Content Idea Generation Solutions for a Strong Content Marketing Strategy
A strong content marketing strategy, working across the content produced for your website, newsletter, and social media platforms, not only informs your ideal client about what your company does, and the why and how of what you do. It also seeks to show them that you understand their issues in a way the competition doesn't, making you uniquely qualified to provide the solutions they need. Great content also has to engage the interest of search engine bots while serving the needs of people. It's a big ask, so here are some content generation ideas to keep things fresh.
Content marketing as a strategy isn't new - brands have been telling stories to attract and retain customers for decades - but with the digital revolution, the content marketer's remit expanded as their audience's attention fragmented across a plethora of distribution channels. The central problem of content marketing - coming up with fresh and interesting ideas - has grown with it. After developing your cornerstone content and churning through your initial bank of ideas for blog posts and social media, marketing efforts may falter. What do you write about next? How can you create a continuous flow of informative, entertaining, and SEO-appropriate content that propels your company or organisation toward success?
The Challenge
You need a reliable process to produce consistently high-quality content to fuel your online marketing. Attracting a consistent stream of traffic to your website and identifying and nurturing leads through creative content marketing methods requires a continual influx of ideas. The content idea generation process will be different for every team, depending on the individuals involved. Some the methods 1827 Marketing uses to create engaging content are described below. They produce reliable results and should have a place in your toolbox:
1. Hold regular brainstorming sessions
Get your team into the habit of meeting regularly to brainstorm ideas and fuel their creativity. During brainstorming sessions, a single topic can split into multiple sub-topics; one keyword phrase can be transformed into a list of useful terms. Keep the sessions light, dynamic and playful. Ideally, they should be short and fun. Write down every idea generated, no matter how unusual they seem, and save them in a swipe file.
2. Create and use swipe files
Swipe files are like collages of engaging ideas. Found a piece of compelling, useful content or an intriguing headline? Pop it in your swipe file. Had a thought while waiting in line for your morning coffee? Note it down in your swipe file for later. Saving snippets and nuggets like this gives you a deep well of inspiration that you can keep coming back to draw on. One caveat: Be careful not to plagiarise. Make sure any text directly copied and pasted from another source is correctly attributed and accompanied by a link.
3. Keyword Research
Teams responsible for generating content need to have a basic understanding of search engine optimisation (SEO) to get their content in front of their audience. Achieving a top search engine ranking for highly competitive short tail or seed keywords can be difficult and expensive, making your content less discoverable. However, high traffic low competition search terms and long tail phrases are an excellent hunting ground for content marketing ideas that bring in your ideal customer, and at a point in the buying cycle when they're more likely to convert. Getting to the right people is sometimes better than receiving a large volume of traffic. Using a tool like Google's Keyword Planner will help you find them and can be a great launchpad for your team's brainstorming sessions.
4. Audience tracking and engagement
If you're already producing content, one of the best ways to determine what engages your target audience involves listening to them and tracking their behaviours. Collect traffic and conversion data using a free tool like Google Analytics alongside any tracking capabilities built into your marketing platform, and analyse it intelligently. Identify the content and campaigns that successfully elicit the response you want from your audience, learn what works and what doesn't, and increase your chances of your future marketing efforts doing the same.
5. Competitor tracking
Making time to discuss your competitor's strategy within your team can trigger ideas that help you broaden your reach. While riding on your competitors' coattails won't position your brand as a leader in your industry or niche, knowing what works for them could help you to challenge their rankings and target their audience, repurposing their success to fuel your own.
6. Idea generation tools
Sites like Google Trends, Buzzsumo's Content Analyser, and Ahrefs' premium Content Explorer share top content, social media posts, and more for keywords, niches, and general ideas for your digital marketing. Data-fueled topic decisions make sense. Just add your distinctive brand-specific flair to the content.
Fuel Your Creative Mind
Creative minds need fuel to operate, but this is not a direct food-to-petrol analogy. You don't want your team members' brains to merely function. For your idea generation machine to run at optimum capacity, you need your team to invent, inspire, and generate new ideas. Still, output requires input.
Read
Everything from industry news to product packaging can spark an idea. What processes do you have in place for inspiration gathering, sharing and discussion among your team members? Would tools such as a Feedly Team account or a dedicated Slack channel help?
Listen
What topics are your targets talking about and what questions do they have that you could answer? Customer support, online communities, social media channels, podcasts and videos provide opportunities to tune in and listen to what is of interest to and challenging your potential customers.
Watch
Video isn't just an impactful method for you to communicate with your audience, it is also a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration and another place for you to research where your potential customers are putting their attention.
Live
Do what all great writers do and use what you know. What struggles do you have in your working life? What new experiences have you had that can fuel your creativity?
Don't forget that content creation itself can be a catalyst. Writing about one topic often introduces good ideas for new, spin-off subject matter. This incidental brainstorming also happens automatically in the middle of other unrelated tasks and when your brain is on auto-pilot. Pay attention when these ideas pop up and note them down in your swipe file before they disappear into the ether.
Make Time To Have Ideas
Blog content ideas and those for other marketing text may come from one of the idea-generation sources mentioned above. A keyword phrase can spark an idea that creates an entire series of engaging content. A trending topic on a popular niche-specific site can provide the inspiration that creates your next top performing, traffic driving post.
However, one-off hits on your blog or social media do not create a reliable conversion engine. You need to ensure you have a repeatable methodology for injecting creativity into a sustainable creation process, one that encourages a single idea to yield many and a simple question to launch a series to move leads down the sales funnel.
How Good is Your Content?
Attempting to squeeze content creation in between less creative tasks will leave you with bland, uninspiring results. What you produce might answer the search engine and algorithms' requirements, but it will lack the power that makes your audience want to act, share it or take direct action. Creative writers speak of flow state, a mental space they achieve when ideas seem to channel directly from their subconscious onto the page. While a Facebook post or your weekly blog might not equate to a literary masterpiece, creative ideas are required, and ideas need space to grow. Carve out dedicated time for ideation in your creative process.
Like the adage about the "proof of the pudding", content is only worthwhile if it gives you the desired result: an increase in traffic, lead generation, more conversions etc.
Many characteristics go into boosting the quality of your content, including things as basic as proper grammar to sophisticated structure-based SEO practices. While a checklist for every aspect of your content creation strategy will help, constant response data collection, analysis of the performance of individual pieces and your overall efforts gives you the best actionable information.