Got ideas for your marketing? How to get them out of your head and into action

Writing is not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, for some, it’s downright stressful!?

But, if you're a founder or executive in your organization, you're likely one of the people with the best ideas, insights and feedback about the customer - and what they want to know.

So how do you get these ideas and insights out of your head and into your marketing?

Step 1: Hire a company or contractor (or maybe even an in-house employee) that is a great content creator.

Don’t just pick someone who can write good emails.?

This person needs to be able to structure content in a way that draws in the reader, answers questions the reader may have throughout the article, and thinks about ways to make the article or piece of content relevant, educational, and even entertaining for the reader.?

If your writer can’t do those things, you’ll fail straight away.?

Step 2: Make it easy to get in your brain.

This is the part of the process where you contribute your thoughts and ideas, but there’s merely “starters” as the writer takes them down the field and across the finish line.?

Here are a couple of suggestions for how to do this:?

1 .The “Brain Dump Email”

This technique is just like it sounds. Whether it’s an audio file of ranting thoughts or an email with a bulleted list of thoughts about a topic, it’s far from a finished content piece. But it’s your voice, your thoughts, and your perspective (which is essential for any top performing piece of content).

My staff started calling Fridays “Marketing Rant Friday” because I’d always have some end-of-week revelation of the type of content I wish people would read to better understand marketing.

And then it became less of a joke as we realized that these marketing rants could actually?be used as the basis for content creation. And this technique comes in super handy.?

To do the?“brain dump email” approach, simply choose a topic and just bullet point things about the topic. Things like:

• What don’t people understand??
• Why do you feel so passionate about this??
• What qualifies you to know how to talk about this??
• What are misconceptions??

Often the brain dump email may look like the start of “something", but it ends up being just that - a DUMP of information. But it does lay a good foundation for the theme of the article and provides a start for the writer to then shape the article with your passion in mind.?

2. The Interview Call

For many topics, regardless of whether the writer has industry experience or not, you may need to go deeper with the domain expertise. That’s where the interview call wins every time.?

Have the writer act as a journalist -?conducting a thorough interview with you, asking you a series of questions in which you answer. Then they can dig through their notes to find the hook and the most interesting angles of the content, and fill it out with the expertise you provided to finalize the article.?

The interview is more time intensive as you have one more step, but it does prove to be very effective.?

If you do it right, and batch your content, you could end up doing an interview call and covering 3-5 topics in an hour. Talk about productive!?

3. The Event (or Nowadays, the Virtual Event or Webinar!) Recap

Whenever I attend a conference, I take a ton of notes and save them in Evernote. I do this so I can refer to them in the future, or share key insights with my team. But it also makes for a great opportunity to bring in a writer to summarize the notes in a fashion that’s much easier to understand, and turn that into a piece of content.?

If you’re strategic, you could even get a blog article, a series of LinkedIn tips, tweets, and a short recap post with takeaways from the speakers!?

Even if you simply attended a webinar, you could use this as the basis of a blog post, and link back to the original webinar for more information - giving props to company and/or person who hosted it. Collaboration and high fives can do wonders for building relationships and opportunities to partner on content in the future.?

Step 3: Have the writer write the article and review for best performance.?

Stepping into this process does not guarantee automatic results. There’s a learning curve involved, but the goal is to develop a rhythm that gets results. I also encourage you to be willing to “accept” some things as is.

I’ve seen executives changes words for the sake of changing words, when the meaning stays the same.?Perfectionism slows momentum in marketing EVERY time.

The goal here is consistent content production that has value - and to get that, done is better than perfect.?

These 3 tactics are ones that I have used with clients as well as my own content over the years. For someone who is new to creating content, or writing just doesn’t come as easy, this is an excellent way to ramp up content production effectively and efficiently.?

Other insights or advice?

What other ideas do you have? Are there other ways you create content that could pose a time savings for others?