Internet Marketing: What's all this buzz about "Creating Content"?

Over the past decade or so, the word "content" has become increasingly popular in the world of marketing. Marketers have always needed a bit of a creative edge - and that is becoming even more the case. Creating content has always played a part as well, and while content creation sounds very easy to do at a surface level, once you start to think about how to relate new content back to your particular business, many of us can hit a wall.  

Ten years ago, content marketing was relatively easy to do. Create a piece of content, put it everywhere, and let the results flow in.  Nowadays, it's about maintaining a blog on a consistent basis, creating emails that people will open, staying engaged with your audience on social media....the list goes on. So the question that keeps coming up is "where can we get ideas for all this content?" In this post, I will go into a few examples of where content can come from.  

Find a Theme

The first example is one that we've mentioned in a previous post, and that is CommCreative's Today's Marketing Cookie blog. The basis of this blog is to somehow relate a fortune cookie to marketing for your business. What a cool idea! This is a combination of many different heads coming together, and bringing it back to the world of marketing. This is a perfect example of being able to find content from anywhere. Personally, I would find myself eating way too much Chinese food, but that's beside the point.  

Create Content by Reading Content

The best bloggers and content creators are also the people who like to read. I know this seems like it's relatively easy to do, but like everything else, it takes time. Staying on top of industry trends, putting your own spin on it, and turning it into a blog article is certainly something that many marketers are doing. My advice would be to subscribe to as many marketing blogs as you can, stay on top of the content they are producing, and then add your own flavor to it. Many marketing blogs will have a team of people maintaining them and producing the content, so if you're a one man shop, it will be nearly impossible to keep up with your own content, but do your best to follow them.  

Understand your Special Sauce

Another way to come up with content is to think about what your firm specializes in and is good at and come up with a schedule of different blog posts off of those subjects. That's what we have decided to do here at BKM. Our specialities include Internet Marketing, Direct Mail, and Bank Marketing so we have catered our blog posts to each of those 3 subject areas. We've decided to divvy up the responsibility of keeping up with the blog, set up a tentative schedule to get blog posts out, have weekly brainstorming meetings for 30 minutes, and set attainable goals for ourselves. So far, it has worked out pretty well for us, and we're pleased with the progress that has been made.  

Know your Customer

Finally, think about who your customer is. What are they into?  Build out exactly who they are, and create content that is going to hook them and keep them interested. If you're a bank, write a funny blog post about a day in the life of a teller. Put a spin on it, make it funny, and post it to your blog. People read blogs to not only get information that is relevant, but they also don't want to be bored to death.  

Finding content isn't easy, but in order to do it successfully, you have to always be on the lookout for it.  Are there new regulations that your industry has?  Is there some sort of trend going on that you have noticed, and you want to give your take on it?  Is there a fortune cookie that has a message on it that can relate to your business?  What are the top 10 questions your customers have when they come into your place of business?  Turn these into blog posts, and you'll find yourself finding content everywhere, and not thinking about blog posts as a chore.  

As always, we welcome your comments, and any ideas that you have for us to blog about, because as I mentioned, we always welcome content from anywhere.