In the incredibly competitive B2B marketing environment, content marketing is vital in order for your brand to cut through the noise and increase audience engagement. A good content marketing strategy allows you to become a knowledge provider in your field, helps drive sales and create overall success for your business.
Producing consistent, high quality content comes with many benefits. Marketers who prioritise blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. However, when it comes to your strategy, it’s important to always be creating content that is relevant and provides value to your potential customer. Here are some tips and ideas of how to come up with content ideas.
Utilise the comment section on your posts
By using feedback and any questions your audience have to build the foundations of your content, you can guarantee it will provide value. The chances are, if one person is asking, there will be others with the same question. Using this source information will provide you with a never ending stream of ideas as you recieve more feedback the more you post!
Rehash your old content and expand on it
This is a nice easy way to create fresh content. Repurposing your old content simple means taking it and tweaking it for a different angle to use for a new blog post. It is not essentially duplication. For example, if you have a blog post titled ‘5 ways to increase productivity’, you could break that blog post down and expand on one of the points but go into further detail.
Look at what is currently trending
An easy and quick way to do this is Google Trends. When you type in a search word or phrase, it shows the relative popularity of the search query. The ‘Trending Searches’ section allows you to identify search queries that have experienced a significant increase in the past 24-hours, allowing you to capitalise on these.
When using this tool to look at trends, I would recommend looking once over a 12 month period to begin with, as you can get an idea of the current popularity of the trend. And then over 5 years as this will identify if a trend is seasonal.
Here you can see the term ‘ski resort’ is very seasonal in the United States. Identifying these season trends will help you plan ahead with your content ideas.
The ‘related queries’ section below reveals other queries people search for alongside your search term, which not only helps with content ideas but also helps you to understand the search journey of your potential customer.
Look at what your competitors are doing
A great tool for carrying out competitor analysis is SEM rush, which has a handy feature allowing you to check out a site’s highest ranking content based on backlinks and shares. This tool also helps you with keyword research and lets you see how Google ranks your site compared to competitors.
Buzzsumo is another valuable tool that helps you get inspiration for topics. You can enter a competitors domain and find out their top performing pieces of content.
Social media listening
This is a great way to find out what your potential customers are talking about and can provide a surplus stream of valuable content ideas. The tool Hootsuite allows you to create a dashboard to monitor content on specific hashtags, alongside multiple social media accounts. You can track key phrases and terms relevant to your business and see what people are saying about them. You can then use this information and consider how you can bring your expertise to a particular issue.
Using social listening as a tool for content ideas means you can respond quickly to your audience, be relevant and provide valuable content.
