Content Marketing: How Your Business Can Produce Content

With more and more businesses realising that content marketing is a great way of generating traffic to their site by gaining ranking in the search engines, and ultimately leading to more sales, we are often faced with the question 'How can my business produce content?'

Business owners and managers know they need to come up with ideas but quite often come unstuck at the thought of what they can write about; that is if they even have the time to do so in the first place!

As time is often the issue for coming up with ideas for content, for the rest of this post I want to show scenarios in everyday businesses where you and your employees could be generating content ideas to be put to good use.

Scenario 1

Your business is IT support and a customer rings you and their computer will not power up when they press the power button.

In this scenario you will more than likely go through the motions of making sure this is not a human error and work through the issue until it is resolved by replacing the power supply unit in the computer.

Turning this into content ' You create an FAQ page on common human errors for computers not turning on. Plugs are often disconnected by people feet under the desk, switches turned off by the cleaners, etc. You can expand the FAQ section so that it covers common hardware failures that mean a computer will not start.

Scenario 2

You own a golf shop on a high street.

You have regular customers and without a doubt you build relationships, even friendships, with these people. Being avid golfers you talk about techniques you use and are regularly giving advice to your customers.

Turning this into content ' You develop a series of blog posts showing how to improve your swing, and you could even ask some of your knowledgeable customers to contribute or guest post.

Scenario 3

You run a travel agency.

Every day you have customers booking holidays and you are giving advice on destinations.
Turning this into content ' You create a lifetimes worth of content with titles such as '5 places to stay in Paris', '10 things to do in New York' and 'The Bucket List of Holiday Destinations'.

As you can see, there are possibilities to come up with content ideas throughout the daily working day of a business. In fact, every time you communicate with a customer there is a possibility of using that information and turning it into some form of content marketing. It could be a phone call, a letter, an Email or a brochure; you then only need to adapt those communications into a blog post, a PDF, a podcast or a video to turn everyday activities into something usable.

This blog post itself is a fine example of what I am writing about. Here at Vertical Leap we endorse discussions within our teams and bounce ideas off each other. One of these discussions was about getting our clients to talk openly with us about their business, and it was from that conversation that the idea of this post was created.

Put simply ' If you are communicating, you are creating content!

I hope you found this blog useful and has given you some ideas how you can start creating some great content for your business! If you still find time and resource a challenge, talk to us, our team of Brand Journalists are ready to help.