Is content creation the bottleneck to keeping your social media campaign vibrant and consistently active?

Today, I'm going to talk about content. I'm going to talk about how we create content that builds compelling public relations, but also that starts to build it to create traffic to your website and your social media accounts and ultimately to sales leads. I had a conversation today with a coach called Peter Rolliston here at The Progress Shed in Bath, and he said something that set me back a little bit. He said, "Nobody really wants to do PR or have a PR agency." I thought, "Well, it's a bit rough considering that's what I do," and he said, "Actually, of course, what they really want is sales and we all know that. What companies do is they suffer the marketing process in order to get the leads, to get those sales," and this is perhaps the uncomfortable truth about public relations. 

In a recent survey in Singapore, in the Sunday Times published by SPH, they said that the top five non-essential jobs as polled by over 1,000 readers were number one, artists at 77%, telemarketers at 69%, and social media and PR managers at 61%. Most people felt these were the top three jobs that were not essential. When asked which jobs they would not like to do, first came garbage collection, while only 20% said that they didn't want to be a PR person. In other words, they may not think it's essential, but they do think it's a good job to have. 

Companies now in COVID times might be looking at cost-cutting and presumably, most of us don't have artists on board, but some of us outsource our telemarketing with social media and PR managers, while agencies are often considered a luxury. However, I think that we know that communication with our audiences, both internal and external, and our allies is not a luxury. It's a necessity, especially at this time. If we're cutting these non-essential jobs from payroll, including perhaps the PR person, or we're not considering bringing them on, what kind of business should you do instead in order to get noticed? The answer lies in content and content marketing. The role of content is important in any company, because in marketing, we all start with search. These days, all marketing starts with people going to Google or, in Asia, to Baidu in China, so unless we're seeing advertising somewhere offline or sponsorship offline, by and large, most of us are looking for things by starting with the search box. So content is important because it's the content that brings us the search engine rankings, both organic and linked.

One chap called Ronnie Nimjeh said that he grew his stress management practice from zero to 25,000 unique visitors per month to his website, which is pretty impressive, with just some simple content marketing techniques all from free Google traffic. In other words, he let the website content do all of the heavy lifting, the drawing in of leads and creating the kind of noise about what he was talking about, in his case, stress management, so that he could bring leads through his funnel to get clients. 

Ronnie set up a business in 2008 for health and wellness providers. It was called PLR, which stands for Private Label Rights. What that means is that you can pay money, and you can use all of these 14,000+ pieces of content on your website or in your courses or on your social media once you've paid for them, and you can use them without giving credit to the author. So for those people and companies that need to have, for example, course content or blog content and don't have the people to author it, you can get it for your site and for your course and for your community by paying a small amount of money. You can start off by just buying a few credits at $0.99 per credit, or you can move up to annual plans of 400, 800, or 2,500 credits. What that means in real numbers is something like $99 per month, or you can pay up to $900 per year to have unlimited content. 

With this catalog mainly covering health and wellness but also now expanded to business, for example, in coaching, you're free to start with all the content that you would need for your site. It actually includes courses that we can use that you can monetize. For example, one person took an ebook and made into a five-day challenge in their private Facebook group. If you have a community of customers, or you can even use this for press relations as articles, but not the content developer or the writer, you don't want to go to Upwork or Fiverr or one of these other places, the website plr.me is a really great place to start. 

There are a number of other places that we can go to to get content for free, but they obviously have varying degrees of quality. One is called Amazines. There are tens of thousands of articles on there written by aspiring authors and people that would like to provide some free sample work so that you can then contract them to write longer articles, so all manner of content categories on Amazines.

If you're looking for media files, or pictures, and so on, a great one is called Wikimedia Commons. There's some 62 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute, so this is great if you've got media files that you'd like to upload and share and have credit for those, or you can download. You can take these articles and repost, and they're great for social media and for customers. The content on that website seems to be of pretty good quality.If you're looking for infographics and, as we know, an infographic is a combination of both pictures and text, a good website to find infographics on is Infogram. You can have up to 10 projects with five pages per project for free, and then you can move up from starting at $19 a month. You can also create infographics on a website including Canva and Visme, for example, but Infogram also has some samples for you there that you can use and download.

One website that I think is very interesting is called The Noun Project. There are over 2 million curated icons that you might want to use in your PowerPoint, for example, or in your infographics. They're very, very nicely laid out and easy to search and easy to download. It's free to use, and free and paid basic users can get access to all the icons. Where it changes slightly is that if you use them for free, then you have to credit the source, and you can only use them in one color. But if you want to pay not a great deal, $39.99 per year, then you can use them in a royalty-free way. You can download the icons in any color, and you can get access to all of their apps and they then embed in things like Adobe, so the Noun Project creates a very nice opportunity to get some icons for your text or for your pictures.

Now, if you are thinking you'd like to create your own content but don't know where to start, which is a conversation I had with one entrepreneur recently, Hubspot, which is the inbound marketing website, has quite an interesting tool. It's called the Blog Topic Generator. It creates five different headlines for free if you put in some nouns. I put in five words and I got back the following: Expectations Versus Reality, Will Experts Ever Rule the World?, The Next Big Thing in Public Relations Consulting, International Explained in Fewer Than 140 Characters, and This Week's Top Stories About COVID. Those grammar errors are actually in the text, not just me stumbling through them. They need a bit of polishing, but it does give perhaps five different ways of looking at the same topics, which might prompt what you might like to do. 

If you're looking for articles that have already been written which, of course, makes a great deal of sense, but are already appearing in established websites, a good service that I personally like and use is called scoop.it and it's free for individuals. You can get a free account. What I use it for is to get a curated list of editorials that's appearing around the world. You can discover, select, and editorialize, but also what you can do is redistribute this content. There's a business account as well. What it enables you to do is to have the search engine, a bit like Google Alerts has done, to go around the world and to bring you that content. On the business platform, it enables you then to reshare that content through your own website with a plugin to WordPress, but also through your social media channels. That's really making it almost a straight-through process. If you've defined who your audience is, be it your internal audience, your staff, if it's your partners or if it's your customers, as we say,` the three different audience groups, scoop.it creates a steady automated stream of curated content of considerable value because it already appeared in mainstream public occasions and platforms.

This idea of curation of content and automation distribution is really important. This is all good and well, but I started the conversation by saying that marketing starts now with search. If we have good content on our website or we're redistributing other people's content, where the real benefit comes from in terms of content is if it can be placed in those top-ranking websites. What we also want to think about, and this is where it comes back to our PR people is, can we get our articles placed in mainstream media?

There was a case study of Mint software, where they were creating fantastic blog content, but the founders credited their success coming from Gawker Media, the owners of Lifehacker and Gizmodo, because whilst they had great content on their website, they didn't have anybody looking for their website. So the role of public relations and the consultant that you might hire or may not have hired is to take this great content that you've generated, either through getting one of these outsourced providers or content that you found as a combination of graphics and infographics and video from these various sites I've mentioned, and then you want to take it to where there is the traffic. Websites like Reddit, for example, or big mainstream media, or Huffington Post, or any of the ones that I've mentioned previously, are where the traffic is going to come from.

The idea of generating content and having it on your website is great and it will help with SEO and some inbound marketing, but having created this great product which is this great content, we need to take it to where people are. Of course, this is always the essence of why people want to advertise on big newspapers or television, because what they're really buying is the audience. As we create great content, thought leadership, for our own business, and we put that onto our website and through our own social media channels, we also want to look at which of that original content can we use to get noticed, to get that pitch to the local editor or journalist. Because as we've mentioned before, those journalists are very short on time, and they're looking for quality content. That quality content can be generated from your own ideas, but prompted and augmented by the content you can get from these other websites that I've mentioned. And as we know infographics, video, compliment text really help to make an article or a piece come to life.

I started off by saying that companies often think about PR, not because they want it but as a necessary evil. But actually, publicity is the beginning of the sales process. If no one knows about a company, the chance that they're buying from it are pretty limited, so we have to generate awareness, and then intention, and then desire, and then action. We can do that by sharing through quality and engaging content across multiple platforms. Today, I've shared with you ways that you can either create that yourself, augment it, or buy it so that you can get a steady stream of content in, what we call, the active communications index for SPEAK|pr which is where there is consistency of content going out. For most of us, that's a huge challenge, but the good news is that there are plenty of platforms and technologies that can make that job a lot quicker, a lot easier, and not any more costly.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash