Content marketing is no new thing; it’s been around for some time but it’s still as popular as ever with SEO specialists and internet marketers. This has created a huge amount of content and led to certain types becoming saturated within the most popular industries. For example, buyers’ guides are extremely popular across a huge variety of sectors; a quick Google search shows that there are 314,000,000 results for ‘buyers’ guide’.
With this in mind, it’s good to have a diverse range of content ideas that span different formats. If you’re struggling to think of topics for your content marketing and SEO plan, we’ve created ways to generate ideas which drive traffic, awareness and more.
Industry resources
Whether you’re in a large industry or a niche one, there will be both printed and digital resources available. Search the following terms below to find sites that provide resources within your industry:
- Your industry + resources
- Your industry + news
- Your industry + stats
- Your industry + latest news
- Your industry + key facts
This will give you plenty of websites that feature information, news, stats, stories etc. that could help you think of a content marketing piece. Say, for example, that there’s a new legislation in your industry, you could create a content piece that shows the advantages and disadvantages of the legislation.
Listen to your customers
Listening to your customers can often identify problems that you wouldn’t normally know about. This problem could be solved by a piece of content that could feature on your site and also be promoted on various social media channels.
A good tip is to make it easy for customers to provide feedback to your business. Read the positive and negative reviews and see what your strengths and weaknesses are. This can generate ideas for your blog and more.
Most profitable products
Content marketing is there to help promote your business, so why not create content that is centered around your most profitable product? The content piece should then gain awareness and sales for that product.
For example, if you supply and install boilers you could create a piece of content listing the signs that you need a new boiler. This list will then be used by people who may ultimately discover they do require a new boiler installation and result in a sale for you, instead of your competitors.
Google Analytics
This great tool can help with SEO and many other things, including content marketing. Using several Analytics reports, you can find which pages are the most popular pages, how people reach your site and much more. Using these reports can help you better understand the user and what they are interested in. Once this is known, you can create, add or amend content to improve performance.
Think time of year
When generating content ideas, a good place to start is often the seasons and time of year. If it’s the start of the year, for example, you might want to create something that highlights current and upcoming trends within your industry. Or, if it’s the end of the year, you might want to do a round up of what has happened within your industry. If you’re using seasonal themes and calendar dates, make sure you plan in advance. If it’s a content piece for Halloween, for example, aim to launch it a week or two before. This will give you time to promote it and allow Google to index your content.
Answer the Public
If you are still struggling for ideas, you can always go to the much-loved content idea generator that is ‘Answer the Public’. Enter a keyword associated with your business and within seconds you get a spiders web of questions that you could turn into content. This is free, but there is a paid version as well.
Format of content
The tips listed above have hopefully helped you to generate a range of content ideas. Once you start creating your content piece, why not support it with graphics, checklists, interactive elements, gifs, videos, or maybe even a quiz? Using different formats will ensure your content is engaging, dynamic and drives action.
Conclusion
There are many ways to generate content ideas that will help you to stand out from your competitors. With so much content out there, it’s important to cut through the noise. Once you have gone through our tips for generating content ideas, we would recommend revisiting them from time to time.
Author Bio
John Cutts is a Marketing Strategist at leading digital marketing agency Adtrak. He has many years of both agency and in-house marketing experience, specialising in strategy for both SEO and Content Marketing. Out of hours you will find John in the gym, at the golf course or drinking tea.