With writing content, it can be a common place for motivation to deteriorate after a lack of creative ideas. I must admit, I had no idea what to write which made me realise how difficult it is to work in content marketing.
How do you come up with ideas?
Speaking to people within the industry; I’m lucky enough to speak with people in this industry every day, a lot them are very talented and have worked extremely hard to get where they are. The least I can do when I’m profiling them to see their suitability for any of the roles I’m recruiting for, is to try and take as much information in as I can. If I’m speaking with people who work within the content or editorial team at a finance business, I have so much respect for them because of the rate they generate great engaging content ideas in, let’s face it, a very dry subject. I spoke with one chap the other day who was working for an insurance business, and he was writing content about luxury yachts, which would draw in boating fanatics and then link them back to the site and give the readers information about how they can insure their water vessels. Now to me, this is very good content marketing to a particular demographic. Other ideas about how to generate content can be as simple as going to networking events, analysing customer feedback, data analysis and focus groups.
How to write relevant engaging content?
What are people interested in at the moment? What are people going to be searching for on Google? For me, this is very important because if you’re going to put your ideas and work out there, you’re going to want people to read about it right? If I’m honest, my content output is not very high, I’ve discovered not by writing blogs, but by putting posts out there, on a platform that I seem to spend most of my life on (LinkedIn), that if I somehow include Game of Thrones along with what I do and the roles I’m currently recruiting for on my post, it seems to get a lot more traction than just a generic LinkedIn post would get if I just posted a list of roles.
How can you link content back to your brand?
This is maybe me being biased, but with a girlfriend that works in this area and writes this type of content, fashion brands and retailers do this very well and have some fantastic ideas. Constantly thinking about what products are selling well and not so well and about what stock needs to be pushed and how can it can be linked to articles. It focusses on getting people to visit the website without such heavy investment as other creative digital campaigns. Again, this goes back to what’s trending at the moment and what’s popular among their demographic. I recently saw an article about how to dress like Conor McGregor, which with him being in the news a lot recently is going to draw in a lot of readers that wouldn’t normally visit the site. Then, when you have these new users on your site, considering how you maximise profit from these individuals. It can simply be linking similar products that you sell on your site to the article.
What can you do to keep both yourself and your customer engaged?
My specialist area that I recruit for is content marketing and branded content. So I work with a lot of the big publishers and content agencies. I recruit people who work across editorial, video and social. Creating engaging content across all these different channels is a great way to keep your customers interested and viewing your product in so many different ways. Now if you were in a content marketing position you could potentially be working across all these channels, or maybe if you’re a specialist in one of these areas, so it would depend on how your business wants to push their product and you might need to hire specialists in each of these positions.
Written by Tom Crawford, Consultant – Content and Editorial
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-crawford-redcat
Twitter: @Tom_RedCat / @RedCat_Digital
Facebook: RedCat Digital
Google+: RedCat Digital
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