. When people bounce ideas off each other, it helps generate even more ideas. You don’t have to start with a blank sheet; bring a few resources to the brainstorm to get you started, including what content the competition has been creating, your target keywords, information about what your brand stands for, a list of the services you offer and industries you serve. Keep in mind the business that you are trying to attract so that content can stay relevant to that.
3. Content can take many different forms. Article, image, meme, photograph, video, gif, survey/poll, infographic, user generated, case studies, reviews/testimonials – keep these (and more) in mind when you are thinking about content ideas to help keep your content format varied. That way you increase your chances of a wider audience engaging with your content because some people prefer information visually vs reading a lot of text.
4. Repurpose content – just because you have used something before doesn’t mean it can’t be used again but presented in a different way (following on from my point above that different formats work for different people). For example; take some of the statistics from an article and put them into an infographic. Pull a short quote out of a long testimonial and put it into a simple graphic image. Remember that the section on your website called “updates”, “news”, “highlights”, or whatever you named it, is essentially a blog function that can be used for a variety of different formats.
   
   For example, if you have historically just used it for technical articles you can mix it up with some lighter posts or simply images with an accompanying caption, videos etc. You might need to re-label the page name/tab to indicate the broader content that can now be found in there. You can also separate the type of posts onto more than one page by duplicating the blog and using categories to determine what shows up on which page.
5. Make it topical and check out the competition. Look at what is being talked about in the media or in your industry to keep content topical and relevant to what’s going on. There is naturally more interest in topical content and potentially more search engine hits associated with it. See what the competitors have been posting to help trigger ideas (obviously not copying their content).
6. Answer FAQs. If you have a FAQ section on your website, use this to generate topic ideas or themes, if not, ask your sales team what questions they get most often.
7. Refer to your vision, values and general philosophy. These are all great things to refer to for telling your story and connecting on an emotional level with customers and potential customers.
8. Dissect your website content. Refer to everything on your website as a potential content idea…either you have spent good money on a copywriter or at some point someone made a decision that everything written about was of interest and importance to customers…so don’t reinvent the wheel, there will be some rich ideas in there!
9. Break your story down into parts. In telling the story of your business, often there is a journey involved. You could choose to break that journey down into different stages and have a ‘to be continued’ approach to your content.
10. Ask your audience(s). An obvious one, however often over-looked…ask your audience what they want to hear about, learn, see. A focus group, an online poll or even just a casual conversation with a couple of customers could help identify what type of content would be best for your audience (or audiences).

If you have benefitted from these practical tips, you can check out more here. Need some hands on help with creating content or content marketing or been thinking about outsource marketing? Get in touch whether you are in Auckland or beyond…we work remotely, so it doesn’t matter where you are based.