Once you have created a content calendar for your content strategy or marketing plan, you can easily find the first content ideas and names. These basic content ideas are both close to the customer’s tastes and useful to them and may even be interesting to some users. But on the other hand, these content ideas may not be the ones that can increase sales and increase engagement with your business.
Authors in content strategy combine these ideas, promote other content in one post, and share them with others in their blog posts. Ideas like these make users understand how a product can help them solve a problem or even tell them why people should trust the company or brand.
If you want to create a new content program for the next few months, or if you want to update existing content at all, take a look at these five ways to get inspiration and content for your content.
Content ideas
1. Competitors
Businesses look to their competitors for inspiration, content strategy, and brainstorming.
Many managers do innovative things for their company, such as doing competitive analysis to ensure they do not lose customers or lag behind others.
Content creators and strategists should use the same approach when generating content ideas. It all depends on the number of page views or the number of times content is shared on social media. Sometimes, the best content is produced with inspiration or imitation of another author’s work.
The best type of content informs customers or potential customers and leads to more sales or a new relationship between the customer and the product. Please look at your competitors and see how they talk to potential customers.
Do your competitors answer questions that you do not already know the answers to? Do your competitors advertise the benefits of their services in a way that you can not?
See what competitors’ content offers and how you can express it in your unique language.
2. Customers
Having a survey form and contact form are the best ways to find content ideas. Ensure that the customer service department reviews the customer feedback section on the site and informs the marketing team about this feedback.
When people ask a question repeatedly, that is a pattern form.
These questions are, in fact, the same topics you might find on the FAQ page, and they may have been generated in blog posts or help videos. If you find your content ideas through these questions and answers, you can interact more with users.
As part of following up on customer questions, the service manager can link the relevant content (article, video, etc.) in their response, which allows the potential customer to engage with the content and be placed in the sales funnel.
3. Internal team
One of the mistakes of many marketing professionals is that they are always looking for content ideas. Meanwhile, connecting with other teams in your company can help them find the best ideas for your content.
Talk to company personnel, vendors, customer service, and anyone at the forefront of customer service, and ask them to inform you of the following:
- What feedback do they consistently receive from customers?
- How do they predict the sales trend?
- From a customer perspective, what are your company’s best features and benefits?
Be sure to talk to the sales team. You will learn a lot and completely new things about the needs of your company or customer that you should pay attention to when producing new content.
4. Business resources
Existing resources for the business should be used to generate content ideas rather than to analyze competitors’ work. In this way, you go directly to the organizations and associations that have created intellectual leadership. Sometimes this path can completely change the direction of your business.
For example, a school with truck driving courses should be aware of the new rules for drivers and how these rules affect the driving test.
However, these rules affect what the school includes in its curriculum. It can lead to content that informs clients of these changes and their impact on their education.
With your content, you can show that you are aware of the latest changes in the business. By doing so, you also validate the quality of your services.
5. Social media
Getting content ideas from social media is so easy that you can easily pull any idea. This inspiration is so easy that many companies forget to make the most of the power of social media. In addition to finding content ideas, the power of these media should be used to review and plan content.
Listen to what people say about your products and your competitors on all social media. Look at the comments section of online sales sites and anywhere else that talks about the types of products related to your business.
Note which posts received the most shares and which posts received the most comments. Sometimes, the reaction to social posts is as important as the post itself for content analysis.
Make sure you know the best hashtags and know how to tag content. You need to know how to optimize the content for searching with hashtags and tagging to find this content easily. After all, what good is a website if it simply “blends in” with everything else?
Tips for content planning
Do not forget that content can be produced in different ways. Sometimes it makes sense to move away from traditional blog post templates to content production.
Add additional tools to your content production environments, such as infographics or a YouTube channel with videos on doing something or using a product. As a great complement to the content, these tools give your business a superior reputation.
Take a look at all the channels you can use as social media. Paying attention to these platforms will help you determine which of your audience most uses social networks and which ones are of little use to you.
When creating your content calendar, write down your specific ways of promoting content. Keep doing this, and look at the Facebook posts or tweets that link to your site. It will help you know what your content should focus on and find the strongest way to attract your audience.
Result
We hope that the content strategy can help you find content ideas in your business. It does not matter where you are inspired or what brand you represent. Your two priorities in producing content should be to build a new relationship with the customer and, at the same time, strengthen existing relationships.