Seven Easy Tactics for Generating Content Marketing Ideas

In a world where technology is changing the lives of people around the world, and where robots and computers are in full swing to take up jobs that humans felt really hard to tackle, there’s no denying that almost every traditional way of work needs to be updated every now and then. The same goes for the field of marketing. This is where content marketing plays an extremely important role. It is basically referred to as a strategic way of handling this approach, with the focus on creating and developing the right content that attracts the right audience, to ultimately gain a more profitable and wider customer base.

To gain a deeper insight into generating better content marketing ideas, we present for you a few of the following ways.

1. Plan out specific business goals you want to tackle using content marketing

In terms of running a business, marketing plays an extremely crucial role. But, if a business involves a million processes, content marketing cannot be targeted for every single one of them. You need to figure out the goals that you’re looking forward to honing. This may involve increasing profitability, expanding customer services, retention of the existing customer base, increasing the sales of any one particular product, or more so, increasing the sales of an entire product line.

An extremely hurting misconception that business owners and marketing managers follow is the idea that marketing (or content marketing to be more specific) is there just to enhance the sales of a particular product. But although the line between sales and marketing is pretty thin, there needs to be a more specific lookout towards what they wish to market.

2. Think more as a consumer than a business owner

Marketing #101: Always try to look from the other side of the coin. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of reading any good text based on marketing, you’d know what we mean by this statement.

If you wish to sell anything, do keep in mind the following rules: Look at the product that you’re trying to bring to the market; start thinking about its utilities; think of anything and everything that can go wrong with the product; try to fix it; start thinking about what the customers would like to see; and start posting exactly that!

The major problem that almost every content creator has ever come across is that they don’t know what their target audience is, and what that audience would prefer consuming. If you want to be a pro at content marketing, always think like a consumer. Ask yourself, “Would I spend so much time going through this?” If the answer is yes, then Viola! You have good content ready for your product.

3. Use content creation tools such as Google Suggest, Hubspot, etc.

Now, this is where it starts getting interesting. Have you ever come to a situation where it gets extremely hard to generate good content ideas for your products? Or rather don’t know what the next topic for your content marketing section should be? This is where intelligent algorithms come into the picture. With the advancement of content and technology, it has become extremely easy for you to actually ‘generate’ content, without finding the need to brainstorm so much about it.

The internet provides some amazing tools, such as Google Suggest, HubSpot, AnswerThePublic, etc. to help you out with exactly that. Take the instance of AnswerThePublic! If you’re trying to improve the search engine optimization results for the content that you’re creating for your products, this one would help you enter keywords, and link those keywords together to form questions and comments that can be used to create content. It uses joining words such as ‘are’, ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, etc. to form statements/questions based on the nouns you entered.

A similar approach is followed by HubSpot. It allows its users to enter multiple nouns and forms tremendous “Sentence/Topic ideas” for your brand.

If I enter the keywords ‘iPhone’ and ‘Apple’, the algorithm would generate amazing topics ideas, such as: “10 signs you should invest in an Apple iPhone”. Such topics are randomly generated, and all in real-time. This allows an extremely fresh approach to target well-known topics so that you never run out of ideas.

4. Learn from your competitors and other industry-leading websites

There’s a very famous saying, which goes as: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer!” Now, in the world of business, your competitors may not be your literal ‘enemies’, but keeping track of who does what always keeps you on your toes.

Just a while ago, it was established by Amazon, that its competitors, mostly Walmart, and a few others kept a regular tracking team, just to keep track of product prices at the firm. This allowed them to put up competitive edges and prices on their products. The point is, unless you’re in a field of business with absolutely no competition, you’d rather wish to keep track of what your competitors are up to.

Another thing that comes into play here is industry leaders. At times, you actually need to learn from the best, to become the best. Websites such as inbound, medium, etc. provide specially curated content for you, based on your interests and requirements. Inbound, as an example allows delivers to you, marketing articles based on a plethora of options you choose. The options include SEO, analytics, social, strategy, and the like.

5. Participate in events and conferences

Going on the field is said to be the best practice for any business. It gives you insights into what the real world seems like. Using various conferences and events to market your business and marketing your business by using conferences can be two very important, yet very different tasks to cater to.

Consider the example of the Google IO Conference that the company organizes every year, to host developers from around the world, and give them a platform to work with Google and its plethora of products. In one way, such conventions allow business owners and developers to showcase their products in the real world. But the thing that’s smarter, and even more appealing, is that these businesses use these conferences as a source of content, and publish updates, news, etc. through videos, audio, live blogs, photographs, etc. to help create content for their own websites, while in turn helping gain traction.

6. Discuss with your experts

It is believed that a single person can’t be the master of all trades. There ought to be cases wherein, to substantiate growth, you must leave some things to the professionals. If I wish to write an article that involves core graphic design insights, I’d prefer someone from that team to come up and give me a few insights about the same.

This has two-fold benefits. One, it reduces the cost of hiring someone who’s good at writing content for graphics, from the outside; and two, it helps to get detailed ideas and thoughts from someone who’s been in this for years. Similarly, if I wish to write on a subject related to marketing, I’d consult a manager, or, say the Senior Vice President of the marketing department. The kind of information they can provide is completely unfathomable.

7. Learn from the client

This seems like a no-brainer. At the end of the day, any business that creates any product or provides any service, does so, to gain more consumers. I’ve never come across a business that’d be doing well today, without the right feedback and suggestions being used into their functioning. If a product needs to be marketed, you’d wish to know what aspects a consumer would look for, in order to make his/her decision. Think as if you yourself are a consumer of that content (or that product, in extension), and the work on the content that you’d wish to publish.

Never publish something that you wouldn’t want to see yourself. And always take regular feedback and suggestions from clients.

With this, we come to a wrap of how you can generate, create, and market new content marketing ideas for your businesses. All content is good content, never forget that!

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