4 Ways to Create Ongoing Marketing Content

4 Ways to Create Ongoing Marketing Content

When building a small business, we often run into the struggle of how to make time for both running and marketing it. Should we be cold calling? What about running ads? It becomes so overwhelming, we’ll often resort to the few methods that feel the most familiar. What if we could connect more with customers, reach new buyers, and bring in sales all from one strategy?

Why Create Ongoing Marketing Content

Content marketing is a key strategy for businesses today meet their goals for reach and sales. Creating and sharing original content can help build trust, form connections, and portray expertise. Are you considering giving it a try? In this post, we’ll give you a rundown of 4 ways to create ongoing marketing content for blog, social, email, and more.

1. Write opinionated blog posts

Blog posts are a content marketing favorite. A great content marketing strategy allows us to reach people through online search. Once they’ve found our posts, they should feel educated and knowledgeable.

To create blog posts that people will want to share, we must write from our expert opinion. If we’re hairstylists, for example, we can write posts on upcoming trends for the next year. We can take from celebrity styles, common client requests, and really show how much we know.

If a particular trend has come into fashion recently and people can’t stop talking about it on social, we can jump on with a blog post. Why are we for or against it? Opinionated blogs can shape public opinion. The comment section is a perfect place to get people chatting about why they agree or disagree which gives you extra engagement.

Posts like these give readers the confidence to buy our products or walk in for an appointment. They’ll read and see that we’re the best at what we do and we’re in the know about the industry.

2. Periodical round-up newsletters

Sending content to our users and potential customers’ inboxes is still to this day the best way to reach them. It’s direct, it’s attention-grabbing, and most people see it come in right on their phone. So, now that we have the medium for sending our content, what should we send?

Since email comes in on the daily, it often becomes a place for news and updates. One of our favorite methods for writing newsletter content is to round up a bunch of things that happened. We don’t have to do it every week, either. If we decide monthly is more sustainable, that’s fine. All we have to do is remember when we create ongoing marketing content is to keep it consistent. If we said “first Tuesday of the month,” it should be the same every month.  The idea is to get readers so loyal to the newsletter that they look forward to it.

What can we round up in our newsletter? If we’re a local bookstore, we can round up top sellers, curate staff recommendations, even books being made into movies this summer. Soon, we’ll turn into readers’ can’t-miss newsletter. That’s great content marketing that often turns into brand loyalty.

3. Make a helpful white paper

White papers are long-form content that focuses on explaining a problem in our industry—whatever it is— and offering a solution. They often look like guides, with carefully designed covers and visual content like graphs and images inside. There are two key parts of a good white paper. One is the content itself, the other is how you give to users.

For the content, focus on advising. To make a helpful white paper for great content marketing, we’ll have to do some digging about what our users want. Go through FAQs in your industry.  Let’s say that we sell wedding planning services. We can write white papers about caterers or the “wedding tax”— the added cost to wedding-related services compared to other events. In the white paper, we’d explain the issue and how to make your wedding budget stretch avoiding the dreaded “tax”.

After writing, how can we get it into the hands of our users? Use website marketing strategies for this. Consider designing a landing page where people can exchange their email for our white paper. Then, run some ads to get people to the page. In the end, people will get the content they want, and we’ll have leads that want to plan a wedding. We’ll send them an email reminding them that we could do the work for them and probably have ourselves a client or two.

4. Start a hashtag on social media

Social media content is what a lot of small businesses focus on in their content marketing strategy. Great content marketing doesn’t have to focus on social media, but we can definitely get on the platforms most suited to our customers.

First, we’ll study which networks our audience uses the most. We can ask them in a survey or look at industry trends. After all, some industries benefit more from social than others. In general, you’ll want to use Twitter for conversations, Pinterest for lifestyle inspiration, Instagram for visual content. Great content marketing fits the platform, without trying to make one-size-fits-all content.

Something that works for many businesses and brands is creating their own hashtag. It spreads campaigns across social for awareness and visibility and facilitates readership as you create ongoing marketing content. Plus, it makes it easy to track who’s talking about our brand. This strategy works great when you’re doing a giveaway, contest, or running a launch.

Some great examples of branding hashtags include the #WantAnR8 from Audi, tweeted over 75,000 times, and the #TweetFromTheSeat hashtag from Charmin.

Takeaways

Now that we’ve gone through our 4 ways of creating ongoing content for our marketing strategy, it seems more approachable, right? How will you plan your next great content marketing move? Maybe you’ll get to writing your next blog post or curating a newsletter worthy of sharing. If you’re feeling like going in-depth, start that white paper. Regardless of which type of content you choose, these are tried-and-true methods for content creation that you can always come back to.

Need help writing your blog or newsletter content? Contact us today to see how Alt Creative can help.