Ep.4 – How To Come Up With Digital Marketing Ideas

[00:00:09] Hi everybody. I’m Chris I’m the CEO Social Link and today I’m joined by Gareth Alvarez Head of Content from Social INK. And Anna Simmonds our Head of Social Media at Social INK.Today we want to talk a little bit about how to come up with ideas for your digital marketing. When we talk about digital marketing in this case and what we talk about in terms of creativity and ideas we’re talking about social media, your blogs, live videos, email newsletters, lead magnets whatever you can think of that would be encompassed within digital marketing principles about coming up with ideas are the same. And I think we’ve been pretty good ourselves over the last few months at coming up with these ideas and showcasing things that you can do as a business and we’ve done it to the extreme. We’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go through the episode I’m sure. But for now Gareth as our Head of Content, we’ve done a lot of blogging and you can talk a little bit about June. And the challenge that we set ourselves internally but give people a little bit of insight as to how we come up with Blog titles how we come up with ideas as to what we going to write about.

 [00:01:13] Okay. Well yeah. So as you mentioned in June we set ourselves a challenge to write a hundred blogs in 30 days. Now that was quite a significant challenge it took a lot of hard work to actually come up with the ideas but also to create the content. However what will give you a little bit of an insight into the process so you know you don’t have to go away and start creating 100 blogs every month you know starting off with one a week is good enough or two up to you but at least getting started is the trick. But when it comes to coming up with ideas for what those blogs will be there are many different avenues that you can pursue. The easiest one is to start off with who you are what you do or in fact what you’re up to. All of these things that sort of tell people a little bit about you as a person or you as a brand or as a company as a business. These are valuable blog topics to to use or or in fact their useful topics no matter what the type of content that you’re creating is it could be for a video. It could be for a podcast. It could be for a landing page. It could be for an email newsletter. It could be for anything. So that’s something that’s very very important to remember is that you need to tell people a little bit about yourself and why they should be interested in working with you or buying from you. And you’ve also got to remember that different people prefer different channels. So some might prefer to read some might prefer to listen some might prefer to watch and you have to think about creating content for all those different channels as well. For that reason you know it’s really important to repurpose your content so if you’ve already got a blog then can you transform it into something else into another kind of medium. So it could have become a video could it become something audio or an infographic or whatever. So in terms of coming up with ideas what have you got that already exists that can be transformed into something new or can be modified into a different format? What is it that you’re already doing that would be of interest to someone who is looking at your business or interested in either purchasing from you or interested in finding out about your service?. And again it’s all about sort of establishing yourself in the very beginning after that. Then you can go down the avenue that we used for 100 blogs which was more of a keyword focussed strategy. But I will let Chris talk to you a little bit more about sort of using keywords as a strategy to create content ideas.

 [00:04:28] Yeah. So I think the interesting part is again we always talk about a strategy. What are the goals what are you trying to achieve? And I think that always starts at the very beginning of any conversation we have. And it’s the same when it comes to the creativity side of things. So understanding what it is you’re trying to do build an audience build a following get more sign ups sell more product. That always has to be at the heart of everything you’re doing, but the creative aspects and the ability to then know what sort of things you can create or what sort of things you could start create that really focuses as Garrett said the starting point. Who are you. What do you do. Who’s in the team. What can you talk about the industry in general. Relevant events things that are happening in the news that are around your industry. All of those things are easy pickings as we call them. They’re the ones that you can come up with pretty quickly and so you know I can give you five titles right now. Why you started Company X and who were the main team members of Company X. What’s the main focus of Company X so what do you do. How do you do it. The idea of how Company X fits into industry y and for example the last one how you established yourself as a person within industry Y and why you’re actually loving the industry that you work at five titles and you could create content right now about who you are what you do what industry you’re in but then it gets a little bit more difficult and then that’s when the creativity side comes in as part of any good strategy. You should be looking at what other people are doing what competitors are doing what the industry and industry specific websites are talking about etc.. And that’s going to give you a host of a wealth of information and knowledge to help you start generating these ideas.

 [00:06:14] But more importantly keeping the consumer in mind so it’s no point in you writing something that you really want to write. That’s always been your your dream to write about what you know how the adhesive on the back of a stamp works. If that’s not actually who you’re trying to sell to. You need to keep that in mind at all times. Coming up with creative ideas and trying to build up ideas that really resonate with the person and with your objective at the same time.

 [00:06:40] So in terms of content you could start talking about your particular product the ingredients that go into your products. For example I always end up talking about a cupcake business. I think that might just be it might just be the fat kid inside me that always wants to have a cupcake. But the idea being that you can talk about the ingredients you can talk about the process you can talk about how you make to talk about the differentiation between something that comes from a factory in something that’s home baked for example whatever it might be but you can start coming up with ideas that are surrounding your business and that surround your product which in line helps build that trust build that relationship with your audience and will take them through to X whenever that goal is whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve.

 [00:07:22] So for example a really cool cupcake recipe that you can make at home. Obviously you wouldn’t give away your secret recipe but a recipe that you can make at home is gonna get people that are interested in cupcakes etc. onto your website and potentially to sign up to get more cool ideas about how to make cupcakes. As a part of that, obviously your newsletter sign ups are growing but what you’re really trying to do is then convert those news at the sign ups into people who go you know what today I don’t want to make the cupcakes myself because I have a job because I’m working I don’t have a time this weekend or whatever else but I do need 20 cupcakes for a party that I’m running at the weekend. This is always the goal.

 [00:07:57] Whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve at the end more sales more newsletter subscribers whatever else you can create that content from from that sort of stream of ideas that you’re coming up. But I think I’ll come over to Anna as well. Some of the things we’re now talking more about the process of content creation rather than the idea side of it. But we use a lot of things internally to keep track of ideas or to find new ideas. Will you talk a little bit about what we do in terms of Quora research for keywords for example things like that that we use to try and develop our ideas, our idea flow.

 [00:08:32] In terms of in terms of idea generation there’s a lot out there online that will help you create ideas that are that aren’t just like you are saying they aren’t just things that you want to already talk about in order to be strategic. You have to think about what your audience wants and a lot of people particularly small businesses you don’t have a market research team and you don’t know necessarily because this is a stage where I see a lot of people get stuck in there like well I don’t know what what people want exactly other than people buy cupcakes because they want the cupcake but how do I talk to them before they’re at that stage.

 [00:09:15] And so it’s a matter of if we use Quora , so Quora, if you’re not familiar it’s sort of like if I get a question and answer site where people can. Leave a question. It covers every single topic under the sun. It’s not just like marketing topics or business topics people will talk about personal stuff or whatever. Like if you’re familiar with Yahoo answers back in the day when I was still a popular thing it’s a bit like that and so you can use that to see what topics people are most interested in.

 [00:09:46] So that’s a really great idea generator. It’s also a really great way to offer value and actually answer some questions too. But it gives you a lot of insight into what people are already asking and what they want to know. And then in terms of competitor research you just look at what your competitors are doing and also in terms of social media you can use things like your current audience even if it’s small you can still ask people what are they interested in. You can have polls to sort of vote on what the next guide or article is going to be. You know you can engage with people in a different way other than just posting a blog or or getting in-depth in terms of who you are and what you do. You can engage people if you know in different ways depending on what platforms you use because digital marketing again isn’t just blogging. It isn’t just social media. So some of the ideas that you come up with might be best for an advertisement or some of the ideas might be based on you know a specific holiday or something in which case what you can do is target things like Google searches so digital marketing applies to all of those things.

 [00:11:08] So again like Gareth was saying you can repurpose ideas but in terms of coming up with all of these ideas and actually making them happen which matters a lot you don’t want to just come up with ideas all the time especially creative business owners tend to do this a lot. They’ll come up with a ton of ideas and not actually action them. So we use tools like a Asana to keep track of this for the team. And if you’re working solo or you have a small team I still recommend using a tool like Asana because it’s great to just be able to sort of brain dump everything and then sort through it and categorize it later and actually start setting yourself deadlines and more importantly you can start looking at how everything works together. So if you are starting with the end goal in mind like you should be then you can work backward from there and sort of see how all those little pieces work together and then you can sort of see where the gaps are as well so that can be really good for idea generation. You might realize that you have a ton of ideas for people for a specific platform or for a specific question that they have and that you don’t actually cover enough of a different topic or a different angle. So when you have a tool like Asana that it’s not just for project management it is brilliant for idea generation and it sort of helps you focus on on that angle.

 [00:12:35] I think to round this up very quickly because we’re getting through all the time but James Altucher who is an author he’s written a couple of books things like Choose Yourself and other things but he always talks about it. He says that the ideas generated part of your brain is like any other muscle. So if you want to get stronger faster whatever it might be with your body you would go to start doing training so you would repetition you do things like exercise regularly whatever it would be. But when it comes to ideas the same is true that I think something that’s really interesting that he talks about because every day you challenge yourself to come up with 10 ideas. Now you’re not 10 ideas that you have to execute or not 10 ideas you have to write those blocks for straight away but you’re starting to train yourself to be creative in that sense. So you can come up with 10 ideas and you can sit down and jot down these 10 ideas. If you did that every day by the end of the year. You’ve got three hundred thirty, sorry three thousand six hundred something ideas. But the beauty of it would be actually from those three thousand six hundred ideas you could narrow that down and you might have a few ideas that are absolutely stellar and things that potentially might have a huge impact on your business so don’t be afraid to try and keep doing this even if you end up writing or hold the ideas in the beginning.

 [00:13:47] Finding ways to flex your creativity and to flex your creative muscles is a really good thing. The last thing that I’ll drop in there is for example for creatives it’s One Minute Briefs so every day has a brief for an advertising idea and the idea is very simple. 60 seconds one minute come up with a brief come up with an idea for that particular advertising. I believe that today what we’re doing is recording its conservatories for example and here at the team since March we’ve basically set ourselves a goal of coming up with an idea for OMB every single day to make sure that again we’re constantly training and we’re constantly pushing our own creativity and that we never sat there stale and just sort of doing the same thing day in day out. So I think that be the piece of advice I would give the one that be the most valuable. Just start jotting down the ideas. It doesn’t matter if you don’t execute on 99 percent of the 1 percent that you do will be absolutely invaluable and it will be worthwhile as an exercise to help you just to become more and more creative as you go along.

 [00:14:50] Guys thank you very much as always. And we’ll see you soon for the next one. Please make sure you subscribe. And let us know and give us any feedback you have on the episode.

 [00:14:59] Thank you.

 [00:15:00] Thanks.