Content Marketing Idea Generation
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Content Marketing Idea Generation
Let’s say you own a business and you have a blog, or, maybe you’re a brand manager wanting to launch a new product. Perhaps you’ve had your blog for a while and you’re in need of fresh material for your clients or customers. Previously, you’ve developed your blogs from subject matter within your organization and that has worked well, but now you seem to be at a loss for something new and interesting. You don’t want to risk repeating things from prior blogs, so where do you go for new content ideas?
There are a number of avenues that can be taken to seek out blog material, but one way that is most often overlooked is to talk to your company’s customers, actually talking to the people who are handing money to your company. If you can get your customers to tell you what matters to them, get them to open up and talk a little bit about their hobbies, what they’re most passionate about in their lives, what drives their interests from day to day, then you can find a wealth of blog material that is almost guaranteed to pique their interest.
For instance, today I’m doing a little research for a presentation I’m putting together, and in one case study, the company tweeted about how their staff loved to watch the T.V. show, Lost. The company was quite pleasantly surprised at how many comments and shared experiences were derived simply from talking about Lost and their reaction was, “wow, we hit a nerve!” It demonstrated to them that one of the most important aspects of customer relations was to simply listen and tune in to their customers.
Of course, there are right and wrong ways to go about listening. You don’t want to ask abrupt questions, but if you are the business owner who is blogging, you might want to ask your employees to spend a bit of time in casual conversation with customers. A good example might be to imagine that you are in the business of selling sewing machines. Generally people who sew love to talk and many times they may be working on a project they’re eager to discuss. If a customer walks into your store and just starts asking questions or wants to talk about what they’re doing as it relates to what you’re selling, that conversation can become a golden nugget of opportunity for you. It opens up the door for you to write about a customer coming in and asking, for instance, how to thread a sewing machine. This is so much better than falling into the same old habit like many companies do of asking customers to fill out a survey or answer a brief questionnaire. Not too many people these days really want to take the time to fill things out, but people are always eager to talk to you if you are willing to listen. Train your wait staff to keep a notepad in their pocket or behind their transaction desk and just jot down short notes about what customers enjoy talking about. If you collect those notes every now and then, you will end up with a ginormous amount of blog material just waiting to be written about and there’s a good chance you will never run short of interesting content.
At this point, I think it’s important to make a distinction here. In the beginning, I talked about content for blogs, for podcasts, brands, product launches, etc. Content is about any information you want to give to your customers, so keep in mind that this can also apply to signage, menus, websites, and anywhere else you communicate with customers. These techniques can be applied no matter what your form of communication might be.
So, now that we’ve covered listening and talking to your customers as one way of finding fresh content, I want to suggest another great technique as well. You definitely want to pay attention to your local community activities or what is in your local news. You can rest assured that many of your customers most likely are paying attention or might even be involved in local community interests. If you blog about these events or occurrences, you will be deepening your relationship with your customers. There will always be customers who admire companies for keeping up with what is happening on a local level and who may make it a point to read your blog content simply because you are “in the know.” In essence, you are demonstrating , ‘hey, we’re local too and we care about this community.’
Remember, however, in employing these techniques, the object is not to just step in and steal a conversation. Instead, you want to draft yourself into it, to join it. You will recall the company who tweeted about their customers discussing their interest in the T.V. show, Lost. The company was careful not to abruptly leap into the conversation and assert their own ideas. Instead, they carefully tied themselves in without barging in. Brian Clark of Copyblogging employed the same technique in one of his popular posts when he tied his subject to the popular ‘80’s band, Depeche Mode. If you are an avid watchers of HBO’s new series, Game of Thrones, and wanted to follow a similar technique, you could ask visitors, ‘would you be a Lannister, a Baratheon, a Stark or a Targaryan?’ It’s a weird show because it’s hard to tell who the good guys are and the bad guys, but basically, you just jump on board the hot topic and draft behind them. The term comes from racing. NASCAR drivers do much the same thing when you see one car hugging the rear bumper of another car, in an effort to take advantage of the energy the lead car is expending. By hugging that bumper, the second car doesn’t have to exert nearly as much energy since they are following the air tunnel already established by the lead car; thus, drafting off the lead car.
One more thing to keep in mind when you’re employing these techniques is to always make your audience, your customers, the “king.” Make sure they are the center of your attention and not the other way around. At that moment, you’re creating a relationship. People connect with people, not to companies or businesses, so find out what your customers are truly interested in, their strongest interests, and you will always have content for your blogs, your websites, and where ever you feel a need to communicate and establish a strong rapport with your customers.
Shortcut Content has implemented a useful exercise to further assist you in creating blog material. It is 37 minutes long and is based on the late author, Ken Miller’s process. Our Content Marketing Outline Tool is free to use.