Sourcing Content: How to Generate Meaningful Content 

As a marketing and design consultancy, marketing is a big part of what we do. Working closely with business and non-profit clients, we create focused marketing strategies and campaigns. We have come to understand that good content is key to any successful marketing campaign. To help others learn from our experience, we are sharing sources that can help generate meaningful content.

Why We Need Good Content

Creating good content is about fulfilling a need. If people are searching for something – whether it’s information about a certain product or service, solutions to a particular problem or issue, or something else – they need answers and guidance. That’s where our content comes in. If our content provides people with what they’re looking for, they’ll find value in it. If they value it, then they’ll engage with it in some way.

Getting people to engage with our content is especially important. That engagement with our content will remind our current clients and customers that we are still around and doing good work. It will also draw in new clients and customers. Beyond sales, our engaging content can be a vehicle for connecting with others in our industry – potential collaborators on future projects and opportunities.

Ultimately, good content is about generating sales. We get that. Yet, the focus of our content – a blog post, a white paper, a podcast, a newsletter – is to meet a need or solve a problem for a customer or potential customer. We must fulfill the needs of that audience, and if we do that well, good things will follow.

What Makes Good Content

Now that we have established why good content is important, let’s talk about what makes good content. Good content should be…

• relevant to our audience. What’s ‘relevant’ may change depending on our audience—whether it’s current clients and customers, prospects, partners, or someone else—but in order to serve people’s needs, we want to create content focused on specific audiences.
• specific and sufficiently detailed. In order to be meaningful to our audience, our content should answer a question, provide a solution, or clarify confusion. We want to provide substance, so vague content isn’t going to do the trick. We need to deliver more specificity than can be gleaned in a quick scan of headings.
• timely. Content can be timely in one of two ways:
  1. Temporally relevant – This means content based on news, changes to the law, industry trends, tech advances, and more. Content of this nature may not be as relevant over time, but there is value in keeping our audience up to date on recent changes and developments.
  2. Evergreen – Evergreen content is content that is not time sensitive. As it does not have an expiration date, so to speak, evergreen content remains relevant for a longer period of time. Evergreen content is usually ripe for repurposing. With adjustments, evergreen content can be used again and again without losing its value.

Where to Source Good Content

There are a number of ways to find and generate meaningful content. We placed sources for good content in two big categories:

Internal Sources

A very convenient way to source content is to look at what’s happening with our own business and with our clients. What trends are we seeing? What are some questions that we are regularly asked? What are some common mistakes our clients, or prospective clients, make? What common misunderstandings do we see a lot? What relevant new products and services are available that could bring value to our clients?

As experts in our field, we can provide the answers our clients are seeking. We can explain current trends in our industry and what that means for business. We can answer frequently asked questions with a blog post, and keep it updated as we learn more. We can create solutions to common mistakes, and offer our help implementing those solutions. Or we can make suggestions on how to take advantage of new products and services.

External Sources

Another useful way to find content is to look for ideas from other people in our sector. Pay attention to what other related businesses and organizations share. Read blog posts and listen to podcasts. Follow social media accounts and subscribe to newsletters. There’s a lot we can learn from other leaders in our industry.

Also keep an eye out for industry news and updates, advancements, and other developments in our industry that are likely to affect our clients. Sharing that kind of news can make great temporally relevant content, and there can be a lot of value in reporting it first.

Good is Good Enough

When we talk about creating ‘good’ content, we mean relevant, insightful, and engaging content. It’s important to recognize that we’re not writing the next great novel, nor does anyone expect us too. We don’t need to go viral with every (or any) post we make. Yet, we do want our content to be valuable to those that read it. So, remember, our content doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be good.

Start Creating Content

Want to learn about even more ways to create meaningful content? We can help! We’d love to share our experience with generating content and help you use your content to make the most out of your marketing materials.