You’ve hit the wall. The first few content marketing posts flowed easily, but now that you’ve cherry-picked the obvious and low-hanging fruit what’s left to write about? Don’t worry you’re not alone.
According to a 2015 study from B2B Content Marketing: “Despite all the content types, platforms, and options available, over 50 percent of marketers are still finding it challenging to produce engaging content, and 42 percent find it difficult to produce a suitable variety of content.”
It is important to create a map of all the channels and content types your organization will use. Why? This can help your team fill your content marketing idea bank with concepts and ideas to execute on.
Content can and should have many different goals — sometimes as basic as putting a human face on your brand (and nothing does that better than pictures or video). Share some photos of a recent team event with a brief introduction or a video of a customer using your product. Run a poll on social media that can gather customer insights or share an article that you found particularly insightful and give your review on why you enjoyed the piece. There are many ways to engage your audience and by monitoring what they respond to best you can find a winning combo to keep they coming back for your new content.
That said there is definitely an important place for longer content items like blogs, whitepapers and ebooks, because that generates a true sharing of ideas and helps to a) make your target audience smarter and b) positions you as the expert. So how do you generate ideas to fill both the pages and hopper for future content? Focus on the customer, your audience, and what they want. Start building your idea bank with some of these sources:
- What are the most common questions that your sales team gets asked in the field?
- Know your content keywords – what information are people searching for online as it relate to your business. Are they finding your content?
- Share what’s new and on the cutting edge for your industry and give your opinion on how it will impact their business.
- Revisit the presentations you’ve done over the last year. Did topics or portions generate good audience engagement? Hone in on this and build content around it.
- Start conversation on social media to find out what customers want to hear more about.
It’s important to keep in mind that content marketing is a holistic effort. It’s likely that no “one” piece of content will be responsible for a sale. The key is in the content mix, and the secret to content return on investment is creating great content consistently, finding the right key performance indicators for your business goals and measuring them over a long period of time. And remember, there is lots of help available!