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Hi folks - welcome to another edition of Coast TV. I'm Darren, I head up strategy at Coast
Digital, and today I'm going to be taking you through how to generate killer content
ideas. The reason for that is that we're currently working on a new piece of thought leadership
from our side which is about content marketing and turning that theory that everyone seems
to have into actual practical ideas and practical, useful things that we can go ahead and apply
to our everyday marketing lives. One of the most interesting parts for me in that is about
generating ideas, it's one of the funnest parts of the whole content marketing thing
- it's kind of the central point of your campaign because if your idea isn't good then realistically
the rest of your campaign isn't either. So you really need to spend some time thinking
about this and putting some real planning and some real inspiration if you like into
the start of your campaigns. So I've got 3 things I want to take you through - firstly
is about answering questions, and answering questions is a really good way to come up
with ideas for a good piece of content. When I think about answering questions, I try and
think about that from 3 different points of view. The first one is speaking to your customer-facing
staff internally, so have a chat with your customer service team, have a chat with your
sales and new business teams, have a chat with your account management function if you've
got one, and go and ask them what customers are asking them, because if you can get to
the bottom of that, if you can really understand what those customer needs are at that early
stage by talking to your own internal staff, it's going to give you some really good ideas
for starting to wrap a nice piece of content together, and if you think about a sales guy
going out and pitching, if a customer is asking him the same old questions, if he can turn
around and say "well here's a piece of thought leadership that we've written on that subject,
it's going to answer all your questions on it", you're going to look really good, and
you're going to stand yourself in good stead to go ahead and win that pitch, so it's a
really nice thing to be able to do. Secondly, if you think about flipping that on it's head
for a minute, one of the things that people often think about is the kind of questions
you're being asked, but also one of the things that really puts that into context is what
are the questions that your customers should be asking you but aren't asking you. That's
really valuable stuff and as experts we should be able to put that thought and that context
around those questions, so it really helps develop some powerful thinking and some powerful
inspiration in the kind of content that you want to be producing. Thirdly you want to
have a think about the leads that are actually coming through your website at the moment
- so we've spent time with our customers before running through their saleforce installation
or whatever it is and picking out thousands and thousands of leads and running through
and just picking out key themes, so what are the key things that your customers are actually
asking for when they're submitting contact forms on your site or when they're emailing
you through, because if they've got specific challenges that keep coming up over and over
and over again then it's a really good thing for you to go ahead and answer because you're
going to get a really good number of leads and a really good number of conversions through
that piece of content because you're answering the question that is being asked on a regular
basis - really nice thing to be able to do. Thirdly on this answer questions point is
ask your actual customers, you know, go and speak to customers and assuming you're delivering
a good service (which obviously we all are), you really want to make sure that your customers
are involved in the creation of your content. They've got the ideas, they're the ones that
have the problems that you need to be able to solve. Go and ask them what they are. You
can do that if you've got lots and lots of different customers, so if you're quite, if
you've got vast numbers of customers then you can actually use surveys and things like
that to get lots and lots of quantative information from those customers, and if you're only talking
to a few then it's really good to get them on the phone or even face to face because
you can get some really good insight directly speaking to customers and a really good insight
into what their problems are and what their pain points are. You can then go ahead and
solve those with a nice piece of content and it's going to help you generate some really
valuable leads in the future. Okay, so the next one on this list is "make it practical"
- I think one of the things that we see with content marketing at the moment is that everyone's
trying to do it, everyone's pumping out tons and tons of content, and you really need to
stand out and you really need to provide something that's actually going to make a difference
to people. If you think about your target audience and who they are and what's going
to be useful to them based on perhaps some of the questions that have already come up,
and you provide something that's really, really practical. So for one of our clients over
the last year we produced a piece of content for them that was actually really successful
and it was something that their customers could actually go and print off and use, so
the example I'm talking about, their target audience is landlords, and they wanted to
produce a piece of content that was relevant and useful for landlords in their day to day
lives. So what we ended up with was a guide to creating inventories which is obviously
something that all landlords have to be able to do, and all landlords have to do really
well because if they do it wrong then later on when it comes to the tenant moving out
they're going to stitch themselves up by not having a good inventory, so this is something
that's actually really valuable, a really valuable piece of content that they can take
away and use in their daily lives, and that piece of content has been absolutely ridiculously
successful - more leads from that one piece of content over the year than all the rest
of their marketing combined, so it's been absolutely phenomenally successful. So that's
the kind of thing, if you get this right then you can be really, really successful with
it. I guess thirdly with this, it's about thinking about what is going to be relevant
to your audience, so for us as an agency we're trying to deal with senior level decision
makers on a regular basis and these are people that are pretty time-poor, people that need
to have the biggest impact every day when they show up to work, so realistically they're
not going to have time to read a massive piece of content, so for us the rule of thumb we
start with is that you don't have to create "War and Peace" with this stuff, you really
need to think about who you're writing this for, are they going to have time to read something
big and heavy? Probably not. Actually is it easier for you to produce something that's
a bit lighter and a bit more creative, perhaps a bit more image-heavy? Yes it is. So go ahead
and think about how you can deliver really good valuable content in a way that's not
so word-heavy, that's not going to take you ages to produce, but it's also not going to
take someone ages to read. So thinking back, we've been doing content marketing stuff at
Coast for year and years and years, and actually looking back, we produced a PPC guide back
in 2007 and it was a big, hefty piece, somewhere around 30 pages of written content, lots and
lots of words, actually quite difficult to get through now when we look back at it. If
you compare that to what we released this year - last year in 2013, we actually produced
a PPC Idea Book which was just 10 pages - really easy to digest, but also for us, really easy
to put together, very valuable still, lots and lots of takeaways, lots and lots of useful
tips, and we had really good feedback from it so it's just as valuable as producing this
massive piece of content, probably only took us a third of the time to produce, so really
worth thinking about that. That brings us to the end of the list but there's 1 other
thing that I want you to think about, and that is about stretching these content ideas
as far as you possibly can. We're all limited on time, we all want to get the most out of
what we do, so you want to have a think about how you can apply these ideas across various
channels and try and get the most reach with them as you can. To give you a live example
of that, I'm now recording a video for a piece of content that we've written - this is a
way for us to get a video on YouTube, we're going to write a blog post about this video
as well, so it gives us a chance to sort of stretch this 1 piece of content into 2 more
channels which is our blog and our YouTube channel, so that means anyone searching on
YouTube for content ideas is going to find this video, anyone searching in Google might
see our blog in Google News, that's quite a nice thing to be able to do, and it's also
going to give our team here at Coast some really valuable content to share on their
social media platforms and give us that little bit more reach, so it's really important that
you think about how you're going to stretch that content out and how you're going to get
the most from it because what you don't want to have to do is every time you need to produce
a piece of content, you don't want to have to start from scratch every time, and if you
can get lots and lots of pieces of content from 1 piece of overall killer content, then
you're going to do really well, and so that's what I want you to think about when you next
come to generate some ideas for content creation. So that brings us to the end of the video,
thanks a lot for watching, as I said earlier we've done this to promote a guide of ours
that we've written which you can find in the description below - if you've got any questions,
do leave them below in the comments and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks very
much!