How To Find Content Ideas That Get More Clicks, Conversions, And Customers
If you’re a B2B marketer, one challenge you’ll face is coming up with enough content ideas for your blog. It can be tough to come up with blog post topics week after week and you find yourself asking questions like:
- “How do I find content ideas?”
- “How do I fill my social media content calendar?”
- “What content should I create?”
In today’s post, I’m going to show you how to come up with content ideas that will help you go from blank page to bad-ass blog post (Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good!)
Grab your free checklist below to see how to come up with content ideas that get more clicks, conversions, and customers.
Bonus Content: Your Checklist for Finding Content Ideas That Get More Clicks, Conversions, And Customers
Then read on to learn my 16 favorite techniques for uncovering content ideas that will drive your content marketing and SEO strategies.
Let’s rock and roll…
Inside This Post
Why Coming Up With Ideas Is Essential to Your Content Marketing Strategy
Do Customers Actually Care about Your Company’s Content?
How Successful Marketers Come up with Content Ideas B2B Buyers Want
Reading Time: 31:22
Why Coming Up With Ideas Is Essential to Your Content Marketing Strategy
Why Coming Up With Ideas Is Essential to Your Content Marketing Strategy
Every marketing team needs fresh content ideas.
- SEO
- social media marketing
- email marketing
….are all fueled by content.
And so, you’re always gonna need new ideas to create content. You can’t have a great content marketing program without a steady stream of creative ideas.
Not only are creative ideas the foundation for your marketing success, they’re also important for business growth. Maybe that’s why when LinkedIn Learning used their Economic Graph to determine the skills companies need most, creativity was ranked as the second-most in-demand skill in the world.
In fact, a McKinsey research study found creativity generates business value. They developed an index — the Award Creativity Score (ACS) — that’s based on 16 years of data. Companies whose ACS scores were in the top quartile performed better than their peers in three areas:
- 67% had above-average organic revenue growth.
- 70% had above-average total return to shareholders (TRS).
- 74% had above-average net enterprise value or NEV/forward EBITDA
Okay, so there’s a link between creativity and business performance. But how do you come up with ideas for content topics? And how do you do it again and again?
After all, 60% of companies struggle to produce content consistently, and 65% find it a challenge to produce engaging content.
The answer is you need creativity to find engaging content topics.
Creativity is the generation of ideas or products that are original and useful. Creativity means using divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the ability to generate many ideas. Convergent thinking is important when evaluating and selecting the most promising ideas. To be creative, you have to be able to switch between these two modes of thinking.
In other words, you have to be able to come up with a lot of ideas and be able to spot the winners.
Let me ask you this question…
Do Customers Actually Care about Your Company’s Content?
Do Customers Actually Care about Your Company’s Content?
Short answer: Probably not.
It’s like Teddy Roosevelt said:
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Your prospect doesn’t care about your product and too many content ideas are about the company or the product.
Like I’ve said before, 500-word, product-focused blog posts don’t produce results.
In fact, Forrester did research on technology-purchase decision makers that found 65% of B2B customers say they already get too much material from marketers, and almost as many think what they’re getting is useless.
If you want to come up with content topics that stand out, start with your customer, not your products or keywords!
Your content ideas should be customer-focused. Talk about what problems they face and worries that keep them up at night.
When you do talk about your product or company, it should be in the context of how you can help relieve the pain points of your ideal customer.
If you want your customer to engage with your content, you have to write about topics of interest to people who can benefit from using your product.
Make sense?
So, how can we drill down deeper into what your audience may find interesting?
A research study in the Journal of Consumer Marketing gives us a great place to start:
- interestingness is an emotion and brand interestingness (BI) has the highest effect on purchase intention (PI)
- interestingness is characterized by curiosity, increased attention and feeling a need to get closer to what is perceived as interesting
- One way of increasing BI could be clearly communicating desirable benefits
What does that mean for you? If you want to earn people’s attention, create content that:
- sparks curiosity
- clearly communicates desirable benefits
Interestingness is only one emotion. What other emotions can you tap into to make your ideas interesting to a B2B audience?
To see a great example of this in action, look at First Round Capital. When they wanted to get the attention of founders building companies from scratch, they published The Founder’s Field Guide for Navigating This Crisis — Advice from Recession-Era Leaders, Investors and CEOs Currently at the Helm.
This is content their audience can relate to and it taps into several of the emotions at play in the B2B space right now like assurance, career advancement, relatedness, reassurance, risk, uncertainty, and fear.
By sharing tips on how to lead and plan during this crisis, First Round gives their readers educational content that they can use.
And they offer readers a desirable benefit (“navigating this crisis”).
After all, what founder wouldn’t be interested in tapping into the minds of top leaders and experts who’ve successfully started companies during a recession?
By focusing on what matters most to your customers, you’ll be able to create engaging and valuable content that will encourage people to take action — whether that means buying a product or signing up for an email list.
Which brings me to…
How Successful Marketers Come up with Content Ideas B2B Buyers Want
How Successful Marketers Come up with Content Ideas B2B Buyers Want
So, maybe you’re wondering, “How do I come up with interesting content ideas, hmmm?” Keep reading to see the techniques top marketers use to come up with content ideas.
Use the “Wisdom Of The Crowd” To Find Content Ideas
The “wisdom of the crowd” is one of my favorite ways to find new content ideas. You can think of it as a more scientific method of finding content ideas.
As Steven Hoornaert, Michel Ballings, Edward C. Malthouse, Dirk Van den Poel, clinical psychologist, say in their recent released study, Identifying New Product Ideas: Waiting for the Wisdom of the Crowd or Screening Ideas in Real Time,
“Crowd feedback is the best predictor of idea implementation, followed by idea content and distinctiveness, and the contributor’s past idea-generation experience.”
They go on to explain how to process crowdsourced ideas by identifying the aspects of ideas that are most predictive of future implementation and recognizing three available sources of information for an idea: its content, the contributor proposing it, and the crowd’s feedback on the idea (the “3Cs”).
According to their research “consideration of content and contributor information improves ranking performance between 22.6 and 26.0% over random idea selection, and that adding crowd-related information further improves performance by up to 48.1%.”
Aristotle is credited as the first person to write about the “wisdom of the crowd” in his work titled Politics.
As you can see, we’re still learning how to tap into crowd wisdom to vet content ideas.
For instance, you can ask your email subscribers for feedback.
This can be as simple as sending an email with a few questions designed to get you insights into their problems, fears, and desires and asking them to *HIT REPLY* to the email.
If you don’t have an email list (or your list is small) you can still leverage the wisdom of the crowd using social media. Make a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn post asking people to vote for the topic they’re most interested in.
Check out how Chris Von Wilpert taps into the wisdom of the crowd when choosing his blog post headlines:
Asking your audience for help taps into proven psychological concepts like the IKEA effect and the “do-me-a-favor” principle. In the classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie shares a story where Ben Franklin persuaded one of his enemies by asking him for a small favor “that touched his vanity, a favor that gave him recognition, a favor that subtly expressed Franklin’s admiration for his knowledge and achievements.
If you don’t have a large audience, you can run a poll or survey on social media asking your followers, “What content do you want to see us sharing?”
When you ask your audience for feedback on your content ideas, they feel appreciated and become invested in your success.
Use Calendars To Find Content Ideas
Holiday and event calendars are great for identifying relevant topics to create content around.
Here’s how you can use calendars to develop content topics.
Take a look at a holiday or event calendar and note the events and holidays relevant to your audience.
For example, if you work in marketing, you might find that Christmas is one of the most popular holidays. That means that this is a great time to publish content related to Christmas.
Alternatively, you might find that Super Bowl Sunday is one of the most popular TV events of the year. This means that this is a great time to come up with content ideas related to the Super Bowl.
After finding a few holidays and events, sit down and start brainstorming content ideas.
You may think nobody will pay attention to your content during the holidays but when LinkedIn analyzed B2B engagement rates during the 2018 holiday season, they found LinkedIn members were highly engaged.
- “LinkedIn Members were reading and engaging more with content
- Ad engagement for B2B brands on LinkedIn increased
- LinkedIn members were also more likely to volunteer to hear from brands during the holiday season — lead gen form submission increased by 22% in December
Software sees the best holiday results
For example, B2B Computer Software brands served 13x more seasonal ads on LinkedIn than any other industry in 2018, and it was worth it — the top five highest-performing brands in Computer Software serving seasonal ads saw 2.6X higher CTR on average.”
This indicates if you deliver timely content your audience is interested in, they’ll pay attention, even if it is a holiday.
Use Current Events To Find Content Ideas
Newsjacking — or injecting your ideas into a breaking news story — can help you and your ideas get noticed.
When you come up with a great idea for content that ties in with something that’s happening right now (e.g., someone’s recent success story), it makes sense. The customer feels like they’re getting information they need, while also feeling like they’re getting something special because they’ve heard about this ahead of everyone else.
In his book, Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, David Meerman Scott explains how Oakley, makers of high-end sunglasses, newsjacked the biggest story on the planet (2010’s “Chilean mining accident”) by donating 35 pairs of Radar with Black Iridium lenses to all the miners as they exited the mine in what was arguably the product placement of the year.
The glasses cost a couple hundred bucks a pair. The resulting media coverage was worth $41 million dollars.
To use this technique effectively, you have to move fast.
If you’re keeping an eye on the news cycle for opportunities to become part of developing trends and events, once you spot a story developing you have to get things done on a tight deadline before the story starts to lose traction.
The Neat Company does a great job of this.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that this content was created in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Neat *was* my client but that has nothing to do with this being good advice. 😉
During the height of the pandemic, Neat used content to attract their target audience — small and medium-sized business — by discussing highly timely and relevant topics like COVID-19, taxes, etc.
Neat was able to tie these topics in with their products. More importantly, because there was a federal tax filing deadline postponement in 2021 and remote work was new for many people in Neat’s audience likely viewed this content as relevant and helpful.
You can see how context helped Neat generate topics to create content around.
They covered a timely issue (and called out their ideal customer in the headline) by publishing Living With Less Stress During COVID-19: The Busy Business Owner’s Guide.
They provided resources and answers to questions that were on the minds of their customers using COVID-19 Resources Available for Small Businesses. Your Questions, Answered.
And they used a trending topic, social distancing — combined with an evergreen topic, growing your business — to create 7 Ways to Grow Your Business During Social Distancing.
Just remember to always put the customer first. Make sure the topics you come up with are actually valuable and relevant to your audience.
Use Competitor Analysis To Find Content Ideas
Competitor analysis is a great way to find content ideas.
By looking at what your competitors are doing, you can determine which topics and formats are popular, and use that information to create content that will resonate with readers.
When we talk about competitor analysis, we’re talking about the process of looking at what other companies are doing in your industry. You want to see what your direct and indirect competitors are publishing on their websites, what they’re sharing on social media channels, and what they’re posting on relevant forums or discussion groups.
This information will help you determine which topics are currently being discussed within your industry. You can then use this information to identify content gaps and as inspiration for creating fresh content that will resonate with your target audience while also helping them solve some problems they may be facing related to these same issues.
Margarita Loktionova, Content Marketing Lead at Semrush, says,
“Doing a competitive content analysis should be a regular part of your overall content strategy” and “It’s a good idea to check in with your competitors and do a competitor analysis on a quarterly or yearly basis.”
Explaining the nuts-and-bolts of how to do competitor analysis it outside the scope of this article however, at a high level, Ellie Mirman, CMO at Crayon, says you want to “take a list of your content marketing competitors and follow these three steps:
- Take inventory of your competitors’ content.
- Evaluate content quantity and quality.
- Tag and analyze content topics.”
You can use competitor research tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Similarweb to uncover your potential competitors’ top-performing content and weak spots and identify your competitive advantages.
Head over to a few competitors’ channels to see what’s doing well for them.
As an example, if you’re in eCommerce in the fitness space, the Gymshark Shopify store would be a great brand to keep an eye on.
This United Kingdom-based fitness apparel and accessories brand manufacturer rakes in nearly $130 million in annual sales and has 7 million highly engaged social media followers and customers in 131 countries.
Gymshark uses content to deliver value and stay top-of-mind with their audience of athletes.
They offer a free Gymshark Training App with a workout library, step-by-step exercise videos, and the ability to track your workouts. Not only does this provide additional value over and above their core product line, it helps foster a sense of community.
The company’s blog features blog categories like:
- PRODUCT & STYLE
- HEALTH
- GYMSHARK
- CONDITIONING
where they share articles like:
THIS NEW STUDY MAY BE THE SECRET TO REACHING YOUR WEIGHT LOSS GOALS
and
HERE’S HOW RUNNING COULD BOOST YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
to help their audience reach their training goals.
Imagine your fitness brand used Gymshark as inspiration and developed content topic ideas for blog posts, YouTube videos and podcasts after observing which topics and formats resonated with Gymshark’s audience.
You may end up with ideas for your own content like:
HOW TO REACH YOUR WEIGHT LOSS GOALS, ACCORDING TO SCIENCE
and…
7 WAYS RUNNING CAN BOOST YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
If you use this technique, you’ll be able to develop content ideas that are — at least — decent (you’ll only get better with practice).
If you’re worried using this technique will turn you into a copycat, remember Steve Jobs famously said: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” and Apple has been hailed as the world’s most innovative company.
Use Trending Topics To Find Content Ideas
If you’re looking for content ideas, there’s no better place to start than what’s being talked about right now.
This will help you understand what your audience is interested in and what types of content they want to read or watch.
Trending topics are popular topics that people are talking about online. Trends can be a great way to find content ideas. You just have to know where to look.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
- Search keywords on Google Trends
- Search for trending hashtags or check out or Twitter’s Explore tab
- Subscribe to Exploding Topics, a free newsletter that features emerging trends rising in popularity among web searches and social media mentions
You can also check out tools like BuzzSumo and Moz which show what content has been doing well on social media over time so that you can see what kinds of topics are performing best right now (or at least recently).
Researching trending topics will show you what people are talking about right now and give you ideas for what to write about next.
Use Your Swipe File To Find Content Ideas
A swipe file is basically a collection of all the highest-performing content you’ve ever seen on the web. It could be an entire blog post, or just an image or quote that really resonated with people — whatever inspires you and gets results. The idea behind a swipe file is that it gives you inspiration for future content while also reminding you why certain things worked so well before.
You’ve heard the advice to keep a swipe file. Most people keep swipes with ads, emails, even landing pages. But do you have a swipe file of blog post titles? Or kick-ass blog posts that you can riff on their format, style, or approach?
Make a habit of collecting good ideas whenever you see them. That way when it’s time for you to create, you have a handy tool you can use as “an inspiration cheatsheet.”
Don’t have a swipe file? Here are a 10 resources to help you start one:
- Swiped.co
- Fantastic Texts
- SwipeFile.io
- Copywriting Headlines That Sell (with Templates & Swipe File)
- The Ultimate Landing Page Swipe File
- Facebook Ad Examples From Every Industry
- 801+ Power Words That Pack a Punch & Convert like Crazy
- Really Good Emails
- The Steal Club
- Learn To Write Headlines That Get More Clicks [Plus FREE Swipe File Download]
Letting the good ideas you collect inform the content you create and borrowing ideas from other industries is smart business. Of course, you don’t want to copy anybody’s idea wholesale.
There’s nothing wrong with using your swipe file for inspiration as long as you put your own spin on the original idea.
As New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist Austin Kleon says,
“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”
Use Insights From Other Industries To Find Content Ideas
Speaking of borrowing ideas and originality…
Intellectual C. E. M. Joad said, “Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” and he may have been on to something.
In the world of content marketing, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut.
You’ve got to keep creating new and exciting content to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more. But how do you do that?
The answer is simple: look outside of your industry for inspiration. Look at other industries and see what types of content they’re producing. You might find some ideas that you can apply to your own business or product offerings.
Fun fact: Henry Ford got the idea for the world’s first assembly line watching men cut meat during a tour of a Chicago slaughterhouse.
Next time you find yourself struggling to come up with ideas, take a look at what’s happening in other industries to ‘help get the wheels turning.’
Use Brainstorming To Find Content Ideas
If you’re struggling to choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential, get the group involved!
Alex Osborn, one of the cofounders of the ad agency BBDO invented brainstorming in the 1950s as “a structured way of breaking out of structure.” He claimed that a brainstorming session was nearly 50% more effective than solo thinking.
Though Osborn’s claims have been disputed by scholars, recent research has shown brainstorming does have concreate benefits:
- Professors in the NIU Department of Communication conducted a study that found groups that focus on both the quantity of ideas and building on the ideas of others during brainstorming sessions significantly increase their cohesiveness
- Stanford researchers conducted a study that showed face-to-face brainstorming sessions were highly effective idea generators
- A field study published in the Journal of Education and Practice reports brainstorming “increases the richness of ideas explored, which means that you can often find better solutions to the problems that you face”
Whether you decide to do individual brainstorming, group brainstorming or both, you’ll benefit from a diverse set of experiences and worldviews as well as be able to build on the ideas of others.
Here are some resources to help you brainstorm effectively:
- 13 Brainstorming Techniques to Spur Creativity on Content Marketing Teams
- How to Brainstorm Content Ideas in a Fast, Easy, Visual Way (with free brainstorming spreadsheet)
- 29 brainstorming techniques: effective ways to spark creativity
- The guide to mastering online brainstorming
- Better Brainstorming: The Most Effective Ways to Generate More Ideas
Keep in mind how you brainstorm has more impact on the quantity and quality of the ideas you come up with than whether or not you use brainstorming as a technique. For example, new research found “video calls, as opposed to in-person meetings, reduce creative collaboration and the generation of novel ideas. The results indicate that while the mental cogs keep running more or less smoothly when working remotely, group innovation might be hindered.”
Use Time Pressure To Find Content Ideas
Spend five minutes looking at your buyer personas and thinking about your ideal customer’s challenges. Then, set a timer for 20 minutes and brainstorm as many blog ideas as you can keeping your ideal customer in mind.
You can use your phone or one of these tools to keep track of the time:
Before you start, clearly spell out what types of ideas you’re looking for. This will keep you focused.
To get the best results, force yourself to do nothing else for those 20 minutes but think of ideas. Five or ten minutes in you may feel like you’ve exhausted your creativity but stick with it.
You may find that your best ideas come later in the session…after you thought you’d tapped your creative well.
The trick is to capture every idea no matter how silly or irrelevant it may seem at the time. After the session, you may notice connections between different ideas or see a way to combine two seemingly unrelated ideas. Maybe you’ll make a huge breakthrough with an idea you would’ve otherwise discarded.
You can do this as a group or do it individually. The trick is to push past your initial discomfort because once you lock in on a train of thought your subconscious goes to work.
Research suggests when you set a goal to find creative solutions for a problem and then do something undemanding that is very different from your main task (ideation) before returning to it, people who unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea.
Researchers at the Behavioural Science Institute note, “A plethora of raw materials has to be available to be connected and one has to be able to focus on some options out of an array of options. In this sense, conscious processing is needed to establish a knowledge base, to know what problems to tackle, and to verify and implement new ideas.”
Pro Tip: Take a walk or occupy yourself with some other nondemanding activity in between your brainstorming session and when you evaluate the ideas you came up with. This will provide you an “incubation period” where your unconscious mind can work on the problem for you. I’m not the only copywriter who swears by this method.
Use Customer Interviews To Find Content Ideas
Do some customer interviews and use them to create content around topics of interest to your market.
You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn about your customers.
Instead of trying random tactics just ask people if they’d be willing to help you by speaking to you on the phone, online, or in person. This is a golden opportunity to get valuable feedback on their struggles, results they wished for before they bought from you, and how using your product / services changed their situation.
You may want to send a small gift — like a gift card — as an incentive prior to the interview request in exchange for their feedback.
Here are two articles that dig deeper into how to capture insights and tips on conducting customer interviews.
When Hiten Shah and his team launched KISSmetrics in January 2010, their go-to-market content marketing strategy was pretty simple.
They shared useful links about analytics and marketing on their Twitter account. Most of the links were from other people’s blogs. Occasionally, they shared content from their own blog.
When the team decided to build a new product that would complement their existing product they did thorough research to figure out what problems people had with existing survey tools. This included 20 in-depth customer interviews to help them understand customer needs and customer pain points.
This customer researched paved the way for a successful product launch and helped the team focus on building features their audience actually wanted.
Use Your Own Company’s Experience To Find Content Ideas
If you find yourself drawing a blank when coming up with ideas, one of the best ways to find ideas for content topics is to focus on knowledge and information that already exists within your company.
Why?
It’s simple:
When you do that, you’re capitalizing on a valuable resource called institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge is the collective information your organization and its people control.
So, when you extract gems from that information goldmine you’re taking advantage of a HUGE strategic advantage.
Think about it.
Right now, you have access to:
- data
- market research
- industry trends
- support tickets
- customer reviews
- email conversations with leads and customers
- app usage data or Shopify analytics
- A/B test results
- the unique expertise of your employees
and more…
that you can use to create content your audience will love. And more importantly, your competitors will find impossible to copy.
Nobody will be able to use the Skyscraper Technique on you (“Take that marketing ninjas!”).
Look how Gong — a SaaS company that collects data from phone calls, emails, and other client interactions, and analyzes it using machine learning — uses data from their patented Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform™ to create data-backed sales templates, blog posts, and cheat sheets for sales, marketing and other revenue teams.
They pride themselves on being “a data-first company” and capture millions of anonymized customer data points from phone calls, web conference meetings, and emails. They pair that data with their AI tool to “analyze the buyer and seller relationship — specifically how various actions (and inactions) and behaviors impact success rates.”
For example, Gong analyzed 90,380 cold call stats to determine “How have you been?” far outperformed all of other opening lines (second only to opening with your first & last name and company name).
Who else has the data to create that kind of content to help salespeople move their deals through the sales funnel?
Some of the inner workings of your company will be interesting to your audience. So, mix things up by publishing a combination of useful data (in context, of course), product updates and tutorials, practical workplace tips, and personal stories.
In other words, when it’s relevant, show ’em how the sausage is made.
The best part?
When you use institutional knowledge to generate content ideas you not only shave time off content creation, you draw on knowledge that is hard to duplicate yet easy to source.
According to Gartner, “Knowledge typically falls into two categories: explicit and tacit.
Explicit refers to the information found in records, data files, customer relationship management systems and other physical cloud locations. It is typically the easiest to capture and transfer.
Tacit, however, refers to unwritten information that is learned through experience, such as a tenured sales executive’s client intelligence. It’s bad for business to lose it, given the amount of time it takes to gain and its strategic importance to the company.”
How do you leverage institutional knowledge? Here are seven tips to get you started:
- Talk with your Customer Service Representatives — Customer service representatives speak with the customers all the time and have valuable insights that can help shape your content strategy.
- Talk with your Salespeople — Like customer service representatives, salespeople are in constant communication with customers and can be a great source of content ideas.
- Give your audience a glimpse “Behind the Scenes” — What’s it like in your office or workplace? Take your audience on a tour. Share exclusive access and let your audience see what’s behind the velvet rope with a few photos and stories.
- Use internal data to tell stories — According to Catherine Cote, a marketing coordinator at Harvard Business School Online, “Data storytelling is the ability to effectively communicate insights from a dataset using narratives and visualizations. It can be used to put data insights into context for and inspire action from your audience.” Make sure you follow a clear narrative including a traditional story arc with a beginning, middle and end. You also want to include visuals and a specific call to action. When done correctly, data-backed stories align with your audience’s needs and help them learn exactly what they need to know to make an important decision.
More brands use this technique than you probably realize.
- Spotify subscribers get Spotify’s Year in Music, a data visualization of their most-played tunes from the past year
- Google Maps delivers a year-in-review feature showing the places you’ve visited
- Pornhub even gets in on the action (don’t worry: the link is SFW, I promise.)
According to Gretchen Gavett, “GE, perhaps more than any other major company, is dedicated to the use of data visualization as a key part of its marketing and communications efforts.”
That’s in part because data storytelling works across different audiences making it a smart move for a multinational conglomerate like GE.
If you want to see even more examples of data storytelling in action check out 9 Brands that turn proprietary data into powerful content marketing
- Build buzz by sharing sneak peeks and previews — Got something coming up at your company you’re excited about? Give your customers a head up. It can build intrigue and excitement without seeming “salesy.”
- Talk about the ups and downs — When you share stories about mistakes and successes you and your company have experienced, you make it easier for people to relate to you on a human level. Most brands present a heavily sanitized, polished façade. Stand out by showing your audience what it’s really like to run your business and serve them.
- Create a an easy-to-access repository — Storing your organization’s information in a knowledge bank will help you save time, retain information and create better content. Former vice president of content at Influence & Co, Brittany Dowell says, “Once you have a fluid system for gathering and compiling the wealth of knowledge within your company, you can sift through the information to identify any trends, potential article ideas, or areas that could supplement future articles. You can then tap into the knowledge bank to fuel more vibrant company content.” If you opt-in, you can grab Dowell’s Free Knowledge Management Template, “a customizable tool to store important information about your company, its key leaders, and your customers. From the company’s origins to its customer pain points and press releases, this template will help you organize every detail necessary to save you time when creating content, both internally and externally.”
Don’t sleep on tapping into experts within your company that have useful knowledge to share.
Richard Bowden, the Global Innovation Manager at British Airways tells a story about how the airline conducted research that showed travelers wanted advice and recommendations that give them an insider advantage… customized, timely advice, on demand that “isn’t available to every other traveler with access to Google.”
The British Airways team realized their partners, pilots and crews, and destination managers had great insight into the 600+ destinations around the world BA flies to.
So, “each Friday during the month of May, we put our destination managers on British Airways’ Facebook timeline from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. to answer questions about specific travel plans for locales around the globe” and “Two days after launch we reached over 200,000 views and received nearly 3,000 likes, 190 comments, and 150 shares. More importantly, our destination managers responded to over 40 requests for hints, tips and information about participants’ destination of choice.”
Institutional knowledge + engaging content on social media = Increased customer awareness of BA’s packaged vacations (a flight and hotel combination) offer as well as audience engagement, content distribution, and potential leads and sales.
This leads us to…
Use the (Entire) Buyer’s Journey to Find Content Ideas
Too many SaaS companies are only publishing TOFU content. 50% of all content created by B2B marketers is geared at people in the first stage of the buyer’s journey–also known as “top of the funnel.”
My recommendation is to mix up the type of blog content you publish. In addition to TOFU content (which doesn’t have purchase intent), create and publish MOFU (has some purchase intent) and BOFU (indicates someone ready to make a purchase) content.
Looking to Gymshark as an example once again, we can see how they company uses content like THE BENEFITS OF LIFTING GLOVES, WRIST WRAPS AND LIFTING STRAPS AND WHEN YOU SHOULD WEAR THEM to attract members of the lifting community in the middle of the funnel.
Because weightlifting gloves are an accessory that a lot of lifters will turn to at some point, Gymshark knows this is a topic that has a chance at earning attention.
On Gymshark’s blog you’ll also find examples of BOFU content like:
THE GYMSHARK SALE: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW (a list of FAQs detailing what to expect from the sale and exactly how to shop it)
and
THE NEW 315 LIFTING COLLECTION (an entire post devoted to spotlighting the brand’s new lifters’ collection)
In the latter article, Peter Boyd-McGahan, Product Marketing Manager at Gymshark, says, “Lifting is our roots, it’s our core and where we started, but performance lifting is something else entirely.
We wanted to support the weightlifters and the powerlifters within our community, so we listened to their feedback — understanding the complexity and the art of each lift and what this group of individuals needed specifically to help them up their numbers.”
Once you create content to bring people into your funnel, make sure you’re also creating content for the later stages in the funnel so your content marketing program has a shot at success.
Use Keyword Research To Find Content Ideas
I almost didn’t include this tactic because I see too many marketers go overboard when it comes to using keywords but the fact is keyword research works.
If you’re like me, some of your content is designed 100% to attract organic traffic.
The question is:
How do you know if your content will be something that people actually search for?
That’s where keyword research comes in.
Armed with your documented content strategy, you can use tools like Frase, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, BuzzSumo and SEMrush to identify topics people are already searching for.
Most of the articles you’ll find about finding content topics go on about SEO and keyword research ad nauseum. That’s because it’s usually the first place people turn when it’s time to come up with content ideas.
More than 35% of marketers use keyword analysis as their main source of content ideas.
Personally, I don’t really stress about keywords other than using the research to inform my existing strategy and optimize the content I create.
Why?
For one reason, when you create content around topics your audience wants to learn more about, the keywords and key phrases will occur naturally.
Secondly, if your goal is to create content that your audience finds valuable, why not simply ask your customers what kind of content you should be creating?
That said, keyword research is important. Especially if you’re looking to identify relevant search terms to help you rank near the top of the SERPs
Use Your Point-of-View To Find Content Ideas
Most content online is unoriginal, recycled bullshit with no voice or point of view.
That gives you the perfect opportunity to “shoot the gap” and publish content that takes a stance or position on an issue and has some personality to it.
Stop trying to “sound professional” and create content your audience can relate to. Oftentimes, what you say is not as important as how you say it.
Don’t take my word for it.
An oft-cited UCLA study found when you speak with another person gestures make up 55% of the impact you have on your audience, while your tone of voice makes up 38%. The words you speak account for only 7%, meaning the non-verbal part of your message accounts for 93% of its impact.
Likewise, when everyone is publishing content about the same topic, many times what stands out isn’t who has the most experience or the best-crafted message… it’s the person who has a unique perspective on the topic.
When you actually have something to say — a POV in other words — it’s much easier for your content to stand out.
Why?
As the old chestnut goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. That means it’s not the topic, so much as your angle/ stance/ approach to the topic that makes your content unique since we can agree other people have created content around this topic already.
That creates an “IP moat” because, by definition, content topics developed using your unique POV can’t be easily copied by your competitors.
If you wanna get in on the action, consider:
- Publishing an article or blog post with lots of comments that clearly shows your POV
- Creating content that spotlights the big mission, the overarching point-of-view that colors everything your company does
- Building content that’s audience-focused but built around your brand story that speaks generally about your audience and the change you want to inspire in them
Don’t be afraid to “plant your flag” and let your audience know where you stand.
Use These 3 Questions To Find Content Ideas
If you create content on a topic long enough, you may find yourself cursed.
No, not a Rosemary’s Baby or Poltergeist kind of curse. I’m talking about the curse of knowledge. That’s when you mistakenly assume everyone knows as much as you do about a given topic.
This technique will help you avoid the curse of knowledge.
In most cases, some people in your audience will be beginners and have … (drumroll, please!) beginner questions about the topics you cover.
Use these three questions to help you think about the questions your prospects need to answer at various stages of their decision journey and build content that can help answer them:
- If I was just learning about this topic, what would I want to know?
- If I wanted to understand how to apply this information to my own situation, what would I need to know?
- If I wanted to become proficient on this topic, what information would I have to master?
Answering these questions will help you come up with topics you would’ve otherwise assumed you didn’t need to explore. It can also help you identify gaps in the content you’ve already created.
Look closely at your chosen content topics and decide if your content fully meets the needs of your audience and if not, use the three questions above to identify additional topics your audience would find useful.
When creating content, think about your audience’s pain points and how you can help them solve their problems.
Since people in your audience are at different stages of their decision journey, you’ll need to have content that addresses their challenges at every stage.
The secret to engaging content is relevance. Your audience will only get value from your content if it’s the most relevant way they can satisfy their needs and desires.
Taking the time to strategize will help you create content that your audience finds useful.
Content produced around pain points has a high chance of striking a chord with your prospective customers, because speaking to their experiences naturally builds rapport.
Use The Golden Topic Technique To Find Content Ideas
This technique is perfect for finding keywords with “buying intent” you can rank for on Google.
The reason?
This technique will give you topics that attract super-specific long tail traffic looking for information people have PAID to get. And you’re going to leverage the intelligence of a $1184.86B multinational technology juggernaut to do it!
I learned The Golden Topic Technique from my boy Chris Von Wilpert, founder of Content Mavericks.
Head over to Amazon and search for a topic related to your blog or product in the Books category. Then look for a book with 100+ ratings. This is proof that over 100 people have paid for it. So you know it’s a popular topic with buying intent. Now, click on “Look Inside” and scroll down to the table of contents. This will give you a list of topics you can write about.
Pro Tip: You can also do this with Udemy courses, Skillshare classes, conference agendas, or anywhere people are paying to access content. Wanna dig deeper into doing SEO-focused keyword research? Try popping a conference page into Google Keyword Planner to find SEO keywords (and get monthly search volume data).
Once you identify a topic evaluate the topic’s search engine traffic potential using a tool like SEMrush or Keywords Everywhere.
If you’re a growing brand looking to compete against the “big boys” with big budgets and huge marketing teams, this is an awesome way to find unexplored content ideas on valuable topics you have a chance of ranking for.
Now it’s your turn
We’ve covered a lot of ground.
I gave you my 16 favorite techniques for coming up with engaging content topics consistently. I gave you a checklist to refer to when it’s time to come up with content ideas. And I gave you tons of examples of how successful content creators are using these exact techniques.
Do you feel like I kept my promise to show you how to come up with content ideas that get more clicks, conversions, and customers (If not, leave a comment or get in touch on social media or email and let me know.)?
Which one of these techniques will you try first?
Give it a try — come up with your own content ideas — and let me know how it turns out!
Struggling to figure out what you actually need to publish to get your business noticed by your ideal clients?
Still not sure you can come up with content ideas that get clicks, conversions, and customers?
I made a checklist to help you out. You can grab it by clicking here.
And, if you want done-for-you help, get in touch and ask about Professional Pen’s Editorial Calendar Rescue™ service.
We’ll create an editorial calendar prioritized by content topics with the highest traffic potential and highest ranking potential so you can manage the content you plan to produce, publish, and promote.
The deliverable is a list of content topics prioritized by traffic score, so you know how likely you are to rank on Google for every one of them. You’ll receive all your content topic ideas in one master spreadsheet.
- A 6-month Editorial Calendar is $995 (USD)
- If you’d like a 12-month Editorial Calendar, the fee is $2,500 (USD).
At Professional Pen, we help B2B SaaS and eCommerce startups with content strategy, content creation, and content promotion. So, if you need help with SEO or with your content marketing strategy, let’s connect to discuss your situation and see how we can help.
Click here to learn what it’s like to work with Professional Pen and to apply to work with us.
