It should be evident to you at this point (at least, I hope so) that content needs to be at the heart of your online marketing strategy, beating healthily and pumping life through the veins of your website. Consumers have so much information at their fingertips, and they are the ones in control. They're reading articles, reviews, case studies, and blogs. They're listening to podcasts and watching webinars and videos. You should be delivering the information to your prospects and customers that enables them to make a highly informed decision about your products - and this goes beyond product descriptions.
Many companies decide to hire full-time or freelance content producers to write articles, maintain the blog, and even create multimedia content like videos and webcasts. This is definitely the way to go, and certainly something you may want to consider. But here's another tool in your content toolbox that you may not have considered: your community.
Some of your best content can actually be produced by your own customers or members of your online community - just by asking for it. This is known as user-generated content, but I like to call it community-generated content. It's prevalent on product review sites and forums; but you can integrate community-generated content on your site in a number of ways. Not only is it great just for the content itself; but for the valuable data you can glean from it for your business.
Community-generated content should not be your only content marketing strategy. I recommend using it as a supplement to original content produced in-house (like case studies, articles, white papers, etc.). Here are a few ideas for how your community can create quality content for your site:
- As research for a blog post or article, ask a question on LinkedIn or other Q&A sites. I did this for my recent post 31 Must-Read Online Marketing and Social Media Books.
- Create a blog post where you ask readers to post comments with their opinions about a specific topic. Use their opinions to create another blog post.
- Ask a question on Twitter. Use the answers as part of a blog post. Chris Brogan did an awesome job with this back in October when he asked Twitter followers "If Oreo cookies wanted a social media
engagement to sell more cookies, what would you sell them?"
- Ask customers to contribute blog posts or articles about a topic relevant to your industry, products, etc. Better yet, hold a contest (check out how Viscape did just that).
Do you have any ideas? How have you implemented community-generated content into your website?
