Yep, you heard me… Your customers are a content marketing goldmine! Want to know why? Great, settle down and let me tell you the 3 reasons why some of your best blog and social media content will come from your customers.

1. Testimonials

So this one is a given… Your customers can provide you with priceless testimonials for your product or service. But why is this so powerful? Because of a little something called social reassurance.

If you think of the journey someone takes to buy your product or service… They’re aware of it, they research & compare the market, before deciding to buy. Now when people are at that decision making stage, nothing works harder for you than testimonials. It reassures people that others have bought from you and they thoroughly enjoyed your product or service, so logic has it ‘they will too’.

Not only that but there’s also something called FOMO – the fear of missing out. When you share previous customers glowing testimonials is stirs up a little FOMO in people… Not in a bad way, but well they want to be rewarded for their great buying decision too.

You see those car dealerships posting collection photos of the car, with the big bow and the salesperson handing the key over. The perfect formula of social reassurance and FOMO in harmony… I dare you to visit your local dealerships Facebook page and look at the engagement on those particular posts… People tagging their friends, sharing it to show others. It’s powerful, powerful emotion provoking stuff.

2. Objections

Every business owners soul dies a little when a potential customer brings up an objection AKA a reason why they aren’t buying today. But turn that frown upside down because that person has just educated you on something you maybe didn’t even realise was a reason for them not to buy. And what do we do with those? We mope for 90 seconds, but then we dust ourselves down and start to list all the reasons why that objection isn’t really, well valid.

Let’s say they weren’t keen on getting a reflexology treatment done, because they were embarrassed about getting their feet out, or they’re afraid it might be ticklish (I know I don’t like getting my feet out, so that’s one for me!)

Well you can now tailor content geared to educate people on the different types of reflexology, using hands, ears even and how effective those other types are. So now your content is working away to dismiss those ‘feet fearing’ objections before someone else even raises them.

When you think back to the buying process, this content is great for those the research stage of the process.

3. Problems

Your customers problem have to be the absolute biggest goldmine of all. It’s a true insight into how your product or service filters into other areas of their lives. Areas you perhaps didn’t think of. People are maybe kept awake at night worrying about their tax return (for example)

They’ll tell you the emotions that they feel when they have the problem, which is so powerful to include in your content. So for a tax return issue it might be stress, worry, confusion, lost… These words are pure content gold. Because you can now use them to attract more of your ideal customer.

A social media caption that starts ‘Are you being kept awake at night worrying about your tax return’ relates to people and makes them scream ‘hell yeah I am!’ More than if you just said ‘Needing your tax return done?’

So when customers are ‘telling all’ prick up those ears and absorbs every adjective.

Which one are you going to try?

We all want to be doing ‘ALL’ the social platforms, ‘ALL’ the content types (Podcast, Blogs, Videos) but we only have one pair of hands and 24 hrs in a day… How is it possible? Well don’t worry, because with my time saving content tips, you can do more than you think.

We all know that content is our biggest friend… That little mini sales ambassador, giving its all whilst we crack on with the accounts (we thank you for it little content guy!)

But we don’t have to struggle with our content creation, it can be simple, streamlined and a complete doddle, once we get to know it.

So in order to help you ‘tame the beast’ here’s my top 3 tips to save you time with your content creation:

Repurpose your video

So many people use ‘only’ YouTube, or ‘only’ IGTV… Use them both! Making a video is time consuming, so record it once, edit it once and then right before you upload it to IGTV, rotate it to make it vertical. Then when people watch, they can rotate their phone and watch your YouTube video in full landscape glory right there on IGTV.

Another benefit of this… Not only are you reaching those who only follow you on IG, but the platform will love you back for using more of their features AND if you have under 10K followers, IG will still let you ‘Swipe up’ on stories to IGTV and they will also let you post the initial 60 secs in your feed!

Better yet, why not lift the audio from the video and create a podcast from it?! (Obviously this wouldn’t work for tutorials and you’d need to bear this in mind when you record it).

So now that’s 1 video being shown on YouTube, IGTV, Stories and your feed (cross post to your FB Page and you get extra points) and potentially a podcast too!

Narrow your focus

If you’re creating completely unique content for each platform… Listen up!

Why don’t you give your brain a rest and instead of trying to think of 5 or 6 different content topics each week, set yourself just 1 topic (hear me out).

So this blog post is ‘time saving tips’ where I share 3. That’s 3 different social media posts (1 for each tip) BUT I also have a newsletter to go out, so I could write all about my social media planning system that I use (more about that here).

Then on stories, I can show people how to repurpose their YouTube video for IGTV (and even add a cute graphic that invites people to rotate the video).

On LIVE I can show people how I plan my content for the month ahead.

So rather than hop all over the place, talking about blogging on stories one day, video on my blog the next, it’s way more effective, easier on my brain and less overwhelming to create.

Get ahead

You probably know my motto by now is to get 30 days ahead in your content. This is a HUGE stress reliever and time saver!

Not only do you build yourself a comfortable cushion, should you get sick, or have a crazy busy week, but by doing it all in one sitting, you’re already in the zone, focussed and you’ll find it rolls off your tongue so much easier than if you ‘post it on the fly’.

So there you have it, my 3 time saving content tips!

Let me know in the comments which ones you find most useful.

You don’t have to be taking images for every social media post. I’ll show you 5 places to find FREE stock images you can use in your content on social media and your blog (in fact I’m using stock image in this post just to prove that stock image aren’t a dead giveaway) so that you can take the pressure off of coming up with it all yourself.

People often think they can ‘right click, save as’ on any image on the internet and that is a common mistake. Even if you know it’s a stock image, you must always go to the source and download it properly, to avoid getting caught up in any copyright battles. But don’t fret, because I’m going to share 5 places where you can find FREE stock images that won’t land you in any bother.

Unsplash

This one is my absolute favourite. The shots on Unsplash are so creative and really don’t look like stock shots at all! If you’re looking for industry specific shots, you might not find them here, but for more general shots, you’re well served here. Flatlays on here are AMAZING!

Pexels

Very similar style of imagery to Unsplash. Pexels has really beautiful and creative shots taken by some very skilled photographers worldwide, that will work well on both social media and even on your web pages.

Pixabay

Another favourite of mine, Pixabay also has illustrations that are free to use. Illustrations can sometime be a great addition to seasonal content and social media posts.

StockSnap

StockSnap is great for generalized photography, such as flowers, sky etc. Not as cinematic as the others, but still great stock photography for blog posts or even promotional material.

StockVault

StockVault is ShutterStocks free sister site, so they have a range of both images and illustrations to use for free. They do show ‘premium images’ in the results which you will need to pay for, but there is still a great number of images to choose from that are free to use.

So, there you go… 5 places to find great & FREE stock images to use in your blog or social media posts.