Writers block doesn’t just affect novelists. Modern marketing is all about storytelling and both B2Bs and B2Cs have to treat themselves like publishers, committing to releasing a steady stream of content to their social media followers. Content creation brings people in and then keeps them engaged, turning prospects into paying customers.
But it’s not always easy to know what to create, which is where this post comes in. We’ll be sharing a few different tips to help you to break through that writer’s block and to continue making great content that people go out of their way to consume and to share with their friends and business associates.
The first and most obvious thing to do is to ask. You might be surprised at how happy your social media following is to help, but even if you don’t get much of a response, there’s nothing to worry about. You can also search social networking sites to see what people are saying about your industry. If you find someone searching for information and failing to find it, that means there’s an opportunity there for you to plug the gap.
Competitor Analysis
Another good way to come up with ideas is to look at your competitors, and that includes news publications. After all, anywhere that people spend their time online is competing with you for their attention, and that includes social networking sites and email inboxes. You can’t see what your potential customers are chatting to their friends about, but you can see what they’re reading about from the major publishers in your industry.
It’s important to note here that simply copying what other people are doing won’t work. Instead, you need to look at the broader themes that are being discussed and to find a new way to approach them. So if people are talking about the internet of things, be bold and make predictions on what IoT technology means for your industry.
Opinion pieces in particular can make for great content fodder, because you can take somebody else’s article and then explain why you either agree or disagree with it. Either way, you’ll be taking a stance, and people respect that. Don’t worry too much about people disagreeing with you and taking offence to what you’re saying. The people that count will either agree with you and respect you for saying it or they’ll engage in a friendly debate. Either way, it’s something that you can start to talk about.
Conclusion
When it comes to content creation, the key is to make sure that you’re constantly iterating and evolving by trialling new approaches and measuring the responses that they get. Sometimes you need to try something to find out that it doesn’t work. Sometimes it works out better than you could ever have imagined. Either way, we hope that this post has given you a few ideas you can put into practice. Good luck.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.