The more considered the purchase, the longer people will take to make up their mind. Great content can speed this up. But, more importantly, it can keep the conversation going for as long as it takes.

Great content will help you to earn the right to a person’s time. But, it also keeps the conversation going over time. Whether the decision takes 6 minutes, six days, six months, or even years… your content can give you a reason to stay in touch, and your buyers reasons to get in touch with you. And, from these touchpoints come conversations. And, from conversations come sales.

So, lots of reasons to create great content. But, if you’re going to get this content to pay you back you’ll need to make a commitment to doing it consistently.

The sort of commitment you’re looking at to get great results from your great content, might include:

• Tweeting a few times every day,
• Blogging at least once per week,
• Sending a subscriber newsletter weekly or monthly,
• Running a webinar each month,
• Issuing a new paper every quarter,
• Re-purposing all this stuff into Podcasts, webcasts, Slideshares, and more.

That’s a lot of content. And, whilst you will most certainly be able to re-use, re-cycle and re-spin a great deal of it… you will definitely need some ideas, themes, and reasons to put it out there. So, here’s some help with exactly that… it’s taken from my ‘A to Z of Content Marketing Ideas’ from which I am sharing a letter each day in December.

Content marketing ideas beginning with the letter G

Gardening

Linking with Growth and with Analogies, gardening is great. You know… hard work and the rewards there of, and all that – there’s got to be something there for everyone?! If it’s appropriate to your business, how about… encouraging people to grow a veggy box, maybe you’re into healthy eating, workplace health, or something. A salad growing competition, captured in photos could be great fun.

Geology

Ok, it’s a personal one. I like rocks, and I like that they have meanings. Birthstones are good if you make products from precious or semi-precious stones. Maybe I like this one because my birthstone is Diamond… so any marketing reminders that go to my husband to that effect are welcomed by me.

Goals

There are three ways you can look at goals. You can share your company goals with the big wide world (see Ambitions), but what is perhaps more interesting is to ask your customers to share theirs with you. Perhaps you could add an option to something that you do that triggers reminders or prompts to help them meet those goals, or help them save or reward themselves when they do so?

Grants

Find out if there are any government grants on offer for what you do. See if you can get your company approved as a supplier for grant-funded activity. You then have a perfect offer to make, where people can use your services for a vastly reduced rate, or even for free (whilst you get paid)

Graphology

I’ve wanted to do this for years! Go on… do it. Relating to individuality, personality or personalisation, how about you get people to send you a sample of their handwriting, you get a graphologist to analyse it and post a personality profile – they then tell you whether it’s accurate or not. There’s got to be a campaign in that one! Or just adding it to the profiles of your key people could liven it up. (I love this one so much I put it in the Watertight Marketing book. The worked example that runs through featuring the made-up company, VA-Voom!, uses graphology to add personality to their professional profiles).

Green issues

See Environment.

Growth

There are very few business that don’t want to grow. So if you’re in a B2B context and something you offer will help a business meet their growth targets, tell them about it.

Guests

Inviting a guest to provide content can be a win, win, win. Let’s say one of your clients offers a complementary product or service. They could write you a guest blog, which appears on your site, giving you SEO phrases, conversation starter and a bit of variety, and they also get a bit of exposure. You can also offer your material as guest content to others. And, it’s not just blogs – could you co-host an event or offer a joint promotion?

Guides

Guides to using something, doing something, preparing something, etc. are top notch and make excellent SEO fodder. Whether it’s getting the best from a product, planning something, etc… have a think about questions people might ask and make that the name of your guide. You know, things like ‘How do I prepare a marketing plan?’ That kind of thing.

© Bryony Thomas – The Watertight Marketer.