If you’ve read our previous blog post about Why Great Content is Key to Online Marketing, you probably know that you need to create quality content for your business if you want to have a strong online presence. If you’re reading this blog post about How to Make an Online Content Creation Strategy, must recognize the importance of having a plan in place for how often to create content, how to edit it, etc. That just leaves one missing—but critical—component: creating quality content.
The act of coming up with content ideas tends to be the one that trips most people up, halting the momentum you may have generated with your strategy and throwing your plan for a loop. You get stuck with writer’s block, spending more brain power and time trying to come up with a good idea for what to write about than writing.
Next thing you know, the time you’d carved out for content creation is nearly up, and you’d rather be doing pretty much anything else, so you move on and the task falls by the wayside. This is why we suggested in our previous blog post that you spend time up front brainstorming ideas and creating a working list of idea to reference, dividing up the processes in order to improve the efficiency of both tasks.
Have no fear, once again VIB is here to help. These 10 content topics work for just about any business. Feel free to use them as a starting point for your own brainstorming list. Just fill in the generic portions with something specific to your business or industry, and start creating! Hopefully when you’ve read through this, it’ll help you generate some other ideas that you can add to your ever-growing list.
One final thought before we hop into the list. Remember that online content does not always have to be written in the form of a blog post. These days, people respond very well to media such as pictures or videos. (Sometimes, they’re even more popular than a written blog post.) So, without further ado:
- Why We Recommend the XYZProduct for ABCTargetCustomer
- This is a great opportunity to combine content that your customers may be searching for (and thus may lead them to you in search results), sales for one of your products, and establishing expertise for your company all in one. Just pick one of your products and talk about the benefits to your target customer of using that product to solve their problem. Assuming you understand the product(s) you are selling, this should be an easy one to create a 500 – 1,000-word blog post. You can even include a picture or two of the product to make it a more dynamic post.
- What We’ve Learned Working in the ABCDEFG Industry
- Here you can give your customers an inside view into what it’s like to work in your industry and establish your company or your own expertise. It can also help you to level with your customers by showing a bit of vulnerability—talking about times when you made mistakes or learned new things. It will reinforce to them that you have been in the industry for a while and can be trusted for advice, as opposed to an amateur who is inexperienced and naive. This way, customers know they can turn to you when they’re in a pickle, which will establish brand loyalty and create repeat customers.
- Cool Ideas for Utilizing the XYZProduct to Really Stand Out
- Again, this is an opportunity to promote your products and services, and establish expertise in one post. It will make customers see you as an organization that really understands what you’re selling and as thought leaders that they can turn to if they really want to stay ahead of the curve. This obviously only works well if you have a product or service with multiple uses, but, assuming you do, chances are that during your time selling it you’ve become aware of many different applications outside of its traditional use.
- Our Favorite New ABCDEF’s of 2018
- This is a very generic topic that you can fill in with anything that’s relevant to your business or industry. If you’re in the retail space, there are likely seasonal products that come out each year, and you can talk about your favorite new ones. If you’re a service provider, there are probably new tools you’ve utilized or emerging thought leaders in your space. Just pick something that is new in your industry and talk about a few of the benefits of that new thing. It will show your customers that you stay on top of industry trends and that your company is not stagnant but instead are always considering new ideas.
- The Most Impressive Industry Projects of 2018
- Similar to the above topic, here’s an opportunity to show your customers that you pay attention to what’s going on in your industry, even if your company is not directly involved. If you sell products, showcase examples of customers who have used them to their fullest potential. If you provide services, give some credit to your competitors who have done a great job with their own customers. It shows that you’re a classy, professional organization, and also provides a strong chance that your post will be shared by those other organizations to expand your reach with some “free” marketing.
- Why We Made XYZDecision in Year123
- Again, here’s an opportunity to give a sneak peek inside your organization to your customers, humanizing your company so they feel more comfortable with you. It can show some vulnerability that customers will respect and could help build loyalty to you if they understand why you’ve done what you’ve done. Just pick any decision you’ve made at any time – whether it was the decision to start your company 20 years ago because of your passion for the industry, the decision to remove the soda vending machines from the office to help your employees stay healthy, or the decision to stop buying a particular item because it wasn’t eco-friendly. Anything that helps your customers understand the people within your organization, have a sneak peek into your company culture, and better understand your company strategy.
- How-To ABCXYZ
- If you have the tools and capabilities to create a video, this is a great topic to post a video about. Just talk about how to do anything – any application of your product, anything you provide with your services, anything at all. As long as it’s something that a customer in your industry might want to know how to do, create a simple how-to video or blog post about it. It will establish you as experts and give your customer a reason to spend time on your site. A helpful video or blog like this also improves the odds that your customers may want to share with their friends or their own customers, providing you free reach.
- The Pros and Cons of ABCXYZ
- Pros and cons lists are easy content creation. Just think about anything relevant to your business – products you sell, different types of service providers your customer could use, your competitors vs. you, different applications of products, tools you use, etc. There are so many different ways to present this topic, and there’s no right or wrong. Just pick something that you think your target customer might be deciding between and write up the pros and cons of it. It doesn’t even have to be something you sell directly either. It can just be something you know about that can establish your expertise and improve your brand image as a trustworthy resource for future decision making – further reinforcing customer awareness and loyalty to your brand.
- Meet Your CompanyName Team!
- This is a really easy topic that humanizes your company and gives your customers some insight into who works there. You can easily fill up some space with some pictures – a group photo of the whole team, then maybe some individual pictures for some people. Ask your team members to provide a few interesting tidbits about themselves: what they like to do for fun, what their expertise is, why they like working for the company, etc. You only need to put a few key points and a picture for each person to really have the humanizing impact that this post is designed to achieve.
- How ABCChange Will Impact XYZ
- Yet another opportunity to establish expertise for your business and show your customers that you understand your industry very thoroughly is to talk about a change in the industry, whether it’s a new governmental rule, a new technology that impacts the way the industry operates, or an acquisition of a company in your industry by another. This is pretty much just an opinion piece. What is your analysis of how this change will impact the industry, why do you think that, and what does it mean for your target customers and their own business or day-to-day lives?
Pairing these topics with relevant links, images and videos will create dynamic content to keep readers interested to the very end.
These 10 ideas for creating content for your business are a starting point to inspire for your own brainstorming list. You don’t have to use any of these, but if you ever feel like you’re stuck, feel free to come back and reference them. And last but not least, always remember that you don’t even have to worry about any of this on your own at all! VIB is always available to create and implement a content creation strategy for your business, so you can forget about it and focus on your day-to-day operations. All you have to do is ask!