Identifying Content Creation Opportunities

Having a company that is in any way conducting business online means that you need to work on your content creation strategies. HubSpot really drives this point home with their recent 2012 “State of Inbound Marketing” report. In terms of blog post frequency and customer acquisition, here’s what they found:

• Those companies that posted content multiple times a day enjoyed a 92% customer acquisition rate
• Those who posted daily enjoyed a 78% customer acquisition rate
• Those who posted only 2 or 3 times a week had a 70% customer acquisition rate
• Weekly posters had a 66% acquisition rate, and monthly posters only 56% (HubSpot, 2012)

The moral of the story is this: the more often you post, the more leads and customers you’ll get. This makes sense for a number of reasons:

• • People will visit your site or blog more often if they know that they’ll be receiving a fresh flow of content on a regular basis.

• • As a result, they’re more likely to come to trust you, your recommendations and your brand. They will become leads, then customers, brand loyalists, and advocates

• Search engines love websites that constantly have brand new content to offer. New content means a higher ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines (SEO)

So here’s the dilemma: just how do you find the time of the ideas to post content several times a day?

Create an Editorial Schedule

To get things rolling, create an editorial schedule. This will hold you and whoever else is involved in the creation of content accountable. Start off by figuring out what period of time your schedule will be for (i.e. weekly, monthly, annually) and then start jotting down your business, brand, or product focused content ideas. Don’t stick solely to blog post ideas either; branch out and include eBook ideas, white paper ideas, webinars, social media posts, document sharing, press releases, and more.

Next, begin to organize activities to help keep your blog ahead of schedule. All too often businesses begin to get behind, and it becomes a very slippery slope of falling behind schedule once that happens.

Then there’s the final step: the implementation and maintenance of your content. Something that should be strongly considered here is the use of a content management system (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software. By investing in these systems, you can potentially create a one-stop shop for adding and organizing your content on your blog, your website, and distributing it across all of your social media channels.

Involve Other Teams

If you plan to create your business focused content on your own, then history will show that you’re doomed to fail. By involving other teams in your company or organization in the creation of product or brand focused content, or outsourcing content creation to professionals, then you’re opening up the door to receiving a number of valuable content ideas.

For example, one group that you’ll likely be able to nab plenty of content ideas from is your customer service team. These are the people who help and handle your leads and customers on a daily basis. They know who your target market is on a very personal level. They know their pain points, what they love about your products/services, what they hate, how they use the product or service, can provide customer testimonials… the list goes on and on.

When involving other teams, make sure that there is a system set up for the submission of content or ideas- otherwise you may find yourself buried beneath it all and end up with it becoming a burden.

Don’t Forget the Visuals

Did you know that Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social media site on the web (Mashable, 2012)? This makes it all the more important for your company to create visually engaging content as well as textually engaging content. Having visual content will give your business even more exposure on the web, and it’s free if you create it yourself – so photograph your products, displays, labels, packaging, executives and keep them in an easily accessible file. (I find that Dropbox is particularly useful for storing photographs, particularly when you want to allow other team members access to them.)

But that’s not the only benefit. Having visual content also helps further develop your brand’s identity and increases user engagement. In fact, as Simply Measured reported earlier this year that by simply having a picture or some visual included with any social media post, you can increase your visitor engagement by 65% (Simply Measured, 2012). There are a number of reasons for this:

• • Visual content, like infographs, can showcase content in a succinct and easier to understand manner than text (as a result, you’re increasing your chances of being shared, thus further increasing your business’s exposure on the web)

• • Content that’s visually appealing is, well, appealing. It attracts a visitor’s eye and perks their interest

• According to a US Government study, 83% of learning is visual (OHSA, May 1996) so by having visual content, you’re creating more memorable content

The bottom line is that you need to be looking for opportunities to create visual content as well as written content.

If your company is at a volunteer event or having a holiday party, snap some pictures and put them online.

If you have run a survey or have accumulated a lot of data that will help either sell a product or further prove your company as an expert in its industry, put them together in an infograph.

If you have customer testimonials on hand, you too can turn this great written content into visual content.

There are so many opportunities that a business, regardless of its size, has to create valuable content. Recognizing them and taking the action needed to mine this rich seam of content is all that’s required.