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What To Do When Your Content Cupboard Is Bare?

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

It’s not just a bad dream – the type where you wake up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, with a feeling of impending doom. When your content cupboard is bare, you feel naked and exposed before your audience.

Cupcakes

For sales professionals, the content equation can seem both uncomfortable and overwhelming at times.

Content is the life blood of social selling. Without a constant source of relevant and helpful content, your prospects and potential buyers will wither on the vine and die like spoiled fruit.

Feeling an increased pressure to provide value to prospects and buyers during all stages of their buying journey, sales professionals must avoid any interruptions in their content stream or risk alienating their target audience.

Here are three strategies to fill any content chasm and help position you as a continuous, supportive resource to your buyer:

Create

The writer’s block is a lonely place to visit, but it can become much more welcoming – with practice. The task of writing a blog post becomes easier with commitment. Dedicate a fixed amount of time each day to writing and transform what was once an unpleasant chore into a productive habit. Just like a diet or exercise program, start slow – 10 to 15 minutes per day – and build your endurance.

I’ve found it’s helpful to create multiple blog posts simultaneously, which provides an opportunity to write to completion and then edit each post with a fresh view point a few days later. Need help remembering blog ideas? My best practice is to immediately capture the topic in Evernote or use an IFTTT recipe that sends all your blog idea emails (subject: blog post) into a Google Drive spreadsheet for easy filtering by topic in the future.

Curate

Content curation is much more than making a list and publishing it on a social media platform. Sharing meaningful third-party content will establish sales professionals as an impartial resource and as an independent consultant to their buyers.

The type of content that you share is important. Not only should your content captivate your potential prospect, but curated content should also be of impeccable quality. Act like a micro-marketer: help a very specific person with a very specific problem at a very specific stage of his/her buying process.

Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose

A simple Twitter keyword search provides insight into relevant industry subject matter. Why reinvent the wheel? Try a new approach with an old topic. Turn dated content into evergreen. Share non-performing assets with new headlines.

Because people log into social media at different times per day and not everyone saw your post the first time, try sharing your content multiple times throughout the day. Different buyers will also respond to different trigger words. The same article will outperform based upon the time and date it was originally published on social media.

Employ tools like Canva or SlideShare to easily repurpose existing collateral into highly shareable images. Uncomfortable with new technology? Go old-school and recycle a simple PowerPoint quote box branded with your company name, logo, or twitter handle to reach higher engagement rates than sharing basic links alone.

Content

During our latest #S4LSocial Twitter chat, which happens every Wednesday @ 12:00 p.m., we discussed tactics for repurposing and curating content. Find the best tweets from that session below!

Kevin tThomas Tully Social Selling Talks9 Step Thumb eBook12 Step Book

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