Creating Content Without Writing
For businesses and brands, having a constant flow of fresh content is crucial for marketing, building awareness, and engaging with customers and prospects online. The reality is that most companies don’t have dedicated content writers or big budgets for producing content. This is where generating content without actual writing comes in. There are several proven techniques you can use to produce consistent content with little to no writing on your part.
Repurposing Existing Content
One of the easiest and most effective ways to create new content without writing is to repurpose what you’ve already published. Take long-form blog posts, social media updates, or other materials you’ve already created and tweak or reformat them into new content formats. For example, you can:
Take parts of a blog post and turn them into shorter social media updates for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Cut out some details and facts to make snackable pieces of content.
Take a Q&A or FAQ format blog post and reformat it into an infographic summarizing the most common questions.
Interview an employee, customer, or industry expert you’ve quoted in the past and turn their responses into a new Q&A or case study format.
Take short social updates and compile them together chronologically into a new blog recap post.
Break down a long blog post into a multi-part email series for your newsletter subscribers.
Repurposing lets you get multiple uses out of content you’ve already created, increasing exposure and readership without significant new effort. Make sure to properly attribute any directly copied or reused content to avoid plagiarism issues.
User-Generated Content
Leverage the social communities you’ve built by encouraging customers and followers to generate content for you. Run contests where users submit photos on a theme you specify, with winners getting prizes. Provide story prompts for customers to share brand experiences. Pose questions on social media and compile the best responses. This type of user-generated content (UGC) comes from real people which boosts credibility and engagement compared to written marketing copy. It’s also free content for you. Just be sure to get permissions to reuse any UGC on your owned channels.
Data Visualization
If you collect quantitative data and insights through website analytics, sales reports, surveys, etc. learn simple visualization tools to transform those numbers into engaging infographics and slide decks without a lot of writing. Charts, graphs, maps and other visual representations of data are attention-grabbing forms of content that clearly illustrate trends without requiring much explanation. Pair your visuals with brief highlights of one or two key takeaways. Tools like Canva, Infogram, and Visme make basic data visualization easy for beginners.
Curating External Content
Aggregate content from trusted industry sources, influencers and colleagues by curating stories and posts that offer value to your audience. Summarize or quote relevant sections with proper attribution, then share on your owned channels. Curating shows your audience you’re keeping up with innovations while reducing the need to constantly originate new content from scratch. Make sure to only feature high quality sources that align with your brand’s mission to maintain credibility.
User and Customer Stories
Feature real user stories, customer testimonials, case studies and interviews that showcase how your products or services impact people. The key is to authentically capture these experiences rather than writing them yourself. Record video interviews and quote customers directly whenever possible for more engaging storytelling. Ask users to write their own stories then touch them up lightly for structure and flow before publishing on your site or collateral with permissions.
Visual Storytelling
Leverage photography, videography and multimedia formats that require less heavy writing compared to text-based content. Well-crafted images, GIFs, videos, animations, virtual/augmented reality experiences and other multimedia allow visual storytelling that can be just as powerful for engagement and messaging as written blogs or reports. Partner with professional marketing studios, designers or agencies to help bring your stories to life through visual media if making your own content isn’t feasible.
Behind the Scenes Content
Give audiences an inside look at your brand, company culture, teams, and daily operations through behind the scenes videos, photos and interviews. Share a day-in-the-life look at various departments through a photo diary or short vlog. Snap photos at company all-hands meetings or team lunches to showcase camaraderie. Interview team members about their roles and responsibilities in short interview snippets. Taking viewers behind the scenes both humanizes your brand while providing interesting insight that requires much less writing versus reporting.
Evergreen Resources
Develop library resources like ebooks, templates, checklists, worksheets, toolkits and other evergreen content pieces that offer long-term value to customers with minimal ongoing effort. The upfront work of organizing information and designing formatting requires focus, but evergreen content can be used and reused extensively for lead generation without further writing with each new distribution. Topics could include guides for common problems or processes within your industry.
Email Automation
Leverage email marketing platforms to automate segmented email nurture campaigns triggered by behaviors and actions without crafting each individual email. Tailor pre-written messages, offers and content relevant to where prospects or customers are in their buying cycle or level of engagement with dynamic email merge tags. Schedule emails in advance and let automation streamline continual re-engagement without writing new emails constantly.
Repurpose Video Transcripts
Generate new written content by transcribing video and audio interviews, presentations, tutorials and other multimedia. Transcripts provide SEO benefits compared to only hosting files, plus transcripts can be edited into new written formats like blog posts, ebooks or reports showcasing the most relevant highlights, tips and takeaways without needing to write fresh content from scratch. AI tools are making automated transcription cheaper and faster than ever.
Social Media Post Scheduling
Schedule batches of social media updates, posts, pins, etc. in advance covering various themes, topics or seasonal angles related to your brand so your profiles remain active without constant direct publishing. Groups of posts can highlight different types of user-generated content, evergreen articles, behind the scenes snippets, industry news or updates on campaigns/offers via a content calendar planned well in advance when you have more writing capacity. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social enable post planning and automation.
As you can see, there are many proven tactics for producing steady streams of fresh content aligned with your marketing strategy without exhausting direct writing resources. Leverage customer and user input combined with techniques like repurposing, curation, automation, visual media and repackaging assets you already have. Implement a mix of these approaches to keep information flowing consistently while minimizing time spent at the keyboard. Always maintain high editorial standards to preserve your brand’s credibility no matter the content format.
Andrew Stroud