David Mamet practically created a new religion for salespeople everywhere in the film version of his Pulitzer Prize winning play Glengarry Glen Ross in which corporate uber-huckster Blake (played by Alec Baldwin) goes on an expletive-laced rant around the mantra “Always Be Closing”.  The scene has taken on a life of its own in pop culture and is even shown in film schools for its cinematic technique. Although, I’m not nearly as zealous as Blake, I am a proponent of “Never-Stop-Marketing”. As evidence, see my article from September 2014, Fighting “Feast or Famine”. However…

What if you build a content marketing campaign that generates so much new business you become too busy to maintain it? Well, that would be called a luxury problem. But that’s the problem I’ve been experiencing this last year, which is why some of you haven’t heard from me in a while. The only antidote to this conundrum is to not neglect all marketing so as to create a genuine famine in which no new business comes in the door. So even if you don’t fulfill your content campaign by posting to your blog, be sure to always be introducing yourself and your wares to new prospects through whatever channels you can. In other words, keep feeding the pipeline.

The bottom line: This Stuff Works.

During this time, I’ve serviced some very interesting accounts and collected many new tools and skills that could prove valuable to the small-business, do-it-yourself content marketer, as well as the large corporate marketing department.

One of the exciting tools I’ve been using is VideoScribe from Sparkol. It’s a feature-rich package for creating whiteboard animations that’s actually easier than authoring a PowerPoint slideshow. Check out this 45-second promo I created in a few hours just for this article:

Another brilliant product is Prezi, in which you can engage your audience with more fluid slideshow content. I’ve built this presentation about the basics of setting up a free social media campaign:

Sparkol also has a new product named Tawe which I haven’t played with much but it certainly looks intriguing. Basically, you can quickly turn any image into an animated infographic.

Finally, two indispensable tools for DIY content creation are sound and video editing software. I use iMovie and GarageBand on a Mac. Two good choices for Windows users are Movie Maker and Audacity. There are certainly more powerful applications for professional users, but if you’re a sole proprietor of a small business or a corporate manager looking to create more interesting limited-use content, any of these are great to have in your toolkit. Use them to assemble elements created in other packages including sound and voiceover.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to go over these and other tools and propose ideas for how and when to use each. Until then, if you have a favorite content creation tool besides MSWord, please feel free to leave a comment.