3 Tips to Guide Your Content Creation

1. Be Honest and Share Freely

Earning trust and holding people’s attention can be really hard, especially when you’re in a business with long buying cycles.

Instead of bombarding potential customers with ‘buy my stuff’ messaging, just focus on being helpful to earn their attention and trust. Some ways to do this include: 

• Sharing how to solve a problem
• Sharing your recommendations or expert advice on industry-specific issues
• Sharing case studies or project walk-throughs that show how you have helped other people like them

Being helpful and honest is doubly important when you’re selling high-value products like many of our industrial and manufacturing clients. If you want someone drop $100K+ on your product, they are way more likely to do that if you’ve spent time giving them helpful information.

Focus on content that resonates with your audience, and when it comes time to buy, you’ll be top of mind for businesses that they ‘Know, Like and Trust’.

2. Keep it (Mostly) Evergreen

When you’re brainstorming content ideas, focus on themes that are likely to stay relevant in the long term. Ask yourself:

• Is this an ‘evergreen’ topic (or is this information going to be out of date in 3 months)?
• Is this topic actually useful for our target audience, or is it self-serving?
• Is this something we have the chops to talk about? Does it play into our expertise?
• Is there an overlap with the product or service we provide? (Don’t go into full sales mode, but consider if there’s a subtle link to what you offer)
• Are we the best people to talk about this? If you can’t honestly create 5-star content on the topic, skip it and pick another idea where you have a real depth of expertise
• Does it present a relatively unbiased viewpoint? Unless you’re writing a sales page, it makes sense to be open about any downsides/cons. Your customer will sniff out an unrealistic article a mile away.

Forget being salesy and forget putting a too-heavy focus on SEO – these things are often a natural byproduct of your commitment to helping your customer in an honest and transparent way. Just work on sharing information that is likely to remain relevant in the long term, and that helps your customer – simple!

3. Create Once, Share Forever

Once you’ve done the hard work of creating content, keep using that original information by slicing and dicing it in different ways. Here’s an example of 7 ways to look at one topic:

• Uses
• Types
• Tools
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Problems
• How to
• Vs

What does this look like in practice? Here’s an example for a manufacturer of edge banding machines.

• Uses: What are edge banding machines used for?
• Types: Different types of edge banding machines on the Australian market
• Tools: Glue pucks or pellets: what to use with your edge bander
• Advantages of adding an edge banding machine to your workshop
• Disadvantages of cheap edge banding machines – what to look for
• Problems: Troubleshooting your edge banding machine
• How to: How to choose the right edge bander for your flat pack kitchen factory
• Vs: [Your brand] edge bander vs [the competition]

This very basic framework can be repeated with all your products or services to kick off your list of content ideas.  

Bonus: 

Check out Marcus Sheridan’s ‘They Ask, You Answer’ approach for more on how to do this. 

Do you need some extra guidance with your content? We can help.

Contact us to find out more about how to set up an evergreen content calendar that will make content creation easy.