Inbound Marketing Meeting Agenda - Content Marketing Brainstorm Session

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This is a follow up to a previous post called, "Your 1st Inbound Marketing Meeting Agenda".

We've heard your struggles about how difficult it is to create content for your website. We understand, but that cannot be an excuse on why you aren't creating remarkable content. The first step in overcoming these challenges is determining topics to write about. This is such an important step that we are recommending you have a meeting focused solely on this objective. Before you continue, it needs to be clear that you absolutely cannot say "we have nothing to write about" or "people don't care to read about our industry". If you have that mindset you will not succeed at content marketing.

How to Run a Content Marketing Brainstorm Session

1. If you haven't already, define your buyer personas and buyer's journey
   • Be sure that everyone understands these
2. Bring the right people into the meeting
   • Receptionist or someone that answers common questions
   • Someone that is very familiar with your product or service
   • A person that is familiar with your competitors
   • A salesperson
   • Executives
   • Anyone else in your business (You will be surprised at how many topics you can come up with by getting different perspectives)
3. Explain the purpose of the meeting (at this stage you are looking for topics only, not the content itself)
   • The topic should be something that adds value for a prospect or current customer
   • It should be compelling enough to read or share
   • Looking for different content marketing mediums such as:
     • blog posts
     • ebooks
     • video
     • infographics
     • checklists
   • There are no bad ideas
     • Topics can speak to the most novice person possible...don't think that there's a topic that is too basic
     • Topics can speak to the person that has a strong understanding of your product or service (remember, content marketing is to add value to your current customers as well)
4. Start collecting topic ideas
   • Someone should be writing the ideas down
   • Use a whiteboard to so everyone can see topic ideas - it might help spur other ideas
   • Categorize them (this can be modified down the road)
     • Which buyer persona
     • Where in the buyer's journey
     • Skill level
     • Overall topic related to your business
     • Any other way you think categorization would be helpful
5. Organize/Prioritize
   • The purpose of this meeting is not to collect ideas and shove them in a desk drawer not to be seen again...organize them based on importance
   • Assign the writing/creation tasks
   • Set deadlines
   • Collect and plan on having enough topics for at minimum 1 month
6. Go forth and conquer
   • Plan on regrouping in 1 month
   • Enforce deadlines (without accountability, things won't get accomplished)

Remember, you can't accomplish something by just having a meeting. Have a meeting, but then actually do what you are planning on doing.