3 Foolproof Methods To Come Up With Content Ideas That Work

Content marketing is consistently proving itself as one of the best performing and most cost effective digital marketing strategies.

That said, you need to create a plethora of content on a daily basis: emails, blog posts, lead magnets, social media content and so much more. How do you keep up with it? And most importantly, how do you come up with great ideas that get results?

Because at the end of the day, in the battle of quantity vs. quality when it comes to content, quality will always trump quantity. In other words, if you want to generate great results from your content marketing, then you need to create content that your audience actually wants to see.

In this blog post, I’m going to share 3 fool-proof methods to come up with content ideas that work.

These methods can be used time and time again and can generate dozens of ideas. So without further ado, here they are, in no particular order:

1.    How to use your analytics to come up with content ideas on any channel

If you’ve been using content marketing for a reasonable length of time, you have one of the best tools for coming up with great content ideas right under your nose: your analytics.

You can use your analytics to come up with ideas for:

• Your blog
• Your lead magnets
• Your social media
• Your email marketing campaigns

And pretty much any platform where you’re publishing content as most offer some sort of analytics.

For example, one of the best ways to come up with engaging blog post ideas is to check your web analytics to see which of your past blog posts have performed best. Head over to your Google Analytics account (unless you’re using a different web analytics platform) and check your Behavior reports:

• Which past blog posts generate the most pageviews?
• Which blog posts generate the highest time spent on site?
• Which blog posts generated the lowest bounce rates?

This can tell you quite a bit about your audience, along with their preferences and interests:

• What types of blog posts they prefer (how to’s and guides, listicles, opinion pieces and so on)
• Which topics interest them (for example, if you have several articles on Facebook advertising that have performed extremely well, then that’s clearly a subject that interests your audience); the same works for the reverse – if you’ve had several blog posts on a specific topic and none of them performed well, then perhaps it’s best to “retire” that topic and try different ones

You can use this method for all of the content you create and publish online, not just your website content but also social media content and your email broadcasts and campaigns:

• What types of social media updates work best on your social media in terms of views/clicks/shares/other engagement metrics? Images, videos, live streaming, quotes and so on
• Which topics does your social audience engage with the most?
• Which emails have the highest/lowest open rates?
• Which of your emails have the highest unsubscribe rates?
• Which emails have the highest/lowest click-through rates?

Try to focus on the metrics that matter the most to you: the metrics that help you reach your business and marketing goals.

To give you an example of this, if you want to generate more conversions from your blog content, then you should focus on those blog posts that generated the highest conversion rates – why did that happen? How can you replicate that?

Or, if your main social media goal is to drive more traffic to your website, blog and landing pages, then focus on the social media posts that generated the most clicks. What is the common thread between these posts?

This is something that you should do regularly; the more you follow and understand your content analytics, the more you’ll understand your own audience and what makes them tick.

2.    Leverage competitive analysis and content research to generate content ideas for all platforms

Another great way to come up with content ideas is to study your industry: competitors, influencers in your niche and top publications in your industry; basically, any content that serves the same target audience that you do.

This won’t just help you come up with content ideas; it will help you come up with content ideas that definitely work. It’s not about copying their ideas and creating the same content; rather, it’s learning from their strategy to see what works with your target audience and what doesn’t.

To help, you can use an RSS reader like Feedly to subscribe to all the relevant publications in your niche, as well as any relevant competitors. This way, you can check their latest content on a daily basis and use it to inform your own content strategy.

Here’s what (and how) to track:

• Research your competitors: use tools that help you spy on your competitors – such as content research tools – to research your competitors’ content and learn what works/what doesn’t work for them
• Leverage social listening tools to help you discover competitors as well as any other relevant publications and influencers who share the same target audience. Social listening tools also offer analytics so you can see what kind of traction a post got in terms of shares and social engagement
• Follow all the top publications in your niche using a tool like the above-mentioned Feedly

3.    Revisit and improve older content

Earlier, I talked about the importance of monitoring your content analytics to come up with new and engaging content ideas that work; but there’s another way you can use all of this older – but high-performing – content:

• Update and improve out-of-date content
• Break down a topic into several “smaller” topics
• Come up with related topics; for example, a “top tips”-type blog post that performed well could inspire a “biggest mistakes”-type post

Improving and updating older content in particular, is a great practice for a couple of different reasons. One big reason is that, of course, your audience loved that content initially – clearly, there’s a demand for it. Secondly, evergreen content that is consistently updates is great for search engine optimization; traffic will keep coming back to it long after it’s published and other publications will link to it in their content, all helping towards optimizing that page or post for better search engine rankings. The longer your content is relevant to audiences, the more search engines will consider it a trustworthy resource.

Conclusion

When coming up with new content ideas, it’s extremely important to make sure you’re not coming up with ideas just for the sake of publishing something; rather, take your time to research your audience and your industry, as well as understand your analytics.

This way, you’ll be able to ultimately save time and money by focusing solely on creating impactful content that has already proven to work.

Because, as I mentioned earlier, when it comes to content marketing, quality trumps quantity.