Easy content marketing ideas to kick-start your strategy

If you’re looking for some content marketing ideas to help you start growing your audience and visibility, we’ve put together a few ‘easy wins’ that you can implement in-house to get things moving in the right direction. As content marketing specialists, we don’t want to give away all of our tricks and methods, but these tips will help you get the ball rolling…

Before we head into our ideas, it’s important to recognise that an effective content marketing strategy takes time to develop and needs even longer to really pay off. It’s a multi-pronged attack on reaching your audience and nurturing recognition and loyalty for your brand, creating a kind of snowball effect as it picks up pace and becomes more established. 

Before you even start producing content, you need to identify where your audience lives online, so you can work out the right distribution mediums for your messaging. While posting blogs on your website can be a great place to start, you need to think about social media, YouTube, webzine editorials and other platforms where you can deliver tailored content to past, present and future customers. 

For the more complex sides of content marketing, such as working out your KPIs, developing a robust, ongoing strategy and measuring results, you may need some additional, outsourced support from a digital marketing agency (hi!), but here are a few ideas to get you going.

Four fab content marketing ideas

1. Platforms and pillar-clusters – it’s easy to think of a topic and bash out a quick blog, then link back to that post from your various social platforms, but you’ll soon run out of steam, and/or end up with a disjointed jumble with no core strategy behind it. Instead, start off with a broader topic/issue/pain point and see how you can break that down into a series of related pieces to sit underneath. By creating more detailed and targeted content, you can increase engagement while maximising the value of just one great idea – plus you also have the option to provide that information in different formats depending on the platform e.g. a talking head video for YouTube or an Instagram reel, keeping the same idea fresh and focused.
2. Reach out with research – this is a great one for engaging with your audience at both ends. Utilise your current customers or social audiences by encouraging them to participate in surveys and discussions, gathering evidence on products, service levels or industry-specific issues etc. Then take the opinions and data you’ve collated to produce an insightful, evidenced piece that will help substantiate you as a knowledgeable and trusted source. Tie in with current events if you can and use statistics in captivating headlines to draw people in – adjusting to the audience/platform accordingly.
3. Re-visit and re-work – who says you need to create every piece of content from scratch? Use your site analytics to identify existing, poor-performing content and re-hash it into something new and more valuable. You can also look for content that has got lots of engagement and re-work for a different audience or platform. That great blog post could become an animated explainer video, or that pillar content could become an in-depth webinar.
4. User-generated content – don’t underestimate the value of an objective voice! Scout your digital platforms for mentions, images, reviews and repackage these to boost your brand awareness. Link testimonials to products, re-post brand mentions and shout-outs, create video stories from a selection of sources and cite snippets from rave reviews to help drive campaigns or add value to visuals. 

So there you go, a few easy content marketing ideas you can embrace and implement straight away – but if you need any further advice, speak to our team to see how we can help build up your brand with our digital marketing services.