Here are 30 free content ideas for your public relations program which you can use now.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. Now, if you are struggling for content, things to say, to write, and to publish about you and your company and what you're doing, then this episode I think is going to be excellent for you because I'm going to list 6 different areas that you can look where you can find content, low-hanging fruit content that isn't going to be difficult to find or create and is going to be great to build your brand. I'm going to read for you the first 6, and then I'm going to come back into each of those and dive down. Now, the goal is to find for you content that you can publish every week, if not every day, that appeals to your 3 different audience groups: your customers, your partners, and also to your staff. Now, let's just have a look. I've got company news. I've got industry news. I've got product news. I've got customer news. I've got partner news, and I've got people news. There's lots of news. Let's find which news is going to work for you. Now, first of all, let's look at the company. Now, I've broken these down into these different aspects of what could be considered the company to give you an idea of the depth of detail that you can go to. Now, first of all, under company, have you talked before about the history of your business? Have you talked about when it was started? Why it was started? Who started it if it wasn't you? What photographs have you got? What images have you got of the business as it was going to be started, or even before you started it? I sent out a press release of me jumping out of an aeroplane at the age of 18, saying that jumping out of an aeroplane taught me that the rest of my career would be in public relations. So I even preceded by some 10 years my start in the PR firm using a photograph of me jumping in and out of an aeroplane. So what do you have for your company that's history? What milestones has your company attained? These don't have to be long ones. They could be small ones. It's all relative. Maybe it's something relatively small, a first invention or a first customer or a second or a third, or growing the business by a certain percentage. What milestones can you create or celebrate for your company? Location. Is your business in a particularly interesting location? Is it in a disused factory that used to have an interesting story? Is it in a building that's been repurposed? Is it a home? Is it that you don't have an office, that you work at your client's office? Is it that you happen to work from a mobile space? How does location anchor your business? How can that be a story that creates a context that potential customers, partners, and employees can think and affiliate with your business? Now let's look at location. Is there any historical resonance to the location and the business you're doing now? Are you working, for example, in a place that has a particular history? With your industry? For example, obviously people talk about coming from Silicon Valley, or in the Ribble Valley in the northeast of England, it's actually the home for digital audio technology in the world. What does your location have that grounds your business, that creates a narrative about why your business is there? Are you in the location that you're in now just because you happen to arrive there, or is there some history? Is there some significance? Is there an infrastructure there of existing companies, for example, or maybe there was an innovation that took place, or maybe this is where the minerals came from. So what story can your location give your business? What about the building? Are you working from a historical building? Are you working out of no building at all? What does your building say about you and your company? Or what are you building? Maybe you're building, for example, a restaurant or a factory. What does that say? Secondly, let's look at the people in your organization. Now, how often do we overlook the stories of our people? And yet most companies say, our people are our asset. And yet they do remarkably little to reward those people, or certainly to highlight those people. Often the head of sales might go for speaking engagements, for example. The CEO often prefers to be the only spokesperson. But what can we do to highlight the people in our business? And you see this particularly with charities are actually very good at doing this, as are groups like the Protection for Children or the animal welfare. They show people at the front line always. NHS care workers, for example. What awards have your people won? And it doesn't have to be a work award. It could be that they're a— maybe they've done a Duke of Edinburgh scheme, or maybe they've helped their children with that. Maybe they've run a particular marathon, or they've raised money for charity. Who knows what it is? Maybe they've entered a cooking contest. So what stories do your staff have of awards? What recreational activities do they take part in? Quite often, people that work together actually play together. Are there examples of your people going out, for example, on a group cycling or a group mountain biking or a group social event, watching the football together? What kind of service do those people have for your business? Do you celebrate long service awards for your staff? Do they have particular ways of rewarding one another? For example, do they buy cakes for each other? So the people in your business are a rich source of stories. We mustn't be afraid of using the stories within the business because these people are, by and large, the people that are going to be in contact with the customers and the suppliers and the partners. So how can we create a personality around the business which is about the people that are in it? Next, let's look at the product or service that you're offering. Now there's a whole raft here, and most people think of public relations as product or product marketing. They think of corporate branding, the company, and maybe investor relations, and they think maybe of product and product marketing. But so often, PR around products is all about what's just been launched, and it misses a lot of the context, a lot of the rich heritage that underlines and underlies why this product or service exists today. So let's just look at those. For example, what's the design of this product or service or venue? For example, where did that design come from? What's the design philosophy for this? Now, when I worked at Lotus as the CEO in China, we talked a lot about how the Lotus design and Colin Chapman, who was the founder of Lotus, was all about keeping the weight down in the vehicle. He said power is not the important point. It's the weight. And it's the weight-to-power ratio that's important. So the design philosophy of Colin Chapman is in the DNA of the business. And in China, it was part of the narrative that we built in the public relations. What technology is embedded into the product, but not just what technology is there for the sake of creating the product, but also for the backstory of the technology. For example, if you're in data, what's the path, for example, to now 5G? I'm working with a client on 5G, and in order to explain 5G, we have to explain 4G and 3G, and we even have to go back to the basis of CDMA, TDMA, and GSMA. I won't bore you with all the acronyms, but There's a history there to the technology, and the products today only exist because of their heritage, the technology path. What can you do to explain how your product or service lies on that chronology of technology? What about any patents that you've got for your product or service, or trademarks, for example? The very process of filing a patent and a trademark actually could be news that you filed for it, what you've had to do to get that trademark, how much it costs, what it covers. This can also be a thought leadership piece for somebody else that might be interested, and it could be one of your members of staff, it could be a partner, it could be a potential customer who really wants to work with a company that has patents but hasn't read about them because it's not on the product itself. What about the science, the thinking behind the product? This is different to the technology, the science behind it. So, for example, I've been looking at the Unnoticed show and writing a book about why people want to get noticed, and it's to do with thymos, which is the the Greek the Greek origin word about the need for recognition and about how as individuals. And as organizations, we need to be recognized, and we need to be recognized in some senses as peers, but also in other senses as better than our peers. It's a basic instinct, but it underlies why people want to get noticed, why public relations and advertising, all marketing happens. Of course, from a commercial point of view, we need public relations in order to get noticed. But actually, that's just a commercial manifestation of our personal requirement, which is to be able to find food and to be part of a tribe and to be taken care of. What is the science behind your product or service? And perhaps my favorite one, making. And if anyone's watched the children watching YouTube, my girls love to watch science movies. They love to watch chemistry, how things get made. They said to me, Dad, watching chemistry is like watching magic. Add this chemical solution to this chemical solution. I'm working with another client in the manufacturing space, and they can make a design into a 3D prototype in 72 hours. It's a combination of CAD, it's a combination of plastic injection molding, it's a combination of heat lamps, It's amazing. It's great content. How something is made. Everybody loves to be enthralled because ultimately we're all curious. How are you making your product? Is it an individual doing coding in Bangalore? Is it a person grinding some powder somewhere or somebody fashioning something or making from textiles? How is your product or service being made? That is a story, and that one lends itself very well to photographs and videos and audio. Now finally, under product applications, what are the applications for your service? Everybody that I know has in mind what they think their customers are doing with their product, but often there are other applications that they may or may not be aware of, or that they may or may not have really exploited. I'm always a big fan of the old story of Brylcreem, which came up at my postgraduate marketing degree in Manchester, and the professor raised Nigeria and Brylcreem as a great application case study. Brylcreem, for those of you that don't know, the story will unfold. I won't tell exactly what it is until you've heard the case study because it'll spoil it. But the sales team at Brylcreem found that a growth market was Nigeria. A little bit unexpected, of course, in West Africa that Brylcreem would be a growth sales product for them. So they sent the sales team down to Nigeria, and on the way in from the airport at Lagos, they were quite surprised to see the billboards put up by the local distributor advertising Brylcreem, people smiling and spreading it on their dry bread and putting it with their yam. They were surprised because actually Brylcreem is a hydrogenated oil for your hair to keep it down, to keep it flat. So they'd originally thought that people were using Brylcreem to relax their afro hair, but actually in Nigeria the application was for food. So not suggesting that you want to have products that are really cosmetics being used for food, but what applications can you think of that your product is being used for that renders itself for social media and PR? Now let's just look at the last 2 groups. We've got customers and partners. Now customers often do not feature in the PR of certainly B2B companies and often not enough for consumer companies. So here are some ideas for you. What are the stories about how your customers first came to get to know about your company? Can you ask them, hey, how did you find out about us? What kind of snippet? Can you use a tool like VideoAsk, for example, To gather up data, of course, we have the other platform called Gather Voices, which is really good for this. You have all the stories happening now on FIFO or on Trustpilot where people will write reviews. Those reviews could be stories. All those reviews could be retweeted, for example. They could be made into a montage or into an infographic. Now, what about recommendations that these customers could give you? Could you offer customers a bonus, a reward, a rebate, a cash-off, a cash-off the next purchase for giving recommendations where they actually appear in the social media, where they're willing to be interviewed, for example? How do they use the product? Think about, for example, people that are buying and driving caravans. I'm only thinking of that because I've got my caravan club membership renewed, and I've just got a picture of people in the caravan site, but they're stock models. Now, what about if the caravan club just had regular members posting their pictures? And what about the engagement? How lives were changed as a result of using your product or service? Could you get customers to tell you? Now, most people are afraid of asking customers, Because they think that the customer, A, might say, actually, it's not as good as I thought it was. I want to have a word with you. So there's avoidance, or they're afraid the customer will say, I'd like a discount, please, because you're using me. Now, if it's the first one, we've got a bigger problem because, as I've covered before with social media, those customers have got other places to say that they're unhappy, and they might as well come and tell you. But if you're worried about giving them a discount or rebate, I would say the monetary value of having a customer engaging with its audience and becoming what I call an evangelist on your behalf is absolutely golden. You can't even quantify that. And as we know from Apple, for example, every customer that's engaged with the brand and becomes an evangelist for your brand is doing your work for you. Now, the final group are your partners. Now, I put partners in here because most people think of PR as being just about the company. But I'd like you to think about what can your partners share? And what can you say about the company that you keep in order to deliver the products and services to your customers? What awards have they got? What supply chain quality do they have? What leadership do they have? What interviews can you have with your partners? Can you do things together? Joint photograph, for example, give each other a certificate of some kind, get your teams together to celebrate that you work together, because for the customer, seeing that there's a team supplying them is reassuring. And also, don't forget, the partner has its own social network, and they're likely then to promote what you put out within their social network. Finally, let's just look at the industry. Now, industry is rich with commentary. There are trends, there are insights, there's analysis, There's whole areas of conversation around regulations. Think of the impact of Brexit or COVID. Now, these can be opinion articles, they can be videos that you give, they can be webinars that you host. The industry where you operate is rich as a source of content. If you just think about your position about any of the topics that are taking place at the moment within your industry, this will give you an idea of some of the ways that you could format it. Now, as I said, some of this content If it's worthy, could be a press release. Some of it could be for your LinkedIn, a short 500-word article. Some could be a video that you could make. Some of it could be an infographic using Visme or canva.com. Some of it could just be a tweet or a text. So I've created there for you some content ideas: company, people, product, customer, partner, and industry. Can you break that down more? Yes, you can. Could you break it down less? Yes, you can. I'm not giving you the exhaustive list, but I am just trying to give you a list to get you started. And once you work through this, I think you'll find content comes freely and easily to you. And I'll post this, my map, on my LinkedIn so that if you need it, you can get it. And I'll also attach it to my show notes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show.