Social Media: 10 Idea Starters to Keep Fresh Content Churning

Content creation is an important part of social media success for ad agency new business, but it is also difficult to maintain without a little help.

I’m going on my 5th year of creating content for my blog. I’ve found that my reading always seems to help fuel my writing and inspire ideas.

So first and foremost, establish a focused reading program that is centered around a specific target audience. When you do, finding resources and developing content becomes mush easier because it is focused.

Here are 10 additional idea starters, along with examples, to help keep you going:

1. Take non-relevant content and make it relevant to your audience. This is one of the most important tips that I can share with you. There is so much great information online. Most of it won’t be related to your readership but you can easily make it relevant as I did in this post, “When it comes to new business Ad Agencies are ADHD.”  I was reading about multitasking and ADHD from a number of online resources, and knew this type of information would be very helpful for agency new business, particularly given the working environment and culture typical of most agencies. 
   
2. Become a reporter at events you attend by conducting on site interviews, take photos and video. Compile a top 10 highlights’ post of the event. You probably will come away with enough material for several blog posts. I was able to interact with attendees of Ad Age’s first Small Agency Conference. From my social media interactions I wrote this article: 50 of the Best Insights from Ad Age’s First Ever Small Agency Conference.  The amazing thing – I wasn’t there!
3. Create a bulleted list of things to avoid. I’m currently working on a list of “Top 10 Non-productive Office Traps and Solutions for Avoiding Them.”
4. Use a celebrity to enhance a top 10 list. One post that generates the most traffic to my site, “Steve Jobs 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business.” Be sure and connect the benefits to your particular readership. Make it specific to them and their needs.
5. Provide resources. Share resources that are specific to your readership’s industry. Here are a couple of examples of resources that I’ve shared: “10 Reading Resources for Ad Agency New Business” and “The Top 14 List of Advertising Agency Networks for New Business.” I wrote a post about agency networks because so many agencies were asking about them and I found very few online sources. I researched and grouped this information conveniently together for my readers. This also helped put me on the radar of many of these agency networks.
6. If you’ve been writing for a while, revise an older post and beef-it-up with current information, stats, etc. A lot of the information for this article, “3 Quick Tips for Developing a Consistent Program for Ad Agency New Business”, was gleaned from a post that I had written in 2008. I took some of the more important elements to highlight and expand upon in this post. It isn’t copying a pasting, having mirrored content. This takes some work but much easier and quicker than developing a post from scratch while still creating content that is of good value to your readers.
7. Conduct an industry survey. You can generate some great PR by conducting your own primary research and propagating the results through your social media network, online tools such as PRNewswire and PRWeb. You can generate a number of post as you expand upon pieces of the survey in various posts. Here’s an article that was written on a survey that I conducted, “Ad Agency Survey Finds Traditional New Business Methods Aren’t Working.” The survey became a magnet for a significant amount of web traffic to my site as other bloggers and columnist wrote articles based on my research.
8. A quick turn around of research and a post can come from conducting a simple online poll. I wrote this post on an ongoing poll being conducted by Mirren Business Development, “The number one reason ad agencies new business plans fail.”
9. Develop your own online contest. A great jump-starter for my blog’s traffic occurred when I conducted an Ad Agency Blog of the Month contest. Agencies submitted their blogs, readers would review them in a post I created and they would cast their vote of their favorite. A follow-up post announced and highlighted the winner from each month. At the end of the year, a blog synopsis of the 12 Agency Blog of the Month winners was created and vote taken for the Ad Agency Blog of the Year. Here’s a sample article from 2010, “Vote for Fuel Lines’s Ad Agency Blog of the Year.” 
10. Set up an editorial calendar for guest posts. Solicit industry experts who are glad to contribute if you give them enough lead time. Guest posts’ can be a huge help and provide some relief during summer breaks and holidays and keep good, helpful content churning out for your audience. Here’s a guest post, written specifically for my audience, by Jay Baer, “Ad Agencies: Don’t Turn Your Back on Digital”

The content that you create will propel your positioning as an expert so it’s worth the price of your time investment.

Here’s a good example: Kelly Fiddner, Business Development Director for Littlefield Brand Development, Tulsa, OK, writes the agency’s blog, “The One Thing: The casino marketer’s guide to understanding gamers.” Within just a few months, Kelly is being recognized for her thought leadership.

Kelly was recently featured in a gaming industry publication iNTERGAMING in this New Technology Interview, because of her content development that is specific to the advertising/marketing needs of the gaming industry.

Additional content marketing articles that may be of interest:

• 2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical to Ad Agency New Business
• 10 Ways to Create An Ad Agency Blog That is Reader-Centric
• 6 Simple Steps for Using Content Marketing to Attract Ad Agency New Business
• 6 Writing Tips to Make Your Ad Agency’s Blog Effective for New Business
• 21 Blog Post Writing Tips for Ad Agency New Business
• The Four Great Laws of Copywriting for Ad Agency New Business

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