If you have been struggling to stay consistent with your inbound marketing calendar? Here’s how to come up with content ideas.
You’re sitting on your desk, staring at your screen and ready to roll your fingers on the keyboard to finish a blog before the publishing date.
But the problem is you don’t have the right blog content idea to actually get down to writing. You have a few things in mind but you need content ideas that actually resonate with your target audience and also serve your business objectives and goals.
At this moment, you’re probably wishing for a Pandora’s box that you can open for never-ending content ideas every time.
Sadly, Pandora’s box is a mythical object and probably doesn’t exist in reality. But we do, and this guide will show you 13 different ways to come up with great content ideas every time for your inbound marketing calendar.
13 ways to come up with fresh content ideas every time
1. Take a look at the keywords you want to rank for and their search volume
Keyword research is an actionable way to find great blog content ideas. When writing to rank on search engines, you need to go through all the keywords related to your industry, target audience, product or service.
Basically, you need to create various topic clusters that surround one major keyword. For example, you want to rank for the keyword ‘customer success’. So along with this, you need to look for other keywords such as:
- Customer success roles
- Customer success responsibilities
- Customer success software
With such an exercise, you can discover other potential keywords for which you can rank and also something your audience is searching for.
There are many tools available to help you with the same such as SEMrush, Google Ads Keyword Planner, Moz, Google Trends, and Ubersuggest.
2. Look into online groups and communities
Online groups and communities are an unfiltered source of content ideas because people share and discuss topics and interests of their respective industries.
You can find some great groups and communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Slack, Discord, etc to become a part of and uncover what your target audience is talking about.
When evaluating communities to join pay attention to these points:
- Members actively participate in the group
- There are moderators to ensure there are no unscrupulous activities
- All the members are respectable towards each other
- Whether your target audience is a part of it
Analyze topics they are discussing, participate in ongoing conversations or even ask questions to get a look into what members are thinking.
3. Take a look at what your competitors are doing
Assess your competitors’ content strategy to generate ideas and come up with lists of topics that you haven’t covered yet on your blog.
By analyzing your competitors’ websites, you will get to know how you can outrank them on those topics. As they’re your competitors, they’re targeting the same audience as you, so don’t forget to check their FAQ pages as well!
Look for the “unanswered” questions and take this as an opportunity by answering them with your content.
4. Use a topic generator
There are various free tools like HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator, AnswerThePublic, and AlsoAsked that can help you in generating new blog topic ideas.
These tools do the legwork for you and come up with trending questions that your audience wishes to know about.
5. Use social listening
Social media is the place where your audience and user hangs out. Monitor your social media following, questions they ask and replies they give. Also, keep track of the industry-related keywords and hashtags to stay on top of the trends.
Use tools like Radarr to uncover topics that your target audience is engaging with online and who is creating those topics; list down things you can do too. You can learn more about social listening here.
6. Ask your customers/ audience
Your audience is the best source when it comes to generating new content ideas for your blog. Whenever your audience/ customer asks a question about your products— make a note of it. You should also look at the most frequently asked questions from your support team and create content addressing them.
Social media is also a great way to connect with your audience and ask them questions directly. For example, you can use interactive stickers on Instagram and Facebook stories to get feedback or answers from your audience.
7. Take notes from your customer support team
Your customer support team interacts with customers as well as prospects regularly and they can help you with real-time information about your audience.
They often get some general questions that your target audience asks frequently, and these “general” questions can help you in preparing your next month’s content calendar.
8. Take notes from your sales team
Your sales team are front-liners as they interact with your customers in the early stages of the sales process. Ideal customers who get on a call with the sales team, ask some great questions about your product and its use cases – which you might not have thought of or probably missed.
Getting details from your sales team can help you in turning a new stone regarding what your audience would like to know about.
You can also ask them what topics/angles they use to sell your B2B SaaS product – convert those into blog topics that will help your brand attract new customers.
Also, note that this approach to finding content ideas is also effective for creating specific strategies for audiences at different stages of the buying cycle. This makes the content even more effective.
9. Take a look at what’s trending in your industry
It’s not advisable to always publish content according to trends but it’s good to add it every now and then as it helps you to get on the radar of your target audiences’ interest.
You can use tools like Buzzsumo, Google Trends, and Right Relevance to uncover the trending topics of your industry.
Analyze what’s trending and give it your unique angle. While creating content – remember to pick only what is relevant to you and avoid talking about topics that don’t align with your business objectives and goals.
For example, your need to talk about analytics and data but you start publishing content about content marketing just because it’s trending. This will lead to confusion among your audience and hence you should avoid it.
10. Follow active threads on Twitter
Twitter threads are a great way to stay updated with the latest strategies and talk happening around your industry.
With Advanced Search on Twitter, you can find tweets with specific words, phrases, and hashtags to understand the type of content people are engaging with.
Be it brands or individuals, everyone is sharing tons of value that you can take advantage of.
Here are some of the points you should pay attention to:
- Focus on which tweets are getting the most engagement
- What questions people are asking in the comment section
- What challenges your target audience is sharing and so on
11. Create content through curation
No one wants to read a list of ten random blogs; they want a list of the best ones. It doesn’t matter what type of content you’re creating, be it a list of tools, best articles around a topic and so on; it always needs to be of high quality and relevant to your industry.
Try to add value every time you create a curated list because it’s not enough to aggregate; you have to present your curated list in a way that your target audience would love to read.
12. Repurpose your best performing content
You don’t have to create every blog from scratch, Instead, you can use a different content piece to create the blog content. For example, you’ve a podcast, you can repurpose its content into a blog.
So you’ve a fresh piece of content ready without scratching your head for new topics. And repurposing doesn’t mean that you reuse your old content repeatedly but it is adding a fresh perspective that appeals to your audience.
13. Refresh your content
With time, things get outdated and irrelevant. Just like you update your product with new features, you need to do the same with your old content as well.
Google flags outdated content and rewards fresh and updated content. Update your old blog posts with new keywords, more information, links to updated content on your site, etc.
It’s just like creating new content in much less time and helps in maintaining consistent publishing frequency.
Droppin’ the curtains
Creating consistent content can be hectic but having a clear process of coming up with fresh content ideas beats the stress.
Leveraging social media and connecting with your customers are some of the best ways to get an idea of current trends.
We at Contensify, follow a comprehensive system that helps us to come up with fresh content ideas for your clients. Let us help you with content creation while you think about other pressing matters of your business.
