9 Ways To Make Content Creation Simple (for Content Your Community will Love)

If you are a business owner, social media or marketing manager that wants to target parents then you may be thinking of or be actively building a community of parents on social media.

As someone who has built a community of almost 600,000 parents on social media, I wanted to share some tips on creating content. Without content it’s very difficult to build and engage a community so creating content is integral to being successful in community building and engagement. Here are 9 Ways To Make Content Creation Simple (for Content Your Community will Love):

#1. Use Your Avatars

If you have gone through the exercise of defining your avatars (or personae) for who you want to target for leads and sales for your business, then you should have written down a very detailed profile for each persona and this is a good starting point for content ideas.

Start with what your product or service solves for them in terms of an issue in their life. Now take that issue and write down 5 ideas around the theme.

As an example, say you own a baby boutique or online store. What are your prospective customers (new mothers) interested in? Babies of course. What problem are you solving for them? What equipment to buy for their new baby. So now write down 5 ideas about babies. Here are 5 ideas I came up with:

1. bathtime tips for babies
2. how to settle your baby at bedtime
3. top 10 items you need to have for a new baby
4. benefits of taking your baby to swimming lessons
5. best pram to buy

So those 5 topics can now be turned into more in-depth pieces of content that are targeted to the community of new mothers that you want to build up on your social channels.

#2. Use the questions your customers ask

Are there FAQs that your customers ask you?

Have somewhere that you can record those questions as they come in and turn these into content pieces.

For example, you could do a simple Q & A blog post or create a checklist of questions and answers for something more visual.

If you are targeting your community in the right way, then using questions that are asked frequently is a solid tactic that will deliver results.

#3. Ask your customers

Nothing beats asking your customers what they would find useful in the way of content. (Never assume you know what they want). Why is this so effective? Because if they want that type of content, then prospective customers should also find it useful and lap it up.

#4. Ask the community

Ask your community what would be useful to them. Try a simple question post or give them a couple of alternatives to pick from or run an online poll or if you have time to put a more indepth online survey together.

Use the answers, responses, results from polls and surveys to gather ideas for content that would help them.

You might also like reading: Top Tips for Managing Your Community on Social

#5. Listen to the community

Slightly different from asking the community, this is where you keep an eye out for feedback that you get when you post other content.

So for example, in the comments on posts sometimes you will find insightful comments that tell you that there’s a gap and that people would appreciate a new type of content.

We wrote an article about talking to girls about puberty and a couple of parents said in comments we wish there was a guide to talking to boys about this topic, so hey presto we have a new angle and a new piece of content for our plan.

#6. Look at other businesses

While it’s good to peek occasionally at what your competitors are doing I wouldn’t dwell too much on them, after all you don’t want to be doing what they are doing, you’re better doing something different.

Instead, I like to look at other businesses in different verticals to ours to see if there’s something we can adapt.

Find and follow creative brands and communities that do things a bit differently, that’s where you will get good ideas that you can adapt to your own community.

#7. Ask your employees

Ask your employees for ideas for content, often businesses have employees with good ideas but just no process to capture these ideas.

Have a shared doc somewhere or use a Slack area to collect ideas for content (or a suggestions box in the canteen if it needs to be offline) that you can feed into your content plan. Give a monthly prize for the best idea to help incentivise the ideas to come in.

#8. Use Seasons

Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Summer are all good for thinking up or curating content on food, drink, activities, home decor, etc.

Use tools like National Day Calendar to find unusual days to write or create visual content around.

#9. Use social media

Monitor hashtags and conversations on different channels on key topics related to your sector as a way of generating ideas for content. For example, we use Pinterest a lot for ideas for parents because we can find great content on there related to snack ideas or arts & crafts.

Any other suggestions for ways to create content for your community? I’d love to hear your thoughts.