Content Marketing Ideation: 21 Quick Tips for Better Content Ideas

Content Marketing Ideation

In our experience, the hardest aspect of content marketing is the ideation phase. Great ideas are fundamental for effective content marketing. This deck contains 21 quick tips, tools, and ideas to improve how you generate content ideas.

#1 Read Edward De Bono’s books

Edward De Bono pioneered the phrase ‘lateral thinking’ and is generally considered the godfather of idea generation. His book ‘Lateral Thinking’ has some great advice on how to generate more creative ideas.

#2 Speak to your customers

Go for a coffee with a customer or someone in your industry – these people know better than anyone else what challenges they have. I wrote this post on recovering from the panda update after speaking to 3-4 people in the same week about panda recovery tactics. It’s now one of the most visited pages on our site. Create content that solves your customer’s challenges.

#3 BBC On This Day

BBC on this day is a great tool for finding key

events that happened on certain days of the year in the past. Very useful when planning your content calendar.

#4 what myths can you bust? What myth do the majority of your industry believe is true? Could you provide a compelling argument that the opposite is true? When I wrote “What Happens When You Build 10,000 Links to a Domain in 24 Hours” it got covered by Moz, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Forbes, and others. It worked because it was surprising and debunked a myth that many marketers believed at the time.

#5 UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is a useful tool for finding out what phrases are most searched for around your products or services. For example, typing “content marketing” will output phrases such as “content marketing books”, “content marketing blogs”, and “content marketing training”.

#6 Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is useful for seeing what people are searching for in your niche and how much search volume and competition there is for certain keywords.

#7 Social Crawlytics Use Social Crawlytics to identify your competitor's most

shared content. Replicate what has worked for them.

#8 Brainstorm ideas with colleagues

#9 Use Forums to Find Topical Ideas

Forums are great for seeing what people in your industry are talking about right now, and what questions or challenges they have. There are a number of forum search engines, such as BoardReader.com, and BoardTracker.com. Don’t be afraid to ask people what they’d like you to produce guides on.

#10 Google Hot Trends Google Trends can be useful for finding ‘breakout trends’ to write about, as well as seeing whether the topics you’re writing about

are increasing or decreasing in popularity.

#11 Soovle Similarly to Ubersuggest, Soovle is great for finding content ideas from

phrases that are regularly searched for. The key difference is that Soovle also shows ideas from Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia and more.

#12 Find common Questions on Quora Use Quora or Yahoo Answers to find

what questions people in your industry are asking. Create content that answers them.

#13 find high-performing content on Open Site Explorer

Use Open Site Explorer to find the most linked to blog posts on your competitor’s website or industry news sites. Write a follow-up or similar (better) story.

#14 What’s Unusual in Your Niche?

Pick something novel or unusual about your niche and create content around it. Reader Sheds host an annual competition to find the ‘shed of the year’. This is great content marketing for a company in the garden shed market!

#15 Replicate exceptional ideas from other niches, in your niche.

Game? Film? Tech? Marketing? Your Industry?

#16 Ask your sales team

The questions that your customers ask your sales team are probably very similar to the questions they search for in Google. Ask your sales team what objections or questions are common, and produce content that answers these.

#17 Google Alerts

Setup Google Alerts on your focus keyword and keep an eye on trends around that term and what others are writing about.

#18 Recycle Content From Best Sellers

Read new and best-selling books in your industry. Pull out any noteworthy or controversial ideas and write about them.

#19 Find local trends on Trendsmap

Use Trendsmap.com to find what’s trending on Twitter in your city (or in other major cities). This is great for agile content marketing due to the real time filtering of trends.

#20 when in doubt, Be Useful

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re struggling to think of what to write about, think about what would be useful to your audience. Useful content is more likely to outlive the novelty of a one-off viral idea.  

#21 clip facts in Evernote

Install Evernote and clip any interesting facts or findings while browsing the web. This will provide a useful pool of ideas to write about.

Need Help With Your Content Marketing Strategy?

www.ventureharbour.com!contact@ventureharbour.com

01273 648909

Thank you!