In our experience, every small business has a series of core ideas.
This is the hard-earned ‘stuff’ you believe as a business owner.
Often, your core ideas will be the most impactful for your customers or clients; the transformational actions they need to take.
When it comes to content marketing, a common challenge is consistently creating enough content to raise our profile, build authority, and convince our target audience to buy.
In this blog, a simple approach for compounding your core ideas to create compelling content.
What are your core ideas?
Every small business owner I speak to has a series of core ideas.
Taking some time to formulate and refine those core ideas, based on the pain points and needs of your target audience, puts you in a powerful position to develop your business.
Your core ideas are those you talk about most frequently.
Think back to recent conversations with colleagues, customers or clients; what ideas did you share with them?
Look at your already published content; are there recurring themes that form the basis of your core ideas?
Consider the questions you are most frequently asked at work; your answers to these common questions are very likely to be your core ideas.
Typically, small businesses have anywhere from 6 to 12 core ideas.
The challenge then becomes to take those core ideas and turn them into compelling content.
After all, if you only have a dozen things about which to talk, surely you will run dry in a matter of months?
How do you compound them?
Compounding your core ideas recognises that each can be expressed differently on a different platform.
For example, you can take each core idea and share it in the form of a blog, podcast, or video.
Using this approach, 12 core ideas immediately becomes 36 pieces of content.
Taking this a step further, you can approach each core idea in several different ways.
Try forming a question about each core idea using the words how, when, can, which, why, where, what, who, will and are.
These 10 question starters turn your 36 pieces of content into 360 digital assets you can create.
Approach the creation of each piece of content differently.
For example, for a blog, post or video, the content can be your voice, a guest post from someone else, or an interview with an expert.
Suddenly, you triple your potential pieces of content from 360 to 1,080.
Continue with this approach, and how you can present your core ideas continue to rise exponentially.
What does this look like?
Here at Bear Content, one of our core ideas is that small businesses should fully understand their target audience before engaging in a content marketing programme.
We can write a blog about that core idea, record a podcast episode, or shoot a video.
We can answer a series of questions about that core idea. For example, who is the target audience of my blog? What does target audience mean? Where do I find my target audience?
We can share our expertise and experience in answering those questions creating that content in-house.
We can invite guest experts to write about the topic, or we can interview others (colleagues or external experts) to address the questions in that way.
And once different pieces of content are created, we can repurpose them to suit the various platforms where they are shared and break them up into micro-content.
One core idea becomes hundreds of pieces of compelling content with relatively little effort to generate the starting point.
How will you get started?
It’s not always easy to come up with new and compelling content ideas, but it becomes a lot easier if you start by focusing on your core ideas.
Compounding these ideas will help you create exciting and engaging content that will resonate with your target audience.
How will you make sure to focus on your core ideas when creating your next piece of content?
