Finding good content ideas for your business’s blog or social media channels can be very tricky.
It’s not always easy to create content that will help to engage your audience. And even if you do find great ideas, placing them into a workable marketing strategy isn’t always straightforward.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that content can be very different for each business. So, while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, there are many things that most business marketers can do to find good content ideas.
In this article, I’m going to go through different techniques and tools that you can use to help create great ideas for your social media channels and how to organize your content into a successful strategy.
What Are Your Content Goals?
Before trying to create a content strategy, you must outline your goals. So, take some time to think about what it is you want to achieve with your social media channels.
Sure, it might be as simple as wanting to grow your business, but you need to be a lot more specific — do you want to boost the awareness of your brand, offer a useful place to deal with customer feedback, promote a new product, or get more people to your website?
Finding Content Ideas
Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to assess which types of content are going to work best for your business.
For your social media, should you focus more on still media images? Audio-visual video content? Or will text-based posts work best? For your blog, should you create light-hearted, fun blog posts? Or educational, authority-building articles?
There are a few techniques that you can use to help inspire your content ideas.
Competitor Research
The first one I’m going to suggest is taking a look at your competitors.
Now, I don’t think you should copy your competitors. However, by assessing your competition’s website and social media you can see what types of content work for them and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you can then come up with your own content ideas based on what is most likely going to work for your business.
Content Research Tools
There are many content research tools to choose from.
You should use tools like BuzzSumo, which helps you to find the most popular content types based on your industry. BuzzSumo is great for both blog and social content.
Essentially, if you don’t know what you should talk about in your content, BuzzSumo will tell you — you type in a term related to your business and BuzzSumo will return what content is hot right now. For example, if you search “social media marketing” BuzzSumo will show you relevant trending topics that are being widely shared across multiple the internet.
You also can find content ideas using Answer The Public — a keyword research tool that shows popular search terms based on specific keywords. You can choose keywords relating to your business, search them through Answer The Public, and get given a huge list of search terms that you can analyze to find content ideas.
Choosing the Right Platforms
This section is specifically for social media marketing. Depending on your business, some social media platforms may work better for your business.
If you’re a business offering physical products, Instagram might be the best choice for your business as it is more focused on images and video — great for displaying products to customers.
However, if you’re offering informational B2B services, like business consultancy, LinkedIn or Twitter would be a good option. LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing and Twitter is a great way of quickly delivering information and connecting with potential new clients.
If you’re unsure what social platforms will work best for your business, you can begin by using all of the key platforms and experiment to find which ones are going to work best for you.
In fact, tools like BuzzSumo will also give you insights into what platform is best for any type of content. For example, it will show how many times a particular piece of content has been shared across different platforms, so you can assess which platforms are probably going to be best for your business.
Using Relevant Content
While the suggestions in this article will help you build up your content plan, you need to make sure all the content you’re delivering — both blog content and social media — needs to be as relevant as possible for it to be as successful as possible.
If you’d like to find out more ways to improve your marketing content and overall marketing strategy, read through some of the awesome articles on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James