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1. Identify Customer Pain Points
The best content idea isn’t necessarily the most creative idea – it’s the one that solves a burning pain point your audience feels.
To learn about your customers’ pain points, you can send a survey and ask them to list their three biggest challenges.
For example, just set up an autoresponder email like this one after someone joins your email list:
“Hi (name),
Thanks for joining! We’re thrilled to have you in the community.
I also have one question for you: What are the three biggest challenges you currently face as a (job title)?“
You can then keep a file of all of their responses and use that to brainstorm content ideas.
You can also just ask your audience on social media what kind of content they want from you next.
2. Iterate On Your Top Performing Content
If you notice that a specific content topic consistently generates high engagement, don’t try to reinvent the wheel – just double down on what’s already working and create more content on that topic.
For example, if you have a marketing brand and notice that most of your top performing content covers topics around conversion rate optimization, create more content around the topic of conversion rate optimization.
However, it’s important to realize that the blog posts that generate the most traffic aren’t always the most relevant to your audience. Ideally, you want to double down on creating content that attracts your potential customers.
So you can also look at which blog posts were most effective at moving your audience through the marketing funnel (e.g., they signed up for your email list, joined a webinar, scheduled a demo, downloaded a tutorial, etc.). You should already be tracking this data in a platform like Google Analytics.
Another method is to look at your social media posts that have generated the highest engagement.
This is helpful because you can see who is commenting on your posts and gauge the general sentiment of the audience. Each platform has its own analytics dashboard, so use it to see which posts generate a lot of engagement from your ideal audience.
Once you know what kind of content topics you should double down on, you can use a keyword research tool to identify more keywords relevant to that keyword.
3. Look At Your Competitors’ Top Performing Content
Tracking your competitors’ top performing content will help you better understand the type of content your target audience enjoys.
While you don’t want to copy their content, you can put your own spin on the same idea.
To track your competitors’ top performing content, you can look at their top pages in Ahrefs.
However, because traffic doesn’t always correlate with conversions and you don’t really know who the piece of content is attracting, a better method is to look at the paid keywords they’re bidding on.
Tracking your competitors’ paid keywords is useful because they probably won’t bid on keywords that don’t turn into leads and sales.
You can find your competitors’ paid keywords in a tool like Ahrefs, Spyfu, or SEMrush.
4. Track Trending Industry News And Topics
Tracking industry news and topics is essential if you’re creating any social media or email content as many people use these channels to stay up-to-date with the latest news.
There are a few easy ways to find current trending topics. First, you can use a tool like Google Trends to find current trending topics across the globe.
A method to find more specific trending topics is to sign up for email newsletters within your niche. This can help you source not only current trending topics, but also generate ideas for new content formats.
BuzzSumo is another great tool for finding trending topics. You can track specific categories, and it will show you the trending content in that category, or you can track specific keywords.
5. Ask Industry Experts
Asking experts for their take on a specific topic is a great way to make your content unique and better than the content that currently exists online. You can also directly ask them for content ideas.
For example, you can reach out to them on social media or through email and ask them one of the following questions:
- What trend are you most excited about for 2024?
- What do you believe is currently the most underrated strategy in (your industry)?
You can use their responses to generate content ideas and even use the quote they give you in your content.
You can also tag these influencers when you publish the content to aid your content promotion efforts.
6. Update or Republish Old Content
Only a fraction of your audience will see your content the first time you publish it – especially if you primarily use social media marketing. So many of the best content creators repost or reuse their top performing content.
The best part is that the content is already proven to resonate with your audience, so it minimizes the risk of the content failing.
In addition to reposting and repurposing social media content, it’s also important to update your blog content.
This is a top strategy we’re currently using at Copyblogger. The content marketing landscape is quickly evolving, and some of the strategies that used to work five years ago are no longer effective.
So we’re updating the content that previously performed the best and has begun to slowly deteriorate.
To find the best content to update, look in Google Search Console and see which posts have lost the most traffic over the past few months.
You can do this by going to the Search Results report and clicking on “New” for the search filter.
7. Share What You’ve Learned
As ChatGPT makes it easy to quickly generate factual advice, people (and Google) want content that provides personal experience.
So keep a journal of what you learn. Perhaps set aside some time each Sunday to reflect on experiments you’ve run, important conversations you’ve had with team members or industry influencers, and anything else you’ve learned during the week.
Once you have an idea of a lesson you learned, put it into a storytelling framework and add a key takeaway at the end.
8. Share Stories From Others
Sharing your own stories is a great start, but one person can only have so many highly impactful experiences in a week.
Another option is to source stories from other people – ideally, those who don’t have time to share their own stories.
You can also contact people directly to ask if they would consider sharing a story. For example, if your audience is B2B founders, you could reach out directly to a B2B founder and ask if they would consider letting you write a story on the most impactful thing they’ve learned during the year.
There’s also a source called Help A B2B Writer, which allows you to submit requests for quotes from experts.
9. Incorporate User Generated Content
The only drawback is that it can be tricky to get users to put in the effort to create content for you.
So one option is to run contests or a giveaway for the best content.
While giveaways are fairly common among B2C brands, you could still do one as a B2B brand.
For example, Trello ran a $5,000 giveaway contest for people to post where they work from while traveling the world.
User generated content can also come from your employees. For example, Trello could have also asked its employees to participate by sharing where they work from in Trello.
10. Create Less Content
This tip may seem counterintuitive, but more content volume is not always better.
If you don’t have anything insightful to share, don’t publish any content.
This is a tip from Alex Hormozi. He claims to scrap plenty of the content that they record if he doesn’t feel that it’s truly outstanding.
So spend more time on the ideation phase and don’t just publish content because you feel that you need to stay up to date with your content calendar.
It takes time to create a truly outstanding piece of content, and you may see much better results by spending more time on a single piece of content than simply creating more content.
