Digital Profits Podcast – Episode 20: How to Multiply Ideas for Content and Ads
If you want to amplify your digital content and advertising, the solution is simple: multiply your ideas. But if creative solutions were easy, every business owner would be an expert at it!
Fortunately, there are a few simple tips that can help kick start your marketing initiatives and get you on the right path to generating more great content and ads.
In this blog post, we’re going to provide advice on how to maximize creativity for marketing success so you can take your brand message and profits to the next level.
Brainstorming 101: Identify topics with potential for content and ads
Brainstorming is an essential step in creating an effective content and ads strategy. It involves identifying topics with potential to captivate your audience and trigger engagement.
The key is to unleash your creativity and think outside the box. You can start by considering what topics your audience is interested in, what questions they might have, and what problems your product or service can solve for them.
Don’t be afraid to jot down ideas, no matter how whimsical they may seem at first. And remember, the best brainstorming sessions are those that involve collaboration and feedback from others. So, grab a notebook, gather your team, and get energized to come up with ideas that will make your brand stand out!
Utilize Social Media Platforms to Generate Content Ideas
Are you struggling to come up with fresh content ideas? Jump on social media! With billions of users, social media platforms offer a vast array of topics and trends to draw inspiration from. Whether it’s scrolling through your Twitter feed or exploring YouTube channels, social media can be a goldmine for content ideas.
By utilizing these platforms, you not only gain insight into what’s popular among your target audience, but you also have the opportunity to engage with them and build a following. So, don’t underestimate the power of social media for generating content. Get scrolling, get inspired, and get creating!
Understand Your Audience and Their Needs
As a marketer or business owner, it’s important to understand your audience and what they need from you. When you know your target demographic inside and out, you can create marketing campaigns that truly resonate with them and drive sales. But how exactly do you go about this?
Start by doing your research – gather demographic data, conduct surveys, monitor social media analytics. Then, take that information and use it to create a buyer persona – a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This persona should encompass your audience’s demographic details, goals, fears, challenges, and pain points.
By truly understanding your audience, you can speak directly to their needs and build real connections with them. In turn, this can lead to increased sales and an overall better brand reputation.
Take Advantage of Analytic Reports to Target Ads
Are you tired of running generic ads and not seeing any traction from your target audience? Switch up your approach and take advantage of analytic reports to boost your ad targeting. With the huge amount of data available today, there’s no excuse for not utilizing it to your advantage.
Imagine being able to deliberately target an audience that is most likely to engage with your brand, rather than just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.
By analyzing your data, you can pinpoint specific demographics, behavior patterns, and interests that are most relevant to your brand.
Use A/B Testing to Optimize Ads Performance
Are you tired of running ads that just aren’t getting the results you want? It’s time to try A/B Testing! By testing different variations of your ad, you can optimize its performance and see a higher return on investment. Not sure where to start?
Don’t worry, it’s easy to get started with A/B testing and you don’t need to be a marketing expert to do it. With a little bit of creativity and some simple tools, you can see real results in no time.
Re-purpose Existing Content for Multiple Purposes
Are you tired of constantly creating new content for every purpose? Well, there’s a solution – re-purposing existing content! Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you need content for a new channel or purpose. You can use what you’ve already created.
Whether it’s an old blog post or a popular social media post, transforming existing content can save you time and effort. Plus, repurposing content also means you’re presenting your message across multiple channels, and reaching a wider audience. So, don’t let your content go to waste, harness those creative juices and start re-purposing!
Leverage SEO Tips to Reach More People
Are you tired of staring at stagnant website traffic? Take control and increase your online visibility with some killer SEO tips now. With just a little bit of effort and know-how, you can leverage the power of search engines to reach a wider audience and boost your rankings.
From optimizing your keywords and meta descriptions to creating engaging and shareable content, we have the tools you need to succeed. Let’s get started and unlock your website’s true potential!
Develop Unique Strategies that Set You Apart from the Competition
Are you tired of blending in with the competition and struggling to stand out in your industry? It’s time to develop unique strategies that will impress and captivate your audience. Don’t settle for “business as usual.” Instead, channel your creativity and discover new ways to showcase your brand.
Whether it’s through innovative marketing techniques or exceptional customer service, find ways to set yourself apart in the minds of your customers. In a competitive market, standing out is crucial, and it all starts with taking a fresh approach to the way you do things.
At the end of the day, content and ad strategies need to be tailored to your particular business and audience. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Brainstorming, utilizing social media platforms, understanding your target audience, leveraging analytics reports, A/B testing ads performance, re-purposing content with SEO tips and creating unique experiences are all great options for getting your content seen by the right people. Choose the tactics that best fit your goals and use them to stand out from the crowd. Don’t wait any longer– start planning those all-star digital strategies today!
Discover the art of market research with the Profit Squad when you tune in to the latest episode of the Digital Profits Podcast. Uncover actionable tips, starting with the importance of social listening and leveraging competitor reviews. Explore our toolbox for trend identification and keyword gap analysis. Beyond external research, learn the goldmine potential of internal sources, including sales team feedback and customer surveys. Plus, you can gain ultimate content hacks: repurposing content and leveraging AI. Explore powerful frameworks for compelling ad concepts and SEO ranking. So, listen now to unveil untold secrets, putting yourself in your customer’s shoes for valuable insights.
Ben Page: Hey, Squad. I’m here today with the whole crew. We’ve got Blake.
Blake John: Hey, squad.
Ben Page: Ray
Ray Sawvell: Hello.
Ben Page: And myself, Ben, and have you ever felt like you didn’t know what to create? And I’m talking about online marketing. You’re going to launch a new ad campaign, you’re going to start a newsletter or a blog or you need to get next week’s social media posts out and you’re just totally stuck? Well, then listen to today’s episode because we are going to cover actionable steps to multiply your content ideas. And I think if you spend time on these steps, this research, this process, you can create a near-infinite well to draw from for inspiration. So guys, let’s jump right into it. We want to talk about some of these different ways to do research to start to inform your approach. Because big picture, we want to get a landscape of what already existing out there and what’s possible related to your topic, your product, your service, your business. So what are some obvious kind of starting points for that research?
Ray Sawvell: I think one good starting point that you can glean a lot of insights from is social listening. And really in particular, it’s going to the places where your customers are currently, like a forum, for example, Reddit, Twitter. There might be something other more related to your niche or your industry where customers live and just seeing what are they talking about, what topics are trending within these forums to get a really good idea of where you should be and what kind of topics that you could cover and really solve the questions that they’re asking.
Blake John: Yeah, and to build on that, it’s like, again, putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, where do they hang out? So if they’re on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, wherever, a lot of these methods are going to involve putting on your spy hat and being like, okay, let’s go infiltrate the YouTube comments. Or let’s go look at this thread. And let’s see what common questions are or common issues or themes or trends and that’ll kind of help develop additional ideas as to how can I answer that question or how could I build upon that idea. There’s a lot of different viewpoints that you can take once you start engaging with content yourself.
Ben Page: Got it. So you guys are saying for your business, your service first, kind of know who your ideal customer is and take a guess, where might they be hanging out online? And then you want to go to that place and see what people like them are saying about this topic. What questions do they have? What complaints do they have? What thoughts and feelings are they sharing in different forms? Right.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah. One thing that just popped into my head that might be interesting, too, this is maybe jumping over, but, like, competitor reviews would be an interesting place where you could probably glean some insights. Like, you could maybe read their negative reviews and say, oh, there’s yeah. Oh, there’s a big issue with quality. Well, we should develop content, or our next ad should be really hit this point, drive this point home, because we’re seeing our competitors are having issues in this area. Yeah.
Ben Page: That’s you know, this approach works generally just globally. But another idea, let’s say you’re a local based business, right? You could go on the social platforms, you could go on Facebook, and what are people in your community talking know, even if it’s not related to your business? That’s kind of another angle is like Ray in prep for the show, we were talking about localize the content. Right. So it’s like, what’s going on in the community that you could tie into maybe events or sport right. School or different organizations. Right. So you could spin any or all of your content, offers, ads, whatever, to be more local based. That’s another angle. Yeah, but I love I mean, there are whole platforms out there to do this social listening to scan at scale the comments of different social platforms, and, like, even I think, Hootsuite right. Ray has some capabilities to monitor hashtags and conversation threads on different yep. Yeah. So pretty interesting. But Blake, I love the direction you were headed looking at reviews, generally competitive reviews or your own? These are uniquely valuable because they’re in the language of the customer, which is kind of the end game of what all this content is being created for in the first place, is to add value out there in the world and hopefully connect people with certain kinds of problems to solutions that you can offer to them. What are some other examples that come to mind?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, and I kind of skipped ahead a little bit in our outline here. It was an idea that popped into my mind that I just wanted to.
Ben Page: Make sure I got out there.
Ray Sawvell: But testimonials and reviews are just an extremely powerful way, and if you’re not currently monitoring those for your own, like your own reviews, you should. But I really do think there could be a lot of value in actually taking some time to review your competitor reviews. As I mentioned, I’m thinking about ads in particular. Like, if there’s a key issue where that a competitor is having with their product or their service that is kind of like there’s a trend in their reviews. Lots of people are saying, oh, this was great, but we had issues with XYZ you could really drive the point home. If this is something that’s important to you, we can solve it for you. We can deliver that and sort of one up your competitor in a way.
Blake John: Yeah, I mean, talking about ads, specifically, any type of UGC or user generated content is very valuable because, Ben, to your point, it’s tied into exactly how your customer is speaking. And then you can take that language infuse it some way into your ad copy or your landing page or your content, whatever, and it’s coming from their perspective. And then you can use that language and speak to potential new customers with that exact same language. So it’s very valuable.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah.
Ben Page: And let’s back up a little bit because we’re talking about researching different platforms, different media, different conversations, reviews on the topic and services that you offer, right? So I’d recommend at the outset, start a spreadsheet, start a Google Doc and you’re literally just starting to go through these platforms and documenting what you’re finding. There are other tools, for instance, Buzsumo, where you can enter a topic and it will return the top articles and social media posts about that given topic and it will also bring in some of the underlying data about what’s performing best around that topic. But just very basic, right? Start a document. Now you’re on Twitter and you’re doing hashtag research around this topic of the service that you offer and noting know the complaints or maybe even throwing links in to the posts or the comments or so you’re, you’re collecting this over time with the goal of identifying patterns. And then like Blake, what you’re getting into here is saying you want to really lean into your unique selling proposition. So if you do great on service or quality or whatever and you’re seeing this pattern again and again and again, people are complaining about some of these elements that you thrive in that would be an idea to kind of bring forth. But in this vein of cataloging what you’re finding in the research phase we didn’t mention this yet cataloging the different formats of media. I use that broadly that you’re encountering. So it’s like hey, text, or this is a social media thread, this was an image, this was a meme, this was a video, this was a short or a reel. Really helpful because one of the levers you can pull with multiplying your content is format. And so you could like one idea of value creation is like what if you could take the best article created on a whole subject and distill it down into a meme and suddenly that could take off, right? It’s kind of a silly example. Or you could take a really lengthy 60 minutes long Vlog on some topic and you can make it super simple and easy to understand and put it in a 15 2nd YouTube short and that could take off because you’re adding value, you’re making it simple and more convenient for people. So what else? What are some other ways of doing research to just kind of get this pulse on what’s even possible out there, right? Because you’re kind of staring and a lot of people, too will say, look, I’ve got the means, I’ll write the words, I’ve got the camera, I’ll record the video, or I’ve got the designer, I’ll make the banner, whatever. Right. But they just need direction on what is it that I should produce.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I think we stay in the same lane here a little bit and talk more about competitor intelligence and doing some additional research. There’s a few in particular for ad formats and whatnot that I think we can lean into, but from my perspective, kind of more of an SEO perspective. I’m thinking literally just doing an analysis to understand what types of content that your competitors are currently creating. And that can include video, that can include social posts, blog posts, whatever it might be. Because if they’re pushing out a certain type of content, there’s a really strong possibility that maybe you should be doing something similar. There could be key topics that they’re really leaning into, and you should probably boil those to the top for yourself. But in particular, a keyword gap analysis is a really valuable type of research that you can do to understand where your competitor has coverage from an SEO perspective and where you’re weak or just not really performing or just off the map entirely. And a keyword gap analysis is something that you probably would need SEMrush or Ahrefs to complete. Those are the two predominant tools that I would recommend for that. But really, if you think about a Ven diagram, what they do is they have your circle, your competitor circle, and then they mash them up and say, here’s the overlap, here’s where you’re doing really well, and here’s where your competitors are doing really well. And you can really get a strong comprehensive outlook on where the gaps are and where you can start to develop additional content.
Ben Page: And that’s from what keywords is each website ranking for organically? And then you smash those together and maybe there’s a 20% overlap. Well, that means you’ve got some opportunity to expand the kinds of content you’re creating. And I’ll say this again, if you’re not ready to onboard a whole bunch of more software platforms and do this deep intelligence research, it could be as simple as, again, Google Doc, right? And you go to your three competitor sites, you go to their blog, you go to their Facebook and maybe sign up for their newsletter. And again, just bullet points. What topics are they covering? And you can make your own Ven diagram. Here are the eight topics I have in my blog. My three competitors have boom, boom, boom, boom, ABCDEF. And then, oh, great, now there’s 50% overlap. But, oh, I overlooked this key. One, one or two maybe are not relevant to what I’m doing. That’s another opportunity. Yeah.
Blake John: And I think to back up too. Just like putting yourself in your potential customers shoes is signing up for something like a newsletter is just so big going through their checkout process. If they’re an ecommerce business getting entered into the remarketing funnels, there’s so much value in just going to someone’s site, going through it, and then you’re able to see the different offers, messaging, different perspectives that they may have that you may have a gap on. So I think there’s just a lot of value there.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah.
Ben Page: And Ray, do you want to talk briefly about competitor ads buying as another piece? Right, because we can see visibly, like just as a member of the public, we can go to the website and see the blog sign up for the newsletter. We can see their Facebook post. What about their ads?
Blake John: Right, so if you go to Google right now or Bing, your favorite search engine, you can just search for Facebook ad library. And once you do that, you can type in the name of your competitor and then within this tool, you’ll be able to see a list of every single Facebook ad that is running for whatever competitor you type in. Now, there are some ethical and I would assume legal, legalities to consider. You don’t want to just straight up copy something and paste it in and do the same exact type of thing, but you can get a really good idea back to your spreadsheet. Example, you can make a catalog of like, here’s the type of ads that they’re running from a bottom of funnel standpoint or from top of funnel. You can really kind of map things out and see all the different types.
Ray Sawvell: Of ads that are yeah, yeah.
Ben Page: And it might be helpful in these cases for social posts, for ad copies and so on, literally just screenshot it. Drop that into your Google Doc because again, we’re talking about this research phase. But next you’ve got to sort of filter all of that raw material and identify the pattern and then come up. We’re treating this in a scientific way. It’s like, what do you think is going to resonate the most? Or here are 50 ideas of what you could create. What should we create? What has the highest probability of succeeding in whatever format we’re going for, whether that’s a blog or an ad. Right? Yeah, that’s interesting. What about let’s talk about internal, external sources of information because those can be extremely powerful sometimes they’re a little bit more qualitative, I would say, but they’re closer to home.
Blake John: Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about this before recording today. And just like if you have a sales team getting in touch with them and listening to the different types of customer complaints issues, common problems that may be coming up is a really big value add. It’s like a phone call is actually talking to your customer versus somebody, like leaving you a review. So this is just getting all of those common problems and issues and then trying to tackle them and consider building content around that.
Ray Sawvell:
Yeah, I’ll just add on to that and say that those people like your sales team or your product team have a direct line of communication with your customer. And some of the feedback that you can get there is just totally invaluable. And it’s a resource that you should lean into. And what I’ll also add to that is if you have inklings or there’s certain types of information that you want to get from a customer, you can go to your sales team and say, hey, consider asking just a question, a quick question about this whatever thing. We’re seeing this in the forums. We’re seeing a lot about this. Is that really an issue for people or what have you? And then they can bring it up in their sales calls or whatever it is. When they sync up, you can get really valuable information just from those conversations.
Blake John: Yeah, this is like a different topic, probably, but it’s like you can put surveys out to your customers. There’s like NPS surveys, things like that. You can pull your current customer base, get a list of questions, and then potentially find some blind spots there just by soliciting feedback.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah.
Ben Page: And again, to make it very basic, mode Google Forms, right? Or something like that. I don’t know, SurveyMonkey if they have a free thing, maybe. Right, but just like a three question thing where you’re soliciting feedback. But the idea is like internally, anyone that’s got a customer interfacing role, spending time with them, hearing from them, just listening, right. What are they describing that customers are saying? And then also voice of customer itself, through surveys, through interviews, through your own reviews, on Google, on G Two, on Facebook, whatever it is. Or even just like listening if you’re in in person format, hey, what did you think about everything today? Just really value the honesty and will help us to improve our operations or our content or whatever. Right. And also like support tickets. That’s kind of like the inverse of a positive review. Or again, what issues are folks having? Because again, it’s like so you kind of landscape all this terrain, you do all this research, you’ve collected things in a Google Document and now you’re looking for those patterns to help inform. And once you do, you can begin to put your own spin on know, we talked about format and we talked about when I say your own spin, I mean putting your unique selling proposition into that topic. Here’s how we look at SEO through these core values or with these principles, or here’s why this matter, whatever. But what are other ways that you can create novel, helpful content? Now that you’ve done the research, you have a hypothesis about what could work the best. It’s like now we’re in this multiplication stage. So what do you guys think? Any approaches that have worked for know, blogs, ad copies, et cetera?
Ray Sawvell: Well, I think one of the main takeaways of this is to always put yourself in the shoes of your customer, like you said, Ray, because at the end of the day, you want to solve their need. You want to make sure that you’re helping them and adding value, whatever it is. And so I think sometimes you’re so close to your own business and you’re so close to what you do that you sometimes forget to take a step back and look at things from the perspective of a customer. Just always keep that in mind because it’s incredibly important. And especially SEO, that’s ultimately how you win, is really understanding the need that a user has when they complete their query, what they’re looking for, and then meeting that to the highest expectation. That’s how you rank. There’s a lot more involved in that, but that is at the core of what SEO is. That’s what you need to do.
Blake John: Yeah. The way I think about it is, Ben, you talked about this earlier, but repurposing your content in some way. So if you’re recording a podcast, make sure you do a social media post and some shorts. If you’re doing a blog post, do a couple social posts and maybe consider reformatting it in some way. We haven’t talked a lot about other tools that you can use, like AI, that’s obviously a big one, and we have a couple of episodes dedicated to that. So I would recommend leveraging AI in some way to multiply your content. There’s a lot of things to consider there which we won’t probably dive into now, but there’s ways you can use AI to make your process more efficient and quick.
Ben Page: Yeah, and other frameworks that I enjoy using are things like the Hero’s Journey or story brand. I’ll kind of workshop that if I’m creating ad concepts where you’ve got your customer as the hero, they’ve got a problem. And usually there are one to five core problems, perhaps that you can help them solve or different ways they would describe that problem, and then thinking about the different ways you can step them through that problem to an outcome. And then if you do that broadly and you list out your ideal customer, the issues they’re facing, then you kind of think about you bring in all this research that you’ve done kind of the best of then you can sort of spin it a little bit and multiply that. And specifically what I mean is, let’s take Facebook ads as an example, Ray. You could say create a video ad, a single image ad, and a carousel ad. You could have a short copy versus a long copy. The way that you write that copy. You could use AI to multiply. Right. But you can also change the kinds of language you’re using. More visual language, more what? Audio or auditory language or kinesthetic language. Moving toward success, moving away from pain. There’s different perspectives that you can write that through or kind of set that up through that can produce very different results.
Blake John: That’s cool.
Ben Page: Yeah. More on that probably in a future episode, but hopefully for today, we’ve given you at least enough to get you unstuck some new sources of potential research. And really it’s just about doing. Even spend an hour, do some of that research, create the Google Doc, start identifying the patterns and then really just narrow it down through the lens of your customer as the hero and your business as the guide and kind of what sets you apart and how you can be most helpful. And then thinking about things like format, clarity, completeness, and even bringing your own expertise to bear on that topic that can help you quickly scale or get unstuck in your content creation. Any parting comments or words of advice, guys?
Ray Sawvell: One thing that we didn’t mention that I just will throw in here toward the end, you can also lean on People Also Ask in Google SERPs. Google is spoiling the most commonly engaged with questions, most commonly searched with questions and People Also Ask. And you can get some good insights from that.
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s really cool. I can think of three different ways to use that even. Just like each People Also Ask result becomes like its own social post, which could be a single image. It could be a testimonial of a customer that had that also asked question that you solved and now they’re satisfied. It could be a video of your CEO talking to that very issue on a 15 2nd reel or something. Like there’s so many ways to bring it to life, but yeah, really good addition, Blake. All right, squad.
Blake John: Yeah.
Ben Page: Thanks for listening. Let us know if this helps you get unstuck or if you need even more ideas, we’ll be happy to help. Thank you so much for listening. Your support means the world to us. And allows us to help more people and grow the community. Please take a minute right now to subscribe and share this wherever you listen to podcasts and sign up for the Profit Squad@joinprofitsquad.com, this will get you insider access, additional tools and swipe files, and help you elevate your marketing game to the next level.