Inbound Marketing Insights

Do you ever feel you have a difficult time generating new content marketing ideas?

To help you create new content ideas, we surveyed marketing professionals and business leaders to give you ideas from various industries and size organizations. From performing keyword research to understanding your audience first, here are some ways to develop creative ideas to make your content marketing the most successful for your business.

Here are 15 tips these content marketing professionals follow to generate unique content ideas:

• Check Trends and Generate Keyword Ideas With Google Trends
• Make Use of Storytelling
• Gain a Deep Understanding of Your Buyer Personas
• Hold Regular Ideation Meetings
• Perform Keyword Research
• Join Community Groups to Monitor Trends and Build Ideas
• Be Sure the Ideas Are Timely and Relevant
• Listen to Buyers and Prospects to Find Ideas
• Use Google's "People Also Ask" for Inspiration
• Follow the News/"Newsjacking"
• Ask Your Customers What They Want
• Personalize Your Website Content
• Check Out Slack Communities in Your Niche
• Generate Ideas Through Content Gap Analysis
• Listen to Understand Your Audience First
• Perform Keyword Research

Check Trends and Generate Keyword Ideas With Google Trends
I'm a big fan of Google Trends to see the general trends in my industry in recent weeks and generate compelling content marketing ideas. Thanks to this tool, I can see what topics are currently at the top of our readers' minds, their most urgent needs, and their pain points. Google Trends also helps me generate new keyword ideas that I can use in my content. The more you know about your target audience, the better content you can create and the higher traffic and conversion rates you can generate for your page.

Dorota Lysienia, LiveCareer

Make Use of Storytelling
One of the best tips I can give for generating effective content marketing ideas is to make use of storytelling. Stories have a way of resonating with people and getting them to connect with your brand on a deeper level. When you craft a story that is meaningful and relevant to your target audience, you will be much more likely to capture their attention and successfully market to them. In addition, stories are also incredibly shareable, which can help you reach a wider audience with your content. So if you're looking for an effective way to generate content marketing ideas, tell a story.

Antreas Koutis, Financer

Gain a Deep Understanding of Your Buyer Personas

Start by understanding your target audience and buyer personas to generate content marketing ideas to help address their needs and reach their goals. Once you have a clear picture of who they are, their interests, pain points, and what they find valuable, you can brainstorm content ideas to help you generate new and re-engaged leads.

Here's a step-by-step process:

1. Audience Research: Use tools like surveys, social media analytics, or website analytics to gather insights into your audience's demographics, interests, and behaviors.

2. Identify Pain Points or Needs: What challenges or problems is your audience facing? What information are they seeking? Identifying these pain points can help you create content that provides solutions or valuable insights.

3. Competitor Analysis: Look at what content your competitors are producing. Identify gaps or areas where you can provide better or different content to attract your audience.

4. Keyword Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to identify relevant keywords and topics your audience is searching for both online and offline. This can help you create content that ranks well in search engines and attracts organic traffic.

5. Brainstorming Sessions: Gather your team or stakeholders for a brainstorming session. Encourage everyone to contribute ideas based on the insights gathered from audience research, competitor analysis, and keyword research.

6. Content Formats: Consider different content formats, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, or webinars. Choose formats that align with your audience's preferences and the nature of the content you want to create.

7. Validation: Once you have a list of content ideas, validate them by testing them with a small segment of your audience or through social media polls. This can help you gauge interest and refine your ideas further.

8. Content Calendar: Finally, organize your ideas into a content calendar to ensure a consistent content flow that addresses your audience's needs and interests.

Use these tips to generate content marketing ideas that are creative, relevant, and valuable to your buyer personas.

Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions

Hold Regular Ideation Meetings
There's no silver bullet in generating great content marketing ideas, but one helpful tip is to hold regular ideation meetings. Ideation meetings are a chance for your marketing team to get together and brainstorm ideas for new content. When you're thinking about what kind of content to create, having a structured process like this in place can be helpful. At our company, we hold weekly ideation meetings where we'll discuss potential topics, ideas for execution, and anything else that's relevant to content creation. We've found that this helps us generate more and better ideas and allows us to keep a consistent cadence of content production.

Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAiD

Perform Keyword Research
There's nothing better than providing the information people are searching for. The best way to do this is to do keyword research. There are many free keyword research tools. I like using the free Google Keyword Tool, which is part of Google Ads. You can enter up to 10 keywords or phrases that you think your potential customers may be searching for, which will tell you how often people search for that term. It also gives you a list of related keywords, phrases, and even questions that searchers are asking. Those become your topics for blog articles or videos. Make sure you use the relevant keyword in your title as well as in your meta description, subheading, and throughout your text. The meta description is essential as that's what the human searcher uses on the search results page to decide if the website has what they need.

Giselle Aguiar, AZ Social Media Wiz

Join Community Groups to Monitor Trends and Build Ideas
Social media platforms can be a catch-all but can also be quite specific. You can find your ideas to generate compelling content by monitoring conversations in online community groups. Community groups are all over social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and there is hardly an interest or industry they don't touch upon. By joining community groups that relate to your industry, you can monitor conversations, check out shared links, read posted articles, and keep up with the latest chatter to find what topics are trending and what your target audience values. In doing so, you will not only find great ideas for generating content but also ensure that you maintain relevance to your industry's trends that can drive your audience and increase conversion rates.

Cody Candee, Bounce

Be Sure the Ideas Are Timely and Relevant
Content marketing ideas should be timely and relevant to the industry. For example, travel content would do extremely well around the holidays or Spring Break as people are eager for a vacation. That said, avoid back-to-school posts on social media in July, as it's the middle of the summer and a bit too early. Be in the loop with daily lifestyle news and industry trends that align with your target audience in a timely fashion.

Corey Ashton Walters, Here

Listen to Buyers and Prospects to Find Ideas
Listening to buyers and prospects is a reliable way to find interesting ideas. Since they represent the targets towards which your content marketing strategy is directed, they are in the best position to give you clues regarding their concerns. So refer to your sales reps or sales team for a list of frequently asked questions from buyers or consumers interested in your services or products. You can also find valuable data in the comments section of your social media pages. A sorting work can then be carried out to conserve the most relevant questions.

Ilija Sekulov, Mailbutler

Use Google's "People Also Ask" for Inspiration
One of my best sources of content ideation is Google's "People also ask" section. I'll start by Googling a highly searched, highly relevant keyword to our main business line, for which there are already dozens and dozens of on-point posts. From there, I'll scroll down to the "People also ask" section, where Google presents related keywords in question format. This FAQ-style response from Google is an ultra-rich source of associated keywords and good ideas for content. Many of these questions will be too narrow, and some are off-topic, but you'll often get related queries that you hadn't thought about. I'll then bucket associated phrases and keywords by subtopic and build a content map based on these concepts. I'll further flesh this content map out based on data pulled from SEO software, like Ahrefs. But for the initial inspiration of content ideas, the "People also ask" section is excellent.

John Ross, Test Prep Insight

Follow the News/"Newsjacking"
One of the keys to producing relevant content with immense potential is newsjacking. It means carefully monitoring the news and following the trends to produce reactive content on the topics that are currently most talked about at that time. The most important thing here is to be fast and create content on something fresh, relevant, and trending. The speed and quality of your content marketing will help you get noticed and recognized for your marketing efforts.

Gosia Szaniawska-Schiavo, Tidio

Ask Your Customers What They Want
Content marketing is only effective if it engages the target audience. Why not ask them what they want? Chances are your customers will be more than happy to tell you. You can send a survey to your email list, post a poll on social media or host a focus group. Ask your customers what questions they have about your product or what is the one related product they can't find. Ask them how you can make the sales process more straightforward. Then create content that addresses those concerns.

Pam Georgiana, Pam Georgiana

Personalize Your Website Content
Have you ever returned to a website often and seen how the service becomes more and more personalized to your preferences? To develop compelling content marketing ideas, personalizing your website content is essential. You have full control over which people see what content is on your website based on their browsing history, dwell duration, account activity, and other factors. You can also customize based on the device and the buyer persona. Adding a reorder button to the product page is one place to start for customers who have previously ordered a product. Consider using content mapping to identify which data best fits the buyer persona at particular points of the buyer's journey to serve each prospect or customer better. You can trigger specific actions, display specific content, and send tailored emails without having to manually integrate personalization.

Maneesh Sharma, Donorbox

Check Out Slack Communities in Your Niche
I have started engaging in content marketing communities recently. You can pick many content ideas from there. People might be looking for a tool, asking for advice on how to do X, or talking about their pain points, hoping to get an answer. All you have to do is join the right community where you can find your ICP, study the community and pick queries that seem most relevant to your business. It's that easy, but the trick is to find the right community.

Nupur Mittal, Mailmodo

Generate Ideas Through Content Gap Analysis 
Last Year, we published 1100 Articles for one SAAS client. We came up with 1100 Topic ideas through "Content Gap Analysis." Content Gap Analysis - helps you find "gaps" or "topics" that your competitor has covered, but you have not. You start with an exact match competitor and slowly expand/broaden the competitor list to get more content ideas. It's a data-driven approach since you are coming up with topic ideas that are already bringing traffic to your competitors.  

Boni Satani, Zestard Technologies

Listen to Understand Your Audience First
It's easier to understand your audience than at any other time in history. What are they trying to learn? What questions do they need answered? What jobs do they need to be done? Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Pinterest Trends (trends.pinterest.com), Taboola Trends (trends.taboola.com), and Answer the Public can answer these questions. Once you know keywords to build content around, use tools like Facebook Ad Library and Google Rich Media Gallery to learn what kinds of images convert to spark ideas. Meanwhile, paid tools like SparkToro can help you go deeper with audience insights. Listen first, and you'll never be short on content that converts.

Mike White, Universe

If you're interested in discussing your current content strategy and how you can start to improve your content marketing results, we invite you to schedule an inbound marketing consultation.