Many marketers struggle to find engaging content. You might feel like you keep doing the same things and wonder what else you could be doing to grow your business. Or you may wonder how on earth you can add more to your plate when you’re barely keeping up with everything as it is.
Here are 25 marketing ideas to expand your creativity to help you grow your business, including creative ways to repurpose content to maximize your efforts.
1. Create a Content Calendar
You know you need to increase your marketing approaches, but actually attempting to do so can become overwhelming. You are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down. Write them down in a content calendar dedicated exclusively to your content marketing so you can easily keep track of when you need to post.
Start with the methods you are already using and add them to the calendar. Next, block out time on your calendar each week to learn about something new. Some new skills, like learning how to do video editing, can take weeks of watching tutorials. Be patient and make your goals realistic.
Once you confidently understand how to create a new type of content, schedule this on your calendar. Keep building on your new marketing approaches and find a balance between maintaining each new strategy while also setting aside time to learn new ones.
You may only have time to do some approaches, like making videos, once a quarter. Check your analytics and focus your time, money, and energy on your most effective strategies.
2. Answer Common Questions
Encourage your visitors to post questions on your website or social media posts and create content that answers those questions. If you don’t have a lot of traffic or followers, research common questions through Internet searches. Don’t just resort to creating an FAQ page.
Create content that is so thorough and comprehensive that your visitors feel satisfied with the information. Encourage readers to leave topic-related questions in the comments of your posts and be sure to answer them.
3. Interview Industry Thought Leaders
67% of consumers say that an unbiased expert’s endorsement increases the chances that they will decide to purchase. People will respect the opinion and advice of an expert. Gather your questions and get answers from a source your customers and clients will trust.
4. Video-Record Your Interview
Take your expert interview a step further by recording it as a video and uploading it to YouTube. Video is becoming more and more popular each year. On average, users spend six hours and forty-eight minutes watching videos online each week.
5. Embed a Video on Your Homepage
Your website homepage is 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results if it includes a video.
6. Make a Video of Behind-the-Scenes Footage
57% of television shows are now reality TV shows. Add a little reality TV to your marketing by showing behind-the-scenes footage of you buying supplies, creating your products, facing an obstacle, or attempting something new like getting a logo designed. Nothing is more humanizing than showing your everyday activities and struggles rather than always making sure everything is picture-perfect.
7. Host a Webinar
73% of business-to-business sales leaders and marketers say that a webinar is the number-one way to generate quality leads. This is another method for pairing questions with answers from an industry expert.
8. Create a Podcast
32% of the US population reports listening to at least one podcast per month. Fortunately, you can repurpose content in other forms and turn it into a podcast.
For example, once you’ve finished a webinar or video of an interview, you can use the audio for your podcast. Simply download the audio, edit it to take out pauses and stutters, add some music for the intro and outro, and now it’s ready to upload to podcast channels like podbean.com.
You can even record several related blog posts and turn your written content into podcasts.
9. Post Your Podcast on Spotify
Once your podcast is created, you can also upload it to Spotify. Spotify has 200 million active listeners in 75 countries.
10. Conduct a Case Study
92% of consumers report reading at least one review before deciding on a purchase. Bring that one review alive by creating a case study. Interview a client or customer that had a great experience with your company and make that your case study to show prospective clients what to expect with your business.
Even better, document your experience with a customer from start to finish to turn it into behind-the-scenes footage on your customer experience to promote your business.
11. Create an eBook
65% of small businesses have found that ebooks are the number-one most effective type of content for a content marketing strategy. You can write an ebook from scratch, compile your most popular blog posts, or do a combination of both by rewriting related blog posts into separate chapters.
12. Write a 101 Guide
Once you’ve become an expert in your field, it’s easy to assume that your specialty knowledge is common knowledge. Go back to basics and write a beginner’s guide ebook for your industry that starts at ground zero. Assume that your audience knows nothing about your industry.
13. Create a List of Top-Ten Tips
People love top-ten lists, and compiling a list of top-ten tips is a great way to show your expertise in your field or industry. You can break up your top-ten list into individual tweets on Twitter.
14. Build an Email List
87% of business-to-business marketers say that email marketing is the primary way they nurture leads. Offer your ebook as a free download in exchange for prospective customers’ email address, and then break up your top-ten tips into ten separate emails to be delivered in a series over several weeks.
15. Create a Newsletter
Once your ten tips have been sent, stay in regular contact with your email subscribers through a helpful, insightful newsletter. Services like GetResponse and AWeber make it easy for you to create a consistent and engaging email marketing campaign.
16. Compile a List of Quotes from Industry Experts
85% of potential customers prefer content from trusted experts. Find quotes from experts in your industry and compile them into a list.
17. Combine Quotes with Images and Post on Social Media
Images in social media are very important to promote engagement. Tweets that included images receive 150% more retweets than those without. Facebook posts that include images have 2.3 times more engagement than posts that don’t include them.
18. Create Help-with-a-Problem Videos for YouTube
70% of YouTube viewers prefer to watch videos that help them with some kind of problem with their studies, hobbies, or job.
19. Share a Hack
Hacks are very popular content. You have a 279% better chance of having someone view your YouTube video if it contains the word “hack” in the title than if it does not.
20. Define Industry Terms
Some industries have thousands of terms included in their technical jargon. For example, Investopedia has over 13,000 financial terms listed on their website. Create a list of terms related to your industry and define them.
21. Share Smaller Pieces of Content on Social Media
Any content you create, whether it’s a video, blog post, list, or podcast, can be broken up into smaller bits and shared on social media. This is a great way to cross-promote your content across all platforms. For example, you can create multiple GIFs from a video and post one a day for a week to promote your video on social media while your video drives traffic to your website.
22. Share Surprising Facts
Where are the materials in your product made? When were important discoveries made in your industry? How much money or time does your product save your customers every year? Make a list of surprising facts your potential customers might be interested to know.
23. Run a Photo Contest
Share your product in unusual places or situations and ask your customers to share their photos as well and have a contest. Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome has his own Twitter account doing just that. You can ask your followers to vote with likes to determine the winner. The winner can receive a discount on a purchase or something free.
24. Create a Checklist
Consumers love finding checklists for a wide variety of things, whether it is shopping, packing, cooking, or making a purchase. You can create a checklist to solve a problem, prevent mistakes, troubleshoot, prepare, or diagnose issues. Add value for your customers and clients by creating some useful checklists.
25. Create a Buyer’s Guide
Give expert advice to your customers or clients about what to look for, what to watch out for, how to know which brands are best, or anything that would be helpful for them. Of course, your buying guide can also guide them right to your product by showing them why yours is the best.
Final Thoughts
Although this list of 25 marketing ideas is by no means exhaustive, it is a good place to start. The important thing is to always expand what you’re doing.
And finally, make sure that you’re always keeping your target audience top of mind and delivering content they want to consume.
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