5 Content Marketing Ideas

When you think you have stumbled onto a content marketing idea that you believe to be unique, the odds are that dozens of other savvy business people have already had the same epiphany. While your aspiring innovations should not be ignored, there is no reason to spend so much time on originality when you can simply borrow the best content marketing ideas already in practice. Instead of endlessly racking your brain, check out a few of these ideas instead.

Reimagining Content

This idea from Ann Handley who is the Chief Content Officer working at MarketingProfs entails shaping each story that you tell to cater certain personas depending on its delivery channel. This is a stark contrast to simply repackaging content because instead of rehashing the same exact idea, you can take the same base elements to create something new and extraordinary.

SAS (A business analytics software company) has built on this idea by organizing content meetings once a week; a concept any organization could utilize. Their massive content marketing team touches on everything from email marketing to HR, with separate vacuums for each. Yet, by having weekly meetings, content is reimagined far easier, branding is unified, and nothing is ever duplicated.

Creating a Content Product That Mirrors Perfection

Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis came up with this idea by describing perfect content products using five characteristics:

Real-time

Fact-driven

Visual

Efficient

Curated

Many of the top websites worldwide recognize this code and because it is easy to follow, you could easily adapt these principles as well. You can even apply these ideas to your social media presence since operating in this atmosphere becomes far more effective by using the above characteristics to deliver useful, interesting, and helpful content that solve mysteries, problems, and pain points, for your customers.

Social Media 411

Andrew Davis, who is the author of Brandscaping, developed Social Media 411 to be used as a sharing system to create greater visibility within social landscapes amongst influencers. In principle, for each six content items shared via social network, four should be from your target influencer while still remaining relevant to the audience, one should be promotional or sales related (such a coupon), and the other should be an original piece of content created to educate your audience.

Mistakes and Useless Processes

Acknowledging your mistakes is important because if you think you are not making any, then the chances are that you are just not taking enough risks. This makes it easy to fall into a lull of ineffective processes which author Peter Drucker has identified as the useless notion of executing tasks efficiently that should not be done in the first place. Being stuck in a comfort zone will never allow you to take your business to the next level. Instead, you must cease processes that have become ineffective, even if it seems scary.

Content Storytelling

This last idea was developed by Todd Wheatland who is the VP of Thought Leadership at the billion dollar HR outsourcing giant Kelly Services. Wheatland decided to monitor keyword variations to pull the story ideas derived from them to produce 20 unique content pieces. These are not limited to simple blog posts, white papers, or emails. Instead, all sorts of unique content is adapted including infographics, SlideSharepresentations, research reports, and even eBooks which are all delivered from the every new brainstorm.

You should never give up on your dream of creating a new break-through methodology for delivering content. However, there is no reason to sit idle in the meantime either. By borrowing any of the above ideas ideas, you will never have to.