Four Ways to Keep Content Fresh

By Gini Dietrich

Do you know the story of how BlendTec used Will It Blend to keep content fresh about industrial-strength blenders?

While a big fan of their super smart and creative videos, I didn’t know the idea to see what their blenders could blend came about because an executive noticed sawdust on the floor.

As it turns out, employees were putting broom handles in the blenders to see if they would blend.

And they would.

And so was born the “try this at home” and “don’t try this at home” campaigns to show just how the blenders work.

One of my favorite videos is when the first generation iPad came to market and they blended one. They put a nearly $1,000 piece of technology in a blender…and blended it up!

This, of course, was part of their “don’t try this at home” series. I don’t think you really want to blend an iPad.

The point is this: They make blenders. They have lots of competition. Their blenders are not cheap. They needed a story to help build the brand and make people aware of its incredible strength, but also to set itself apart from the competition that seemingly do the same thing.

And a story they found.

Keep Content Fresh

I consider myself a pretty good storyteller. I write every, single day. Even though I didn’t start out as a great blogger (which I am reminded of every blog anniversary, when I re-publish our very first blog post), I put something on proverbial paper every day.

Now companies hire us to help them tell their stories … and guess what? Sometimes even we get stuck.

We work with manufacturing companies. We work with financial services companies. We work with software as a service companies.

None of those companies have anything in common, which requires us to be extremely creative—in different ways—multiple times a day.

To help us tell their stories, we do a few things to stay creative and keep content fresh:

1. Subscribe to SmartBrief. I’m a big, big fan of the SmartBrief newsletters. They aggregate a bunch of content every day (at least 10 articles) around one topic (I subscribe to entrepreneurship, leadership, and social media). It’s pretty likely they have a newsletter for your industry.
2. Subscribe to Talkwalker alerts. I love, love, love Talkwalker alerts. And I love them even more now that I can throw them into a newsfeed in Hootsuite instead of having them come into my email. Create an alert for your industry or your specialty and pay attention to the trends. There are a lot of content ideas in there.
3. Read the comments. Maybe no one is commenting on the content you create. We certainly have clients like that. Readership and subscribers grow significantly every month, but no one comments. So read the comments on other blogs inside the industry. Read the Twitter streams. Read the comments on Facebook updates. This is what we’ll call real-time research. Find out what strikes the fancy of your audience.
4. Pay attention to current events. Can you provide a perspective on the release of the “newly found” manuscript from Harper Lee? Or test different ways to organically grow your Facebook fans? Sometimes scanning the news is the best way to get past writer’s block.

Now it’s your turn.

What do you do to help keep your content fresh? To tell your story in a new and different way? To get past writer’s block?

About Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich is the founder, CEO, and author of Spin Sucks, host of the Spin Sucks podcast, and author of Spin Sucks (the book). She also has run, built, and grown an agency for the past 14 years. She is co-author of Marketing in the Round, co-host of Inside PR, and co-host of The Agency Leadership podcast.

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