If you’re an owner of a small-medium business, you probably can’t go on LinkedIn or Facebook without seeing videos from business coaches or marketing gurus screaming at you to produce more content.
The reality for most business owners is that even if you have the time to spend creating new content, finding something interesting to build your content around can be difficult.
At Content Hype, we specialise in helping businesses find their story-telling opportunities and harness them to create engaging content in various forms to truly capture their target audience.
How do we find these opportunities?
We speak to people and we ask questions.
We talk to the business owners, sometimes the business’ staff or, if we have access to them, we speak to the customers or people who fit the business’ ideal customer.
Today, we will lift the lid on three of the easiest questions you can ask yourself to identify great content opportunities.
These questions will force you to think about what’s working in your business, the problems you are helping your customers to solve and the many different ways you can effectively communicate your business’ point of difference and value proposition.
Here are three simple questions you can ask yourself, your staff, your customers or even a friend to start finding great story-telling opportunities.
What is the best thing you or your business has achieved in the last month?
Your next great piece of content can come from simply stopping and reflecting on your biggest recent achievements.
We work closely with sporting organisations at Content Hype and sports clubs are never short of great content ideas.
Why?
Because every weekend there is a match or a result to talk about.
If it was a good result, you can talk about what went right. If it was a bad result, you can talk about what needs to improve.
Business’ are no different. Every day, every week, every month, your business is performing and its striving to achieve results.
What was the last big win you had?
Was it achieving success for a satisfied customer? Put together a case study.
Was it landing a big client? Write a company announcement.
Was it winning an award? Tell us what you did to win it.
Whatever the achievement was, there’s a great piece of content to be written, filmed and/or photographed and shared with the world.
The important thing to remember here is that you want to tell a great story that goes beyond simply describing a service.
Who were the people involved? What were the problems did they come to you with? How did you solve it? What was the outcome? How do they feel about it?
If done effectively, you can seamlessly tell a great story about your win which captures the intersection between human interaction and service delivery.
What is the most common question you find yourself repeatedly answering?
If you find yourself constantly answering the same or a similar set of questions about a particular topic relevant to your industry or business or the services you offer, there’s a piece of content screaming to be produced.
If your existing customers are looking for answers, then you can bet your bottom dollar that people looking to engage with businesses’ like yours have the same questions and are looking for someone who can answer it.
Focus your next bit of content marketing on proactively answering those questions.
Doing this will demonstrate to active and engaged shoppers that you can help them with the problem they are trying to solve and allows you to demonstrate your expertise before they have a chance to call one of your competitors.
You might even find some of your competitors distributing your content for you!
You don’t have to give everything away, but you can always demonstrate that your business has the answers your future customers are looking for.
If you work in a team, have a chat with your co-workers or staff and get a feel for the sorts of issues existing and prospective are facing and start from there.
Other than proactively answering customer questions and establishing yourself as an authority figure in your marketplace, these pieces of content can become great resources for your staff.
They provide a single resource all customer-facing staff can use to ensure customer questions are being answered consistently across the board.
Send a copy of this sort of content to your referrers so they can effectively demonstrate your expertise to those in their network who may require your services.
What is happening in your industry?
If you’re a savvy business owner, you’re going to have some concept of the issues playing out at a macro level in your industry.
What do these changes mean for you? What do they mean for your customers?
Answering those two questions should give you at least one idea for your next piece of content.
These sorts of pieces are particularly effective on Google if done correctly.
Google is quick to pick up on search trends and if you can get in early and demonstrate your content effectively answers a new question people are asking, you’ll have plenty of eyes on your content.
Here’s one such example from Tick Box Conveyancing.
Got some great content ideas but still need help with execution and management? Want to explore these and more questions in depth? Contact us today.