5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2017

In April 2017, content marketers can find topics in the month’s well-known holidays, spring activities, and even poetry.

Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content with the goal of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. Shoppers may be more likely to buy from stores they trust and respect, and good content is a way to earn that trust.

1. Easter Sunday: April 16

Whether you focus on the Easter bunny and colored eggs or on the holiday’s spiritual meaning, Easter is a celebrated day in April.

From the content marketing perspective, it is also a natural opportunity to publish articles, graphics, or video related to Easter’s history, meaning, and observance.

Look to established publishers like the Reader’s Digest for content marketing inspiration.

To help inspire your Easter content, read some of the Easter-related articles from traditional publishers.

• “So Why Are Bunnies So Popular for Easter Anyway” – Reader’s Digest
• “That Time Sean Spicer Was the White House Easter Bunny” – CNN
• “Lamp Chops and Red Wine: A Perfect Easter Pairing” – Wayne County Journal-Banner
• “Easter: Astronomy’s Moveable Feast” – Arizona Daily Sun

If newspapers, magazines, and global news organizations can find Easter angles and hooks for their content, savvy marketers should be able to come up with at least a few Easter topics, too.

2. Make a Spring How-to Video

In most parts of North America, spring is in full swing in April. Your business’s potential customers are changing their daily routines to take advantage of relatively warmer weather and longer days.

This is an example, below, of a spring how-to video on YouTube from “MissMikaylaG” that had garnered nearly 90,000 views at the time of writing. For almost the first three minutes of the video, the host talks about a recent haircut and style, but by around minute three she offers some simple tips for spring cleaning.

Make and publish spring-themed how-to videos that help viewers. Don’t be afraid to closely associate your company’s how-to content with the products you sell. Notice in the spring-inspired do-it-yourself projects video below that Ellie briefly talks about projects she found on Pinterest. A craft supply retailer could easily produce a similar video and even sell the required items as packages.

3. Publish a Poem or Write About a Poet

April is National Poetry Month. It’s an opportunity to raise awareness about the quality and vitality of poetry in North America.

Content marketers may reference National Poetry Month in at least a couple of ways. A store could publish a series of poems on its blog or journal. Or businesses for which publishing poetry wouldn’t work as well could profile poets whose interests, work, or lifestyle relate to the products the company sells.

A men’s grooming supply retailer could profile famous poets with beards, like Walt Whitman, shown on the left, and Shel Silverstein.

For example, an online store that sells men’s grooming supplies, like beard oil or similar, could feature a bearded poet like Walt Whitman or Shel Silverstein, telling readers something about the poet’s life and experiences. This could include the five-line poem from Silverstein called “My Beard.”

My beard grows down to my toes,
I never wears no clothes,
I wraps my hair
Around my bare,
And down the road I goes.

4. Start a Pinterest Campaign

According to Pinterest’s blog, the social media site has about 150 million users, including about 70 million users in the United States. By some estimates, about 2 million Pinterest users are pinning shopping-related items every day.

For your April 2017 content marketing, build a Pinterest campaign featuring the products you sell. REI, which had more than 110,000 followers on Pinterest at the time of writing, sometimes shows pictures of its products in use. Notice the hiking picture below shows a dog wearing a pack that the company sells.

REI uses lifestyle images featuring the products it sells on some of its Pinterest boards.

You might also include do-it-yourself or how-to pins. Michael’s, the brick-and-click retail chain, uses Pinterest pins to drive traffic to its DIY craft projects on several boards.

Set goals for pin sharing, likes, and clicks.

5. Relieve Cabin Fever

Consider publishing articles, podcasts, or videos that encourage your audience of potential customers to get outside, be active, and buy the products you sell.

Mr. Porter’s The Journal recently featured an article encouraging readers to run a marathon.

After a long winter, your customers may feel pent up and they could be looking for good reasons to get outside. Use your influence as a content marketer to encourage them.

Along this line, men’s fashion retailer Mr. Porter recently published an article about running a marathon. The pithy and entertaining post ends with a collection of running apparel.

Bonus: April Fools’ Day, April 1

April Fools’ Day could be the most obvious content marketing opportunity of the year. It appeared in my list of content suggestions in both 2015 and 2016, when I described the holiday as “the pinnacle of content marketing creativity.”

ThinkGeek has a reputation for great April Fools’ Day products.

Publish only a harmless hoax or prank. For inspiration, see ThinkGeeks’ long list of prank products.