Adding Color to your Content Marketing

An Excellent addition to your creative content arsenal

I have come across a great tool that helps spice up the day to day blogging. It can add color, context, perspective or humor. The tool injects popular culture spin on seemingly mundane topics and can immediately bring a person back to a particular time and place. A time and place that serves to reinforce the very topic of the post to inject an emotional reaction that perfectly underscores a salient point that you are trying to make. What is this magical tool? What could possibly marry together a thought inducing blog post with a reader’s emotional bookmarking system?

Movieclips.

I love movie clips. Not only does it offer up a way to tune in, on demand , to some of my favorite movie clips from some of my favorite movies. It also allows me to trim them down to the very precise point in the clip that would, if I were able to embed it into a blog post, provide a tangible analogy for the topic that I might be writing about. And guess what, it actually does allow me to embed the clip. It is awesome. I first used a movie clip, but from YouTube, to write a Prezi tip about how it helps to think like a director. Movieclips offers much more content, however, and I began to use it mostly for fun here and there, and even included a Movieclip link to a scene from the Godfather in order to illustrate an example of varying your theme when content marketing. And most recently I used it to communicate the incredulous emotion I felt when learning that a company with aggressive growth plans had no go to market strategy in place.

And I feel like I’m just getting started with the tool.

For those who know the value of content marketing and inbound marketing, they understand three things very well; the requirement to steadily generate fresh and relevant content, methods to spice up or add color to that content, and tapping into new ideas for generating new content. Movieclips solves all of these needs.

Let’s suppose, for instance that one is writing a post about how seemingly simple tasks suddenly appear to be daunting. To reinforce that notion they might drop in a clip like this.

What if the writer has an affinity for baseball and believes that it is the perfect metaphor for just about anything. To hammer home the point in a post about having passion and commitment in order to achieve a specific goal they might select this offering.

What if the writer is looking to keep things on the lighter side when writing a post about a certain revelation that they’ve had which they believe to be creative but perhaps not too terribly earth shattering. To express the fact that they are impressed with their newly lit light bulb, yet still admit that their pride is indeed humble they may select to included this.

What about those content marketing and inbound marketing moments when one is finding it difficult to identify something new and fresh. Movie clips to the rescue. How? Well by following these simple steps.

1. Spend some time on movie clips browsing some of the most popularly viewed clips. Or simply searching for some of your favorite popular movies from the past.
2. Let your browsing take you where ever your memories guide and being to watch some of those clips.
3. While watching ask yourself “what in this clip reminds me of the nuance of the things I typically use for my content marketing or inbound marketing?”
4. Jot down movie and clip title and being to bullet point notes of where that discovered alignment might rest.
5. After say 5 clips look over your notes – in the bullets rests your next content idea
6. Begin to write and then use the clip to reinforce the connection.

An example would help you say? Ok, let’s give it a try.

Put the topics of your content marketing and inbound marketing in your head right. . . .NOW.

Watch. . .

Think of anything?

Good. . .start writing

Update: Received some good feedback from CC Chapman, co-author of Content Rules the quintessential reference for creating content.    “I think these will be even better if you include more of your thoughts on why the clip fits the theme you are talking about. Right now the clip is the hero of the post rather than the content you are creating to surround it.”  He was referring to this post on the Seamless Workforce on professional staffing services.

Also Movieclips re-tweeted the the Seamless Workforce post with the hashtag #movieclipsmonday.  If  you end up posting moveclips content on a Monday use the hashtag!

photo credit: Capture Queen