When it comes to content marketing, your options are limited only by your imagination. If you stay open to novel ideas, you'll be able to come up with ideas for creating quality content that is useful enough to keep your clients' customers coming back for more.
Here are 10 ways to mix up the content on your clients' blogs or websites, keeping it interesting, varied, and relevant:
1. Think outside the box.
Quality content can be anything from a picture to a song. If you can provide eclectic content while still staying relevant, you'll increase your odds of keeping your clients' audience interested and engaged, coming to your site for the type of information they're not finding elsewhere.
2. Brainstorm.
Most likely your clients' staff has great ideas for quality content. Advise them to sit down with a group of key employees and think out loud. If they create an atmosphere that encourages an uncensored exchange of ideas, the discussion could lead to some great ideas. They can use a whiteboard and write down every idea, no matter how silly it seems at first. Editing can be done later.
3. Interview a customer.
Customers can help add creative content to your clients' sites by providing a perspective that they might not otherwise have. They could consider running a series such as "Customer of the Month," in which they feature a stakeholder who can provide information about the products and services the company provides, and the unique ways that your clients interact with customers.
4. Feature an employee.
Your clients' employees are the face of their businesses, the individuals in the trenches working out the nuts and bolts of how the company operates. Quality content for your site can also include pieces from their point of view describing a solution to a unique problem, or a thought-provoking customer service experience.
5. Make a video.
Your clients can make use of the diverse media options that they have at their fingertips. Video content can be either professional or raw depending on the message they want to project: raw footage is inexpensive to produce and can provide an effective sense of how the company operates behind the scenes. Professional footage is more expensive, but it gives the company a unique kind of credibility, and also offers a great opportunity to craft an effective message.
6. Sponsor a contest.
Providing a format for getting customers engaged is an imaginative way to add quality content to a site. Contests are exciting and fun, and if your clients come up with a unique way to draw attention to their products and services, customers will keep coming back to their site for updates.
7. Show "What Not to Do".
Plenty of sites provide useful information about how to complete a task relevant to the product of service that a company provides, but quality content about unsuccessful attempts can be equally useful and entertaining. Use pictures and anecdotes to show mishaps and solutions. These examples can help set customers at ease by demonstrating that everyone makes mistakes, and that most mistakes are not insurmountable.
8. Share your history.
Every business has a story about how it was founded and how it evolved into its present form. These stories can be an excellent source of quality content, adding personality and depth. If your clients don't feel qualified to construct a compelling narrative yourself, enlist the help of someone who can.
9. Showcase vendors.
Businesses rely on relationships with customers, and these relationships become even deeper when your clients show their customers that they are also connected to the vendors who supply the raw materials for the products and services they provide. Create quality content by telling the stories of producers and suppliers, creating a compelling web of interconnectedness.
10. Showcase the competition.
Car insurance companies such as Progressive have been quite successful using this strategy, showing the prices that their competitors offer in order to demonstrate how their own favorably compare. There are many ways to create quality content out of these types of comparisons.
For example, if your client's company has a unique approach to providing a product or service, providing information about a competing option can highlight this difference. Although comparisons can be useful and informative, they should avoid transparently praising your own offerings and disparaging those of competitors. This type of shameless self-promotion can harm your clients more than it helps. Instead, advise your clients to find creative ways to honestly and respectfully show how their companies stand out.
