From Thanksgiving how-tos and holiday buying guides to sporting events and odd observances, there are plenty of content topics your business can use in November 2017.
Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content with the specific goal of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers.
Useful, informative, and entertaining articles, videos, and podcasts are a form of owned media your business can use to first build an audience and then sell to that audience.
What follows are five topics meant to inspire your November content marketing efforts.
1. Thanksgiving How-to
In the United States, Thanksgiving is a landmark holiday. Just about everyone in the nation will celebrate it in one way or another.
Marketers have an opportunity to engage readers or viewers with useful and entertaining content that teaches them how to accomplish a Thanksgiving-related task.
Better Homes & Gardens published a simple set of instructions for making fan-folded papers leaves with children. This guide is just the sort of Thanksgiving how-to content, you might try for your business.
This Thanksgiving how-to content could be a recipe for Maple Butter Turkey or instructions for making fan-folded paper leaves with children.
Choose how-to topics that make sense for the industry and audience your business serves.
2. Video Buying Guides
For retailers, November is the heart of the Christmas shopping season. It has three of the most important days for holiday ecommerce sales: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.
In 2016, desktop ecommerce sales for the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday totaled more than $8.4 billion in the United States, according to comScore, the trend-tracking firm.
To help your potential holiday customers choose the proper gift for the folks on their list, consider publishing a video buying guide that explains in detail some of your more intricate or complicated products.
Imagine, for example, you want to buy a fishing rod for your nephew. Which rod should you get? Shakespeare, the fishing-supplies company, posted a buying guide on YouTube a few years ago that might help.
In the video, Casey Davidson, product manager, walks through the process of choosing a rod. For November, try to do something similar for your business.
3. Sporting Events
Few things bring people together the way that sporting events do. So it can make a lot of sense to feature specific, timely events in your content marketing, particularly if those events are likely to be popular with your audience of potential customers.
As an example, the Professional Bull Riders national finals event — officially called the PBR Built Ford Tough World Finals — will be held November 1 through 5 this year.
The PBR finals are just one example of a sporting event your business could feature in its content marketing.
The PBR has about 42 million fans. Of these fans, some 15 percent are likely to earn more than $200,000 per year and 22 percent earn more than $100,000. In fact, the median income of a PBR fan is more than $96,000, according to the Professional Media Group.
If you sell products that might appeal to this demographic, an article or video about the PBR finals could attract potential customers.
You might also cover important football games, such as the University of Michigan versus Ohio State University game on November 28, 2017. Many college football fans simply call this particular matchup “The Game.” These two teams first met in 1897 and have had a significant rivalry since about 1918.
In November, pick a sporting event that makes sense for your audience, and write about its history, its tension, its important participants, or even its outcome.
4. Other Holidays on November 24
November 24, 2017 is Black Friday, a critical day in retail when hordes of holiday shoppers storm big box stores for deep discounts and Christmas savings.
Although there have been some reports Black Friday sales and deep holiday discounts may be in decline, the day is still important.
Rather than trying to compete with the Black Friday hoopla, consider composing an article or creating a video about one of the other holidays that happen to fall on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
“You’re Welcome Day” naturally follows Thanksgiving. Image: Jonathan Daniels.
For example, there is “You’re Welcome Day,” which seeks to promote good manners. Thanksgiving is all about saying “thank you,” so the next day is about saying “you’re welcome.”
Here are a few other pseudo holidays that fall on November 24 this year. These are listed in no particular order.
- “Brownielocks Day,” celebrating brunettes.
- “Buy Nothing Day,” a response to Black Friday.
- “Evolution Day — All Your Uncles Are Monkeys Day.”
- “D.B. Cooper Day,” remembering the mysterious hijacker.
- “National Leftovers Day,” since everyone will have them.
- “Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day,” because there is probably something you’re good at.
5. Comment On Popular Culture
Pop culture describes the attitudes, images, books, movies, and music distributed via mass media.
For some online retailers, content about pop culture will be a good fit for their brand. There are many opportunities to cover pop culture in November 2017, such as covering movie releases. For example:
- “Thor: Ragnarok”: November 3.
- “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”: November 3.
- “Murder on the Orient Express”: November 10.
- “Justice League”: November 17.
- “Molly’s Game”: November 24.
If movies don’t make sense for your audience, books might. There are hundreds of anticipated book releases in November that your business could preview, especially in you sell products that are in any way related to those books.
Here are a few examples.
- Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson.
- Renegades, by Marissa Meyer.
- Hardcore Twenty-Four, by Janet Evanovich.
- All Closed Off, by Cora Carmack.