The most difficult thing about content marketing is coming up with the ideas.
Once you’ve covered all the FAQ’s and obvious topics in your industry, it can be hard to come up with anything exciting, interesting or engaging, especially if your industry isn’t particularly glamorous.
In this post, we’re offering our tried-and-tested tips on how to come up with ideas for content.
What makes a good blog idea?
How can you be sure that your idea is a good one? When it’s your own idea, it can be difficult to distance yourself far enough to distinguish whether it will perform well. Run your ideas past others in your team, or even existing clients or customers to see if it resonates and take any feedback into consideration. Where the input of others isn’t possible, there are ways to help you decide whether your idea is worth pursuing. One of these ways is evaluating the idea to see if it’s ‘valuable’.
Good content is often equal to valuable content. No doubt you’ll have heard this term before, but what does it actually refer to? According to the Content Marketing Institute, a piece of valuable content has the following characteristics:
Findable – Is the title of your idea something that will enable the user to easily access the content?
Readable – Is the idea compelling to attract the user? Is it presented in a way that makes for easy reading?
Understandable – Have you written the content in an easy-to-understand tone of voice? Have you targeted it to your persona? Have you made the context clear?
Actionable – Will the user be equipped to take action following reading the piece?
Shareable – Does the idea make for shareable content? Give the reader a reason to share this piece and ensure it is easy to do so.
Where does SEO come into it?
When it comes to search engine optimisation, the days of writing blogs purely to hit certain keywords and rank in the search engine results pages are over. Nor is simply putting the keyword in the title and first few paragraphs enough to secure high rankings. You should bear this in mind when coming up with ideas.
These days, it’s all about E-E-A-T and helpful content. You can use these frameworks to inform your content strategy and come up with ideas for blog posts, in particular the experience and expertise components. Let’s break it down.
E – experience: how can you use content to demonstrate your experience within your niche? Don’t forget to include evidence of this experience where possible: anecdotes, data, case studies, etc.
E – expertise: use your blog to prove your expertise. Write detailed guides on your products, services or wider industry, develop thought leadership pieces and answer commonly asked questions.
Helpful content: content that has been written for humans, not search engines, satisfies user curiosity and provides value.
How to come up with blog ideas
Use your target audience
Drilling down into your target audience and learning what makes them tick is a great way to help spark ideas. After all, these are the people you’re creating the content for. What problems do your audience face that you hold the solution to? How can you convey the message that your business can help, in an interesting way? If you’re not sure how to get inside the mind of your target audience, start with creating a range of buyer personas as this can really help to inform your ideas.
Keyword research
Once you have an idea of the topics your audience will find insightful and useful, head to your preferred SEO tool (we recommend Ahrefs) to find out what they’re searching for. You can then start to build your ideas around these keywords and common search terms, which will not only help you to meet the needs of your target customer, but get your content noticed in the SERPs, too.
Competitor research
You’re also going to want to see what your competitors are getting up to with their content, and determine what you think works well for them and what they could improve on. When you’re looking for improvements you might just stumble upon a trick they’ve missed and you can then fill this gap.
When you’re carrying out your competitor research, you should be looking for anything trending in your industry, finding which keywords and long-tail search terms get the most traffic, and the social content that others are putting out and how their following engage with the posts. Look at the content that the top players in your field are putting out and see which pieces are getting the most attention. You can perform keyword gap analysis in Ahrefs to see which search terms your competitors are gaining traffic for.
Think wider than just the blog when you think of content too, check out your competitor’s videos if they produce any, subscribe to their email list to analyse how their email campaigns are performing and take the time to read some of their bigger pieces, such as whitepapers. This can be time consuming, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to gain an understanding of ways you can provide for your customer that your competition isn’t already leading on.
Keep in the forefront of your mind that you should only use competitor research to inspire your own ideas. Be careful to avoid simply copying or regurgitating that which has already been said. Your content should be original, so ensure you incorporate your own brand’s messages and values into each and every piece. Competitor research is about seeing what your competitors are doing, then do it better.
Perform regular content audits
Sometimes the best place to start is by examining your existing content. Performing regular content audits can help you to identify which blogs generate the most traffic and conversions. You may find that related topics start to come to mind. Are there any posts that could be turned into a series, for example?
Create an ideas repository
Remember those ideas we mentioned earlier that just didn’t fit right now? Well they might be viable at a later date. When you’re coming up with ideas, it’s worth remembering that not every single one will be turned into a full piece, but keeping a log of all your ideas can serve as a useful inspiration tool in the future.
Create a bank of content ideas that the whole team can access and add to, and go back to these on a frequent basis. Something that once wasn’t relevant may become relevant as the seasons change or as trends in your industry change and develop.
Look to other industries
Not only can you find inspiration within your own industry, but you can also look further afield. There may be something that another industry is using effectively that can be applied in your industry. For example, look at the ways other industries collate and present useful data and if they do it in a particularly engaging way. You can then take trends or insightful data from your own sector and present it in a similar way.
When looking to other industries for inspiration, it’s more about HOW they are doing it, not WHAT they are doing. The bonus of researching how other industries apply their content strategy is that there is little room for duplicate content, as their topics will be entirely different to anything that would be relevant for your business.
Inspiration can come from many places and at any time, so keep an open mind and don’t feel that ideas can only come when you set aside the time to think of them. Read anything and everything that you can, keep up to date with what’s going on in your industry, and others if you feel necessary, and don’t overthink the process too much.
Recycle, reuse & refresh
Remember that successful content can be recycled or reused. Get the most out of your successful pieces by updating them or building on them. This way, the idea is there for you already, so if ideation hasn’t gone so well this week, you have something you can count on. Even evergreen content can become a little stale if it isn’t given a bit of love from time to time.
Has anything changed since you last posted on this topic? Is there room for a follow up piece? How can you make use of that which you have already created? Be sure to prioritise doing this for pieces that have previously proven to be successful, and dated or time-sensitive content such as “The best prams for 2024”. Meta titles with old dates are a huge turn off for users and can negatively impact click-through rates, signalling poor quality to the search engine.
Because of Google’s heavy focus on relevant, helpful content, dated blog posts can hurt your organic visibility. When it comes to these pieces, don’t just change the date and call it a day. Revamp the entire article where possible with fresh, up-to-date information and products.
Still stuck for ideas and sick of staring at a blank page? Our content consultants can help with everything from content ideation to copywriting and strategy – get in touch to find out more.
