Four ways to fill your content marketing pipeline

Right now, businesses, especially professional service-based businesses, have an extraordinary opportunity.

Marketing is changing. In an environment of information overload, never-ending promotional messages and low trust, it's harder to establish a credible and attention-getting marketing presence using the old rules. Lucky for us, the new rules are about educating, consulting, guiding: the very skills and philosophies that have guided professional services-based businesses for years.

But the opportunity comes with a challenge. How do you convey what your clients want and need to know in ways that are relevant, interesting and position your expertise effectively? All year round? What you can do is to reconfigure your promotional efforts around client education. Content. Interesting material versus sales pitches.

Go ahead, climb out of the marketing box.

Stamp all over that box. (No, you won't be needing it anymore.) Go get whatever it is that helps you think creatively-- chocolate, snacks, music, a comfy chair. If you want to, you can also do this sitting at a conference table without any of that stuff, but why not take the opportunity to relax and have a little fun?

Here are four ways to get thinking on this, and more important, to start answering the question, "so, what exactly are we going to say?"

The content map. I can think of a lot of great uses for mind mapping, but this is my favorite. The openness of the mind map format lets ideas flow into each other with surprising ease. Using a whiteboard or your fancy mind map software, start with your big idea (that would be your expertise) in the middle. What are the main subtopics of that idea? Where does that take you? Keep on breaking down, going off into tangents, letting the topics define themselves.

The sticky note plan. Using a whiteboard or wall and a bunch of colorful sticky notes, get brainstorming. What are your specialties? What are the big questions? The top concerns? The most valuable tidbits? Put it all up there, one sticky note at a time. When you're complete, start categorizing them into 4 or 5 main topics. Mash topics together. Admittedly, sticky notes aren't the "greenest" brainstorming method, but they're wonderfully flexible and provide a great visual "map".

The dozen questions. Imagine you're out to lunch with a client. What are his or her burning questions? What are the topics of conversation that seem to come up again and again? Keep thinking... you want a total of 12 questions. One question for each month of the year. Now, how are you going to answer them?

The six solutions. First, start with the biggest three problems or concerns faced by your target market. What are your market's challenges? What's the environment in which they're trying to solve them? Which three of those concerns are you well-positioned to address? Now, come up with six potential solutions for each of those identified concerns.

After one or two of these exercises, you should have enough material to keep you going with content-based marketing efforts for at least the next year. Wean them down to what's most relevant and what's most interesting. I'd love to hear what you come up with.