Every now and then someone comes up with an idea that you wish you’d have thought of yourself.
And the latest contender for me is ‘Online Strategy Cards’ – a deck of 54 cards packed with content ideas categorised into… well, categories. It’s the brainchild of local entrepreneur Sarah Frame O’Hare.
I’ve met Sarah before and I know she is full of ideas, I’ve discussed them with her.
But by bringing her current idea to market, she is helping businesses with one of the biggest conundrums of modern marketing, – how to generate good quality, relevant content for your website, blog, email and social networks.
At a basic level, it’s a huge list of content ideas (I counted 420) all printed on laminated cards, and you could easily dip in and pick one each working day and have a fresh idea for nearly two years.
I’ve got loads of lists which I use to reference ideas, but there’s something essentially satisfying and easy about thumbing through a list of cards, compared to looking things up in a spreadsheet, or reading through a cheat sheet.
There are also ‘games’ which Sarah has devised that help you work through the bamboozling quantity – it is a deck of cards after all.
Deal or no deal?
I suspect, being in the profession of coming up with content ideas, I will adapt the deck to work the way I want it to, but it’s not just for the marketing industry I will be recommending these cards to our customers, or we may work together using the cards as a catalyst. Every business can benefit from these. I’m not saying they are the panacea for marketing stalemate, because while the ideas are one thing, people also struggle with execution.
‘Where to publish’ is covered to some degree by the Online Strategy Cards, but not in any depth. And that’s not a criticism by any means, the concept is to generate ideas, and it does that well. Going beyond that would only muddy the water. That’s what people like me are here for. A list of ideas will generate unique content through the notion of applying your own stamp on them, but the complexity with which content produces ROI is not so simple.
And to be honest, I think that that passage of ideas to execution works well. People do pay me to have ideas and execute them, but I can execute a marketing idea wherever it comes from.
I call the Online Strategy Cards a ‘brainstorm in a box’ and with the excess of rubbish content out there, these little things you can hold in your hand could make digital dullness a thing of the past.
Top marks to Sarah for her latest in a string of great ideas. Whatever will she think of next?
PS: I’m about to go into discussion with Sarah so we can stock them in my shop, but if you want to buy your own deck, go to OnlineStrategyCards.com