One of the biggest challenges business owners face in content marketing is finding new ideas to keep websites and social media feeds fresh.
It can be tough to come up with something new every week or even every day, but a simple trick can help you come up with unlimited ideas.
All you need is a little creativity and a tiny mind shift.
So what is this magical trick? Keep reading to find out!
Everything is content
My friend Hannah from West Stanton in Godalming is a bit of an Instagram Queen.
When doing some filming with her recent, to capture footage to mix into Instagram Reels, she played a brilliant trending tune from the platform.
View this post on Instagram
Everything is content, everything is content. Don’t forget to film it, don’t forget to film it. Everything is content, everything is content.
And that’s the trick.
When you’re stuck for content marketing ideas, the answer is – everything is a content marketing idea.
What did you do last week?
Every business owner I know is super busy.
It’s rare to ask the ‘how are you?’ question to a business owner and not receive ‘busy’ as the response.
Maybe we suck at time management. That’s a debate for another day.
But this busyness is a good thing when generating ideas for content.
The trouble is, we don’t always perceive the things we are doing as ‘interesting’ or content-worthy.
Trust me. They are.
Our brains are weird
Towards the end of my career as a Financial Planner, I developed a particular interest in human behaviour.
I spent a lot of time studying the cognitive biases that affect how we process information and make decisions.
One cognitive bias applicable to this lesson is called the curse of knowledge.
Curse of knowledge means once you understand something, you presume it is obvious to everyone else.
Once we’ve spent time learning something complex, we quickly forget just how detailed and sometimes difficult the path to that knowledge was.
This curse of knowledge is particularly relevant to content marketing because of the assumption it creates that nobody is interested in what we have to share.
After all, why would others want to hear our knowledge; surely they already know it?
They don’t.
Help others
I’ve written before about Google’s Helpful Content Update.
Keep this approach in mind when coming up with ideas for content creation.
If you can take what you see in your daily life and create content that is helpful to someone else, your marketing will be successful.
Remember, everything is content
Head out into the world today with a new perspective; everything is content.
That conversation you have with a customer or new prospect? It’s content.
The random interaction you have as you buy your lunch? Content.
An article you read about how someone in your industry is doing something differently? Definitely content.
Don’t overthink it. It’s too easy to dismiss excellent content ideas because we believe that they are ordinary, dull or boring.
For a sizeable audience, everything you experience has the potential to be valuable content.
Capture it, share it
Because everything is content, you need to start capturing it.
Keep a notebook to hand (or a new memo on your smartphone) and record the ideas as they arrive.
Use the camera on your phone to snap photos and videos throughout the day.
You don’t need to create content with these moments at the time they happen.
Assuming you can collect little moments throughout the day, you can sit down when you have a quiet five minutes to write a blog post or tweet or edit a short Instagram reel.
Having that base content in place makes content creation so much easier.
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There are content marketing ideas all around us – we just have to be willing to see them.
Our everyday lives are full of opportunities to create helpful, engaging content that others will want to watch or read.
If we can tap into our personal experiences and share what we’ve learned, we’ll be successful with content marketing.
So take a look at your day-to-day life and ask yourself, “How many pieces of content can I capture from this?”
You might be surprised at how much valuable information you have to share.
