When I meet a client for the first time, I ask, ” Are you producing and sharing any content for your audience?” More often than not, the answer is, “I should be doing more, but…[insert excuses].
Excuses like:
- “I don’t know what to write,”
- “my grammar sucks,”
- “I’m a terrible writer,” or
- “I don’t have time.”
There are no excuses for not creating valuable, helpful, and inspiring content. It is a must for every security business owner and protective services professional.
Your content doesn’t have to be:
- War and Peace, especially when the focused attention span is about 8 seconds, most “readers” skim and scan.
- Perfect. Many free spell-checking and grammar tools are available, or pay a few bucks to a good copy editor.
- Written. It could be video, audio, infographic, or images.
However, your content must be authentic – in your voice, brand, and personality.
Why?
I suppose a few of you at this point are asking yourself, “Why do I, as a security professional, need to create content?”
Content enables you to:
- Share your knowledge
- Share your brand
- Bring new customers and clients to your website.
- Be “top of mind”. When considering the security industry, your brand, services, and products will be first on customers’ minds.
- Connect with other industry leaders
These are just a few reasons to create valuable content.
Below, I offer a few content ideas and suggestions to help you start creating content.
Tips
I’ll start off with just regular, ordinary, everyday tips.
Whether you are a painter, a woodworker, a car washer, or whatever business you’re in, you always have these tips, these little nuggets that only you know about and would be great to share with customers or visitors of your website. It doesn’t have to be long; it could be short and sweet.
The Tips content could be a video, a podcast, or it could be in written form. Maybe even something as simple as sharing a photograph. Photographs tell a story. You can do a nice photograph with just a paragraph or a few simple words depicting what’s happening in the photograph. Simple information about the photograph – when it was taken, why it was taken, why it is important that you’re sharing it with everybody, what’s the meaning behind the picture.
Book Reviews
Book reviews are pretty easy to do. Talk about it, talk about why it’s interesting, why you even started to think about reading it, and if you have read it, do a simple, what was it all about? Why is it useful? What did you get out of it? Now that will be useful for your customers and visitors. You can do this with Apps as well.
Interviews
Interviews with a person in your industry, in your niche or market. Prepare questions ahead of the interview. The interview can be done in various formats – video, podcast, or send the questions to the interviewee and have him return his answers. Copy/Paste, and you have a blog post that is useful and valuable to your audience.
Top Ten and Do’s and Don’ts Lists
How about the do’s and don’ts list or a top ten list? Examples – The top things you must look out for when driving down the street. What are the top ten TV shows you have watched? Whatever you come up with, make sure it’s focused on your market.
Video
Share or create your own video. More than 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube daily, and consumption is increasing yearly. Search YouTube to share a video that your market would find valuable. Set up the video with a short introduction on how the content is relevant to your market.
Checklists
Every good security practitioner has a wide variety of checklists. Share one or two with your market.
Presentations
Upload your PowerPoint or VisMe slides to Slideshare and share the content. Pro tip: Record your voice as you go through the slide deck and upload that to YouTube.
Q&A sessions
Your audience, clients, and customers ask you questions through social media or email, and you supply the answers.
Email Newsletters
Email is one of the best ways to connect directly with your audience, clients, customers, and potential customers. Use a service like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Constant Contact, or Aweber.
Regular emails can help security businesses build customer rapport, loyalty, and repeat business by providing valuable content, updates, and offers.
Email marketing platforms offer detailed analytics, including open, click-through, and conversion rates. This data helps security businesses measure campaign effectiveness and make data-driven decisions to improve future communications.
What are your content ideas?
Post in the comments below.
