What strategies do you use to brainstorm your content marketing?
Are you bouncing ideas off of your colleagues, tailoring ideas according to your target audience, or are you sitting alone in a room with a pencil and paper hoping for inspiration?
No matter what you’re doing, how do you keep your ideas fresh, so you’re not saying the same thing over and over again?
If you’re a content marketer, you’ve probably considered all of these things, but to make sure you’ve adopted the best strategy, Media Shower spoke with a true professional.
In the following interview, Katie Wagner, president of Katie Wagner Social Media Inc., answers questions about her approach to brainstorming for content marketing and more.
What strategies do you use to brainstorm for content marketing?
We take our clients through a process called brand discovery. Brand discovery is where we discuss their target audience, goals, brand voice, etc. Once we have that information, we brainstorm as a team about what types of content will appeal to that audience and help us reach our goals.
Then, we ask our clients for a list of the top 20 questions that their customers ask them. The answers to these questions are a great place to start creating content.
How do you keep things fresh?
To keep things from getting stale, we hold Collaborative Content Time every Thursday at 3 p.m., where we spend an hour brainstorming as a team – all working to create content for the same client. Each Content Editor can submit a client for us to work on and we choose a different one each week.
Sometimes, when you’ve been working with a client for a long time, it can be hard to keep the ideas fresh. This allows us to tap into the creativity of our colleagues to keep producing killer content.
Why is it important to keep putting fresh content out rather than recycling old content?
Because, first and foremost, content marketing is about communication. Sure, it has benefits for SEO and lead generation, but at its heart, it’s a conversation with your audience. If you were having a conversation with anyone else and they kept saying the same thing over and over again, you would probably walk away. The same thing happens online. We respect our audience enough to keep the conversation interesting.
How many unique posts should be shared by a business on any given day?
There’s no hard and fast number. It depends on what social media channel you’re using, how engaged your audience is and what kind of content you have to share. With great content and an audience that’s really interested, posting several times a day may be fine. With boring content, or an audience that’s losing interest, once a day may be too much.
I would say that the general rule of thumb to good social media is to be consistent. I am generally a fan of posting once or twice a day. However, you have the responsibility of creating good content that people want to see. If you’re not willing to do that, perhaps you should rethink using social at all.