Content Marketing Tips: 10 Tips and Tricks for Creating Content

By now, most brands understand the importance of content. In fact, HubSpot found that companies that blog get 97% more inbound links and 55% more web visitors than those that don’t. Still, creating content on a regular schedule poses some challenges.

In an AMA webinar  I hosted with Rick Burnes at HubSpot, a third of attendees said time to do it was the biggest challenges they faced in creating content. A quarter said having staff to create content was their biggest challenge. Creating content doesn’t have to be this hard. Here are some content-creation strategies that were shared:

1. Get into the content mindset. Anytime you’re thinking about your business or industry, be looking for inspiration. Could the discussion you had in a marketing meeting last week be turned into a blog post? Could that answer your colleague posted on Quora? What about that presentation you gave at a conference last month? Look for these kinds of opportunities.

2. Create tweetable facts. Compile a list of statistics and include a “click to tweet” link next to each one. Include the link back to the original post. Here’s an example called 10 Tweetable Facts from 2nd Annual B2B Marketing Trends 2012 Report. This strategy creates multiple entry points into a blog post and allows readers to easily tweet the stat they find most interesting. The ease with which readers can share your content boosts the potential for it to go viral.

3. Don’t be Hemingway, just be useful. A lot of people who are new to content marketing try to turn their content into an art form. This places a ton of pressure to craft the Great American Novel or something worthy of a National Poetry Award, and it’s not necessary. If you find yourself getting sucked into this mindset, simply ask yourself, “Will my target customer find this useful?” If the answer is yes, you’ve done your job.

4. Conduct a poll or survey. Write a blog post and ask readers some questions about your topic. Then you can take the responses and craft another blog post, so you’re getting two pieces of content out of one idea. For instance, Boston.com’s Daily Dose blog published a reader poll to tie in with new research on headphone-related accidents.

5. Don’t make one person carry the load. Often at companies, the blog manager will carry the whole load of the blog, which isn’t scalable. Instead, find creative ways of enlisting people throughout the company to contribute to the blog. At Hubspot, 130 out of 300 employees blog and they give awards to the top bloggers. Take advantage of people’s vanity or competitiveness to motivate them.

6. Create guest blog posts. Invite a guest blogger to write on your site or contribute guest posts to another site. When you publish guest posts, it’s an easy way to create content with minimal effort. When you contribute a guest post yourself, it exposes you to a new audience and boosts your SEO. For instance, here’s a guest post I wrote for HubSpot about curating B2B content.

7. Re-use your best old content. Repurposing content you’ve already created is far easier than creating brand new content. Another variation on re-publishing older content is taking it through the content marketing pyramid. If you have a 20-page ebook, chop it up into 20 blog posts. Or you could take 20 blog posts and turn them into an ebook.

8. Conduct an interview. The beauty of interviews is that it requires minimal time and effort to email an expert in your industry, type up questions, and clean up their responses before publishing. However, your interview subject gets exposed to a new audience and gets the SEO benefits of links, while you get to expose your readers to a new perspective. Here’s an interview with Craig Zabodijnk, Marketing Manager at DPT Labs who sends out a regular curated email where he discusses his curation methods.

9. Create an infographic. Infographics have a far reach and are easy to embed on other sites, which creates the potential for your content to go viral. Include your brand’s name and logo and make the infographic available under Creative Commons so others can easily share it, giving you more exposure. Here’s an example of an infographic from Eloqua about the content grid.

10. Test your content. Don’t rest on assumptions of what types of content works. Test those assumptions to make sure that you’re not killing yourself over content that won’t get read as much as another type of content. You might assume that your readers would enjoy video clips, but videos are time- and resource-intensive to produce, so if cartoons require less effort and get much more clicks from readers, you should do that instead.

I hope you enjoyed this post. I wanted to also invite you to join our upcoming AMA webinar on August 20th 1pm EST to learn how to Optimize Your Lead Nurturing Process: The Right Content to the Right Audience. Register and reserve your spot >>