The problem with undertaking a content marketing campaign is that you need content and plenty of it. It’s natural for you, particularly if you’re new to this sort of marketing, to worry about where it’s going to come from.

It could be right under your nose, unrecognized and underused.

Traditionally, it’s been difficult for Halloween haunted houses to distinguish themselves. Haunted Warehouse, Haunted Factory, Haunted Laboratory — they all have costumed ghouls, chainsaws and things that go bump in the night. Their marketing largely is limited to websites and garish ads in the local alternative weeklies. But Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Ontario, got a brilliant idea on how to use something it had plenty of – scared people.

The haunted house rigged a camera to take photos of people at their most frightened and posts them on Flickr and its website. The photos are hilarious, popular enough to trigger remix memes and sell Nightmares better than any ad could. And it took a minimum of effort to create and push it out to the world.

In some cases, content produced for internal use can also be sent out to consumers. Maytag created 3D instructional animation to teach salespeople the differences between regular washing machines and High Efficiency washers. But modern consumers like to do their own research and not rely on salespeople so, after tweaking the videos to make them more consumer-friendly, Maytag posted them on Lowes.com.

Sometimes what a company has to offer is expertise and a venue. Commercial plumbers and pipefitters are the most loyal customers of RIDGID Tools. They like to talk to each other about tools, jobs, customers, problems etc. So RIDGID established a forum where they could talk, comment and ask questions. RIDGID moderates the forum and sometimes weighs in with answers or explanations, but it’s largely self-policing and self-perpetuating.

Forum users provide the content and RIDGID benefits from having a website where its customers go to get answers and swap stories.

While content marketing sometimes does mean starting from scratch, there is often an easier way. Just look at what you are already doing.