A great piece of content starts with a great idea. Coming up ideas is a process known as the ideation stage. This stage is one where you need to be well-informed by taking research, insights, resources and inspirations from different areas to help you along the way.
There are four main ways that you can try to come up with quality content ideas.
Be Well-Informed About Your Audience
Your target audience needs to be the center of everything that you do because that’s who you’re trying to sell to. So the more you know about them, the easier it will be to create content that will engage them and get them interested in your brand. It is really helpful to create buyer personas as they will give you some solid insights as to who your audience is and how they behave.
Another great way to come up with buyer-driven insights is to simply speak with your customer service or sales teams, as they would know the exact questions your customers are asking, and the pain points that they experience. You can then use these as content idea inspiration.
Research Your Topic
An amazing tool that will help you come up with content ideas is the Topic Research tool.
Enter a topic and hit ‘get content ideas’ to be given a wide range of topic ideas and subtopics, one of which could be your next content piece.
By clicking on any of the subtopics, you can see, in real-time, recent headlines and the questions people are asking online about that topic.
Research Some Keywords
One of the most common starting points for coming up with content ideas is actually keyword research.
And the good thing is there are numerous free keyword research tools that you can use to find targeted keywords and trending topics to find inspiration for your content.
Here are some:
Enter a keyword, hit ‘search’, and you will be presented with a comprehensive list of keywords that you can explore in more detail.
Research Your Competitors
Finally, one last common starting point for generating content ideas is unsurprisingly competitor analysis. Which is basically spying on those who sell the same (or similar) products or offer the same services as you do. There are lots of tools available to help you in this area too! Here are two that we recommend:
- Quick Search– Working in real-time, you can enter multiple brands – your competitors – and compare sentiment, with 90% accuracy. Also, discover audience demographics, gender, location, mentions, and more. Using filters, you can dig deep into trends and topics and find the stories that are currently impacting.
- SEMrush Competitor Research Tool – An all-in-one digital marketing suite that covers SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitive analysis, social media, PR, content, and even more. The SEMrush software contains over 30 tools with the ability to analyze 3.7 billion keywords as well as 4 trillion backlinks.
Using tools such as these can help you understand your competitor’s top-performing pages and pieces of content to help you gain insight on how to optimize and tweak your own strategy because you can see what is working for others.
ABOUT DIGITAL PRACTICE
Led by Marketing expert, Muireann Fitzmaurice, DigitalPractice.ie is a social media agency that create branded social media content for professional practice owners. It is a subscription service that provides physiotherapy-based content to the practice owner on a monthly basis that can be used on all social media channels. Saving you time and headspace each month to concentrate on other areas of the business.
