Creating content marketing ideas that sell…
Happy New Year, next is the outlook of the new year, marketing strategies and targets to be locked, this is common across most organizations. It is imperative that such plans cover the digital marketing activities. To be fully set to welcome the new year. I was lucky to sit with fresh grades, interns and zero-experienced social media and content marketing executives more than once over the last few weeks , discussing content marketing and content innovation in the HR industry. It was nice to see fresh thoughts from such young talents. Yet the dilemma of content ideas innovation was the same, and seems it is a hindering thought for many, fresh and experienced marketers, working in the same field. This has inspired me to put some points here to help address the content innovation topic with practical tips.
Content is not new for marketers, they work with it everyday offline and online, they consume it and create it in different formats and shapes. So why it is still a riddle to tackle for many then ! The online audience is the same offline people , it is just that their behavior is bit different online and the way they expect brands to communicate with them. Many thought-leaders and authors have discussed different concepts over what kind of approach marketers should look into to get people to pay attention to your online marketing efforts, engage and finally get inspired to take an action. Ideas like being helpful, as Jay Baer highlighted in his book Youtility, being remarkable as David Meerman Scott always talks about in his series The New Rules of Pr and Marketing, being relative as Seth Godin always advises, adapt or die as Brian Solis highlights in his book What is the Future of Business and many other research agencies and authors focus on these ideas and others to inspire marketers to be more engaging.
To dive more into the content creation process I am highlighting the following tips,
1. Plot the marketing calendar in details
Having the marketing calendar well laid down with the local calendar of the country or the region your business trades in, is key, because it will help you understand more of the seasonality and events.
2. Stories
We always relate to stories, sad, happy, evoking and many different emotions get into that. That what sticks not the marketing taglines, so it is helpful to think of creating ideas that tell stories to engage people around them.
3.create it or curate it.
Not all the time you need to create things from scratch, sometimes ideas are there already. Others have posted them already, people or brands, so makes more sense to get inspired and reuse that content to fit your needs. While still it is important that innovation is fed to come up with remarkable ideas, to get your content topics shared , liked or discussed.
4. Images , text ,video, infographics.
Formats and presentation of content are options but you need to try different ones to test which works better for which channel and audience. It is worth spending sometime trying something new like infographics, blogs and short videos like Vine, or other MOBILE content related to spur into remarkability. so people pay attention to your brand.
5. Responsive and fast.
Today things happen so fast and new trends of topics sometimes happen more than once a day, and all are real time marketing opportunities. So it is cool to be fast and inject your brand to the story or the news in a smart way, while making sure that you are relevant. Oreo Dunk in the Dark Ad in the Superbowl was an excellent simple example for this. While many brands do it everyday. When we look at NOKIA’s quick response to one of SAMSUNG users, whose phone battery exploded, then NOKIA offered him a LUMIA phone as a replacement, then it got picked up by the media and new discussions were born around the brand.
6. Artistic and different
Life has many sources of inspiration, everyday we walk down the street we see something, nature, people, other brands advertisements, TV, radio etc… The touch of Art is important to draw different content concepts of creative ideas. It is worth to have a regular session with your creative designers and other functions in the organization regularly and brainstorm ideas around your industry and your business environment. When you work for example in a recruitment firm, you will feel like ” oh what a boring business , what should I post online?” but if you try to look to the big picture you will get immerse stream of ideas like, challenge, success, dreams, careers, skills ,etc all are good topics for this. Business is it still boring now, I guess not.
7. You can’t win them all.
Not everyone will be happy or engaged with your ideas, but it is fine, maybe they are not your right audience and you have managed successfully to put the right filter through content. Don’t worry if not many people see your content or interact with it; Because new things are always weird, till people explore them more closely.
8. Consistency
Brand, culture, trends, these are of importance and can have some restraints on what you can create. But you need to maintain consistency around the brand guidelines, and other important aspects like tone of voice, etc. Because people expect to visualize a human-like-brand that has a character. So make sure you maintain that.
These are practically proven ideas, that can work for anyone, Do you think your business is different ?