By Jason Falls Maybe it’s jumping the gun, but when it comes to content marketing and your content strategy, I think you need to go beyond having an editorial calendar, assignments and the like. I think you need to have an arsenal of content you’re constantly building, evolving and stocking so that your worries about content are always distant.
If I ran out of content ideas today, I want three, five, 10 weeks worth built up until inspiration hits me again.
Certainly, that’s an ideal world scenario and isn’t always feasible. But keeping three or four blog posts in the can for when your brain isn’t working isn’t a bad idea.
But think beyond that to your Facebook content, your Tweets, your YouTube videos, etc. The content on those networks is different because the communities are different. Are you building up an arsenal of content there, too.
As you know, I’m working a bit with Expion, a social media management solution for franchise and multiple-location or multiple account need businesses. (Think restaurant chains, colleges or universities with multiple department accounts to manage or even advertising agencies who want to manage social presences for multiple clients.) They’ve got a neat feature that speaks to this notion of content arsenal I find really appealing.
Their platform allows the corporate marketing team to build a content library for all the various locations to pull from. This helps ensure consistent messaging, branding and the like. But it also empowers the not-quite-hip-to-social-media store manager who wants to post good stuff on Facebook to promote his or her location, but doesn’t get it. The content library can be built to provide turnkey messages that work at anytime for any store or location in the organization.
Take that a step further and look at all the content posted by both the corporation, but then also locally driven content that active store manager post, and analyze each piece of content to see what’s the most engaging. Then take the most engaging content, regardless of its source, and pump that into your stockpile so other stores can benefit from one manager’s brilliant Facebook post.
Sure, Expion has the platform that does all that automatically, but even if you don’t use an enterprise content or social media management system, you could take the same thinking and apply it to your business.
Have a team of bloggers but a few who don’t quite produce the same amount or quality of posts? Use the successful ones to teach or inspire them. Have a couple of employees with bigger and better Twitter accounts than the company’s? Ask them to share some ideas on what would make the company’s better.
And take what’s working for one of your accounts and see if you can apply it to others. Building a content arsenal then begins to seem a lot easier than you think.
Your thoughts? How can you build up a content arsenal using your current staff, ideas from the personal realm or even what your competition is doing? The comments are yours.
Related articles
- Franchise Social Media Tools: The Customer’s Perspective (socialmediaexp.wpengine.com)
- What Content Strategy Is and Isn’t (tc.eserver.org)
- Content Marketing infographic: The Content Grid to help you with your Content Strategy (socialwayne.com)
- An Introduction to Content Strategy (verticalmeasures.com)
- Challenges in Content Strategy for the Coming Year (conversationagent.com)
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