It’s no secret that Content is King when marketing your business. It is through excellent content you engage your audience, attract new customers, and build a solid relationship with them. Meanwhile, one of the challenges people deal with is how to generate content ideas with topic research. In this article, we provide tips and tools to generate content ideas for your blog, social media, videos, or anything you want to create.
Before You Begin…..
Before you begin searching for content ideas, here are some things you should first put in place:
1: Set Your Content Goals
Every content you push out, whether a newsletter, podcast or social media post, is meant to help you achieve a business goal. For this reason, it’s best to highlight your goals before looking for content ideas. So, before you start generating unlimited content ideas, start by defining the goals and objectives you are trying to achieve.
Some common marketing goals include:
- Brand awareness
- Increase email signups
- Build customer loyalty
- Improve conversions
- Increase sales
Make sure you formulate your goals to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). Setting SMART goals make it easy to approach your content creation more strategically, and this will help you find great content ideas.
Poor Goal:
To increase website traffic for my business.
Smart Goal:
To increase website traffic by 10% before December 2022.
2: Understand Your Audience Needs
One of the best tips on how to find blog content ideas is by researching questions your audience may have. Your content shouldn’t just be about meeting your business goals but also about solving your customers’ needs. You write for your customers, so find a way to dig into your customer’s needs and challenges.
For instance, if you are writing for people who need help saving money, you need to figure out what questions they are likely to have. As a person who struggles with saving money, some of the questions I have are:
- What platforms are best for saving money?
- How do I restrain myself from touching the money I saved?
If I see any blog post with any of these titles, best believe that I will click on it immediately.
So, try to apply this to your audience needs too. If your audience are content creators, then one of their needs is how to create content ideas through topic research. In this case, you can write about this topic to help them solve the problems.
Try to understand your audience’s questions and needs because it is a minefield to source content ideas.
Fortunately, you can use platforms like Quora, Reddit, and Nairaland to find your target audience’s questions on a subject.
Top 12 Ways To Find Content Ideas For Your Business
We’ve got you if you have trouble coming up with content ideas! Whether you need content ideas for Instagram, videos, or blog posts, these tips will help you develop content ideas. Here are some hidden ways to find content ideas for your business:
1: Follow Industry and Seasonal Trends
There was a time when TikTok was taking over other social media platforms in terms of marketing.
What did many marketing blogs do?
They started creating guides and how-tos on TikTok marketing.
Why?
The answer is simple: that was what was in trend and what interested people the most.
So, it would help your content creation strategy if you pay attention to industry trends. Keep an eye on what your competitors, industry leaders, and target audience are discussing. Some of the tools to stay up to date with trends in your industry include Google Alerts, Google Trends, and social media platforms.
2: Conduct Interviews and Surveys
One of the best tips on how to find content ideas for social media or your website is by asking your audience directly. A good way to do this is by conducting interviews or surveys to understand their problems and needs. This will help you create content that solves their actual problems and needs.
To get content ideas from your customers; you can:
- Create a survey using tools like Typeform or SurveyMonkey to identify the type of content your customers would like.
- Create social media polls on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter by suggesting between 2 or more content ideas.
- If you send out emails often, you can introduce a survey in one of the emails.
You can ask questions like:
- What should our next content be about?
- Who should we interview next on our website?
- Which of our content do you enjoy the most?
- What topics do you like reading about the most?
- What type of content would you like to see more on your website?
You can also mix the questions with demographic questions like:
- What’s your niche?
- What’s your job role?
- What’s your business size?
The responses you get can help you find creative content ideas that would fit the needs of your audience.
3: Check Your Competitors’ Websites
If you need a content ideas website, you should check out the blogs or websites of your competitors or people in your industry. The point isn’t to steal but to seek inspiration from their content strategy and topics since you share a similar target audience.
Pro Tip: Don’t just spy on your competitors’ website content but also on the performance of those content. You can find out what content on their website or social media receives the most views, shares, or likes.
Why is this important?
It will give you a better idea of what type of content you should create. Buzzsumo is an excellent app for finding the best-performing content on a website. For example, if you are interested in writing about how to find content ideas for social media. You can go to Buzzsumo, enter the domain of the website you are trying to spy on, and you will get their top-performing content.
4: Repurpose Your Old Content
Another great way to come up with creative content ideas is not to bother coming up with content ideas.
Does that sound weird?
Maybe it does but it’s an excellent hidden strategy to get content ideas.
How does this work?
It works by repurposing of content. Look at your previous content and repurpose them for new content. For example, if you have a blog post, you can repurpose it for your social media by rewriting it in a different form.
Also, you can update your old content with new ideas or information and relaunch them. If you wrote an article some years ago on makeup trends, there is a chance the article may not be relevant now since there are newer makeup trends. It is a good idea to update the article with new trends and then relaunch it; that is content repurposing.
5. Create One Content In Different Formats
Instead of looking for content ideas for YouTube, your blog, and social media, you can create just one content for all platforms.
How do you put this into practice?
Let’s assume you are creating a how-to article on your blog. In this case, you can create that one content into different formats to suit different platforms. You can create a tutorial video for YouTube and a carousel for social media from that how-to article.
Pro Tip: Since there are unlimited content ideas, switch things up by creating different formats of one content. This is especially important if you are unsure what works best for your audience. Some content format ideas include:
- Common Mistakes
- How-Tos
- Top Tips
- Tutorials
6. Analyse Existing Content
Also, if you are looking for content ideas, try to analyse the performance of your current content. Is there an article or content that performs better than the rest? What is your worst and best-performing content?
An insight into this can give you information about what your audience enjoys regarding the topic’s format, structure, and length. Content analysis shouldn’t just be on your website but also on other content platforms. In case you are more interested in how to get content ideas for Instagram, you can assess your past Instagram posts.
7: Seek Inspiration From Keyword Research
Keyword strategies are useful to find keywords for better SEO performance and generate new content ideas.
How does this work?
It’s easy. Start by heading to a keyword tool like KeywordTool.io or Google Ads Keywords to research a keyword or a general topic. By doing this, you will get a list of other similar topics people search. All you need to do is review the keyword tool results.
Let’s try an example. Say you are thinking of writing on “how to find content ideas for social media.” Here are some topic ideas you will find:
8: And HashTags
As with keywords, there may be some hashtags in your industry that can serve as inspiration for your content. Follow important hashtags in your industry and monitor what is going on around the topic to help you come up with topic ideas. Also, you can use tools like Sprout Social and BrandMentions to monitor hashtags and other trendy topics in your industry.
9: Seek Content Ideas From Forums
Some of the best content ideas generators are general forums like Quora, Reddit, and even social media platforms like Twitter. A lot of conversations happen on this forum with people asking questions and seeking answers. No matter the niche of your business, you can look for the questions people ask concerning your business niche and turn it into the content.
Another interesting place to find topics is on Facebook groups. Explore Facebook groups related to your brand to look through conversations people are talking about. Answer The Public is also a great platform that helps people generate questions people ask about a particular term.
10: Mine Your Blog and Social Media Comments
Comments from your social media and blog posts can be a great inspiration to get unlimited content ideas. If people often ask questions in the comment session, you could restructure their responses to create a new topic idea.
And if you don’t get enough blog or social media comments, don’t skip this tip yet. You can go ahead and check your competitors’ websites and social media to find hidden topics from their own the comment session.
Also, you can set up a feedback loop on your blog or social media to encourage people to drop comments.
How do you do this?
Simply prompt questions like these after posting your content:
- Does this answer your question on this topic?
- What other topics would you love to read about?
The idea is to prompt people to leave comments about their questions and needs regarding your content.
11: Don’t Ignore Google Search Suggestions
Google is a great content ideas generator for all business owners, irrespective of the niche or industry. If you have a general topic or idea you would like to write on, then you can start a search on Google. Go to the related results or People Also Ask session to find other content ideas. These are the results that came up after searching makeup trends on Google.
To find something related to your industry, simply enter a search term or ask a question, including keywords relevant to your brand.
12: Create Cluster Topics
Now that you have the tips for finding content ideas, it’s time to brainstorm. It is not when you need content for your website you should start thinking of what to write. A good idea is to brainstorm a list of potential content ideas that can cover about a month or two. Brainstorm different ideas at once to make it easy to pick a topic from your list.
You can try using free tools like Content Idea Generator and Blog Title Generator to get suggested content ideas based on the keywords or topics you enter.
Over To You
To create content that performs well, you first need to know how to generate content ideas with topic research. So define your marketing goals, understand the needs of your audience and from there, research content ideas relevant to your audience. Hopefully, the tips shared in this article will help you generate a lot of relevant content ideas for your business.
