Having trouble coming up with blog ideas? Feel like every post, eBook or guide you could write has already been written? You’re not alone—even industry leaders get writer’s block.
Kuno Creative’s Lead Brand Journalist and Content Strategist Carrie Dagenhard shares five easy ways to come up with fresh content ideas sure to help drive traffic and captivate your audience.
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When you're developing content for your brand, one of the biggest challenges, or one of the biggest roadblocks, that you might run into is coming up with fresh ideas. A lot of times it feels like everything that could be written about your industry or about some of the trends going on in your industry, have already been written about by someone else or you've already written about them. When that happens, we look at five different ways that you can come up with fresh content ideas.
The first thing you're going to want to look at is what's trending. So you're going to want to look at Facebook and Twitter. Use social monitoring tools to see what kind of conversations are happening in your industry. What are prospects looking to solve? What kind of challenges are they facing and discussing online? By answering some of those questions or resolving some of those challenges through your content, you can build trust in your brand and establish credibility.
The second tip is to know what your customers are asking, and this is where it's going to be really important to align your sales and marketing team. The marketing team should always be aware of what kind of questions customers have throughout the sales process. What are they asking as they move from one stage of the buyer's journey to the next? By knowing these questions, you can use your content to answer those questions and, again, establish credibility and build trust in your brand.
The third thing you're going to want to look at is, what performed well in the past? This is where you're going to want to take a deep dive into some of your historical data. Look for some of those pieces of content that brought in a high number of leads or increased your traffic, and then look for ways that you can replicate that same success. Maybe that means taking a fresh take on a subject that performed well in the past. Or, sometimes, that means using the same format but a different subject.
The fourth thing you're going to want to take a look at is what thought leaders in your industry have to say. By listening to some of the noisemakers in your industry, you can get the creative juices flowing and come up with a great new idea.
The fifth thing you can do to develop new ideas is to determine what stories can be told. At the end of the day, content marketing is all about telling stories. To get ideas for a story, you can look at some of your customer successes, maybe a partner success. Look at some case studies or even a short little anecdote, anything that's going to resonate well with your buyer personas.
What strategies do you use to develop fresh content ideas? Share them in the comment section below.
