10 Awesome Ways To Fill Your Content Marketing Pipeline

10 Easy-to Create Content Marketing Blueprints

Despite your focus on holiday promotions and budgets, as a marketer, you need to take your content marketing up a notch to keep your business top of mind.

To help you, here are ten awesome, easy-to-execute content marketing projects complete with blueprints so you can quickly adapt them to meet your audience’s needs.

1. Thirteen Halloween Tricks.  (Halloween: October 31) Halloween’s a great hook for content marketing even if your firm sells boring, buttoned-up B2B services. There’s always an angle to create a list of treats or tricks whether it’s recipes, patterns, templates, or quotes. Alternatively, think about what scares your market. For example, a headhunter could write, “Thirteen Job Mistakes that Can Come Back To Haunt You.” Add to the Halloween fun with the use of images to highlight your points such as witches, black cats and ghosts. Of course, ensure each image is sharable and pinnable!) For example, last Halloween, I wrote “31 Halloween Social Media Tricks and Treats“.
2. The Never-Forget BLANK Fall Checklist (Time change: November 4) This works for any business where the change in seasons signals chores such as winterizing your home, preparing pets for colder weather and car tune-ups. Alternatively you can always make up a seasonal excuse such as winter recipes. Extend this list to fit your target audience. To increase the utility of this list, ensure it’s printable with your business information including your URL, email, physical address (if you have one) and phone number. Where appropriate link to your product pages to streamline buying without being overtly promotional.
3. Cast Your Vote (Election day: November 6) While being political generally isn’t good for business, use the idea of voting and apply it to your business. Think like the old fashioned Brand A cola versus Brand B cola. Regardless of your focus, play it up with the red, white and blue. The great part of letting your audience participate is that you can promote the winner after the vote.
4. Support Our Troops (Veteran’s Day: November 12) Show your support for our men and women who have served. This content is about remembering those in your community who were part of the military. Take a page from Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation, and let your employees or customers who were members of the armed services strut their stuff and tell their stories. Extend this content to your retail establishments in the form of images. (BTW, I’d be thrilled if you helped support my friend Tom Deierlien’s Foundation. Tom is an Iraqi war veteran with both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star who continues to help get medical help to save children without red tape! Mmm sounds like a good story.)
5. The Never-Fail BLANK Holiday Survival Guide (Pre-Thankgiving November 19) Have fun with this piece of content. You can extend it from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the Day After New Year’s. The idea is to focus on creating a set of images, mini-posts or videos to make your readers chuckle. Entertain your readers by using your product as the center of attention. This isn’t just for B2C marketers targeting time-starved moms. For example, B2B marketers can use images of their product (such as GE’s instagram) to create an inspirational e-book. Go one step further and get your customers and followers involved by submitting their favorite Instagram of your product. (Here’s more information on Instagram.)
6. How To Survive The Worst Travel Day of the Year (Day Before Thanksgiving November 21) Regardless of how you plan to go, the day before Thanksgiving is a travel nightmare. You don’t have to work for an airline to have fun with this topic. Think entertainment that can be used without wifi. Remind your readers to download the content before they leave home. Some content ideas include “Airport Survival Checklist” or “Food that lasts 6+ hours and will keep your kids quiet”. Another option is to provide word games involving your product or fun videos.
7. Let’s Give Thanks: 21 BLANK Things For Which We’re Grateful (Thanksgiving November 22) Fill in the blank to make it relevant for your category. This post shouldn’t be promotional. You should be thinking bigger in terms of helping others. Extend this content by getting customers and followers involved. Gather their thanks, inspirations or images. Think about how you can give back to your community. One example of this is Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving. (Here are some great marketing insights for not-for-profits and cause marketing.) Alternatively, offer an e-book of holiday recipes, kids activities, or DIY projects. In these step-by-step instructions, you can link to your product.
8. The Ultimate BLANK Holiday Gift Guide. (Black Friday, November 23) Unless your customers do their holiday shopping in July, this should be on everyone’s list. Make this content fun and not salesy. Integrate your 360° brand into the list. Go beyond the basic mother and father and include fun alternatives. Offer a wish list as well! If your technology department can handle it, turn the wish list into an email so that it’s easy for gift givers to purchase! Show the unique aspects of your offering to make them special.
9. The Definitive Guide To BLANK. Regardless of your business, create an awesome piece of content marketing that most of your customers need. Make it sexy. It can be a collection of templates or recipes or images. The goal is to augment your product offering with content of value. Your measure of value should be, “Can I Offer This on Amazon as an Ebook?”
10.  The Top 12 Rockstars in BLANK. This is a great year-end blog post or ebook that can be extended to include an infographic or powerpoint to be shared on Slideshare. Want to get your audience involved? Then ask readers for their input. The upside of this is that your rockstars will share this information with their followers.

The key to maximizing the impact of these content marketing projects is to think about how you can extend the content into more than one format and make it accessible across a variety of social media platforms.

Have you used any of these content marketing suggestions? If so, please share your experiences in the comment section below.

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Here are some related articles.

• Images: How to feed the content marketing beast 
• How to make the case for content marketing.
• How to distribute content marketing

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkbrooks85/5588292846/