What does Pregnancy Have to Do with Inbound Content Marketing Ideas?

The sheer volume of inbound marketing content businesses require 

In an era, in which companies are no longer selling products or services, but rather providing information and solutions to their customers and potential clients, content is the fuel that drives the marketing and lead generation machine. Digital tools have made it possible for people to widen their searching and learning, parallel to making it possible for smaller entities to get good exposure, thus empowering both consumers and businesses. With these new capabilities has also come an increase in competition over online real-estate and a decrease of the time a person forms a first impression regarding digital content. 

All this means that the quantities of content a company needs to generate has grown exponentially. According to Hubspot, in order to achieve maximum effect from blogging on website traffic, a company needs to post 11 blogs per month! That is ~3 per week. So where can companies get enough ideas to be able to generate so much high quality and interesting content? We all have an amazing resource available to us, and if we notice it, we can gear it towards collecting content idea. This resource is our brain, and more specifically the Reticular Activating System.

                                      

Start noticing ideas for inbound marketing content

When I was pregnant with my first born child, I suddenly noticed how many pregnant women were on the streets.  Then after I gave birth, I started noticing people with little babies up to one year of age. As my baby became a toddler I became especially adept at noticing little tykes about to run into trouble – like outrunning their mommy’s to the next cross road. I also noticed that the people who noticed it when my toddler outran me were mostly parents around my age group. As I became pregnant with my second child, my mind hones in once more towards all the other pregnant women out and about. 

It’s not that the birth statistics in my home town have changed overnight, but rather that pregnancy as a theme of interest became relevant to my life. I started noticing pregnant women when pregnancy was of the highest important to me.  I was so tuned into this subject that I not only saw more pregnant women, but I also heard more people talking about pregnancy and child birth , filtering these specific conversations from the general hubbub on the street. This phenomenon is called Reticular Activating System (RAS). We can all do this when something in important to us, it’s part of nature’s tools for reconnaissance, allowing us to gather information that is of high importance to us, exactly a time, in which it is most relevant.

Utilizing RAS for collecting inbound content ideas

So, I bet you are asking yourselves what RAS has to do with inbound marketing content. Well, if you can train yourself to use RAS to notice ideas, which are relevant to your business content, then you can use RAS to help you collect inbound content ideas. You are probably already doing this, as I assume your business (or the company you work for as a marketer) is important to you. So all you need is just a little more awareness to this idea collection process.

Take the time to stop and note any idea that comes to you, which is related to y our business. Good ideas and bad ideas. Use a recording device on your smartphone or carry a small pocket book and a pen with you at all times, so you can write down any scraps of ideas that come to you at any time. Try to record at least 2 ideas a day. The quality of these ideas is not what matters. The purpose of consistent idea recording is to train you mind to collecting ideas. The more often you do this the easier it becomes and the quality of the ideas will improve.

One a week take the time to sort through the ideas you have recorded and crate a list of the good ideas. This list is your idea bank. For each idea, consider how you can present it with digital tools – is a blog post the best way to go? Or perhaps a short video? Or maybe both? Can you extract an infographic from your idea? Can your initial idea be an inspiration for something more? Write all content types and relevant remarks down, adding them to your idea bank. 

It’s probably best to manage this idea list in an excel file so that you can easily sort the list according to categories relevant to your business (to which personas is your idea relevant? In what stage of the buying journey do you think your idea is most interesting to your customers and/ or potentials? What content type can you create from each idea?). This way when you need to create a certain content piece (e.g. an awareness blog for CEO’s) you just go to your idea bank list and take your pick.

Reticular Activating System is a skill that we all have. When you are tuned in to collecting ideas, they will come to you! If you are aware of this mechanism of your brain, you can utilize RAS to become a better inbound marketer.