It can be hard to come up with ideas or brainstorm quickly. Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank word document? You have a blog to write (and a deadline!), social media posts to publish, whatever. To help, we have a simple formula.
We recently asked clients what some of their biggest challenges were in marketing.
Aside from the obvious analytics and metrics, ideas for their content marketing plans came up top!
Successful content needs to be relevant and helpful to your buyer, and answer the questions they are asking.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is your content giving value?
Am I providing solutions to my customers pain points/solutions?
Is my content unique?
Does it inspire?
It also needs to hit them along the buyer journey in a “one of a kind way”, i.e. it shouldn’t appear anywhere else on the web, in what Rand Fishkin called Uniquely Valuable.
To be ‘Uniquely Valuable’ your content needs to be:
A massive upgrade in aggregation, accessibility, and design
Information that is not available anywhere else
Presented in a clearly different voice or style
Coming up with content ideas
It can be hard to come up with ideas or brainstorm quickly. Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank word document? You have a blog to write (and a deadline!), social media posts to publish, but you are sat there, at your desk, staring at a blank document trying to come up with ideas for your content marketing – sound familiar?
To help you create some high-value ideas for your content marketing strategy, we created this formula:
In this post we’re going to share with you our formula for coming up with ideas for your content marketing strategies.
Let’s break each section down.
Source: What are you basing your content angle on?
Curated: assembling content around your brand and themes. Think Buzzfeed and their curated content eg “34 times twitter was the weirdest place on the internet”. You can also try:
Searching top <target industry> blogs
Twitter advanced search
Twitter advanced lists
Medium
Pocket
Feedly
Created: original content based on themes and pain points of persona. This is going to be your brand-spanking-shiny-new content that you are going to create from scratch. Think:
Blog posts
YouTube Videos
Webinars
Podcasts Interviews
Free resources
E-books
White papers
How-to guides
Co-market: partnership or influencer based content where you are sharing resources and audiences, for example GoPro and Red Bull collaborated on a stunt called “Stratos” where Felix Baumgartner jumped from a space pod more than 24 miles above Earth’s surface with a GoPro strapped to his person. You can also collaborate with social media influencers with companies such as:
Tribe
Social Bakers
Upfluence
Recycle :what content can you repurpose and reuse? Ideas include:
Do you have a number of blogs that could be made into a book?
Do you have a PowerPoint from an industry event that could be turned into a blog pots?
Once you know what your source is going to be, you can focus on your theme.
Theme: The pain point you’re going to focus on.
Your theme needs to have a purpose and to have a purpose you need to have a deep understanding of your customers and the things that keep them up at night.
Get obsessive over your customer and all the questions they have on a topic that you love talking about.
Dig into your personas and try to flesh out an umbrella theme and the sub pain points or issues that are associated with it.
Let’s say you are the owner of a knitting shop and you’re focusing on content to build links and drive more inbound traffic to your site.
An umbrella theme could be.
“People who want to learn more about knitting”
Problems/ issues and pain points could be
Avoiding knitting pain from tension
Running out of yarn, how to source, buy, and store
How to fix problems/ losing a place in pattern, dropping a stitch
How to read knitting patterns
Tip: use the free Google Trends tool to see when a popular time would be to publish your content.
Format: How are you going to deliver your content? There are many to choose from and you need to select based on your resources and budget, here are some examples:
Videos
Inforgraphics
Podcasts
Blog posts
Quizzes
Case Study
PPT
Ebook
Industry Report
Checklist
Customer Reviews
Book review or reading lists
Data sheets
Curated Lists
FAQ’s
Detailed product information
Webinar
Calculators
Tips and tricks
White Papers
Ideas: Once you know your format, what ideas can you use. Below are some examples.
Top 10 tips
How to
News
Competition
Q&A
Checklist
Jargon Buster
Compliance/ Law
Interviews
Polls
Futurology
Debates etc
Now, let’s put it to action with a use case with the umbrella theme for our knitting example
Source- Creating brand new content
Theme- Avoiding knitting pain from knitting tension
Format- Blog posts
Ideas…..
Q&A with a doctor or health professional on how to avoid tension injury when knitting
How to: A detailed how to guide on avoiding knitting tension problems
Interview: with well known influencers on how they tackle pain from knitting tensions
Top 10: Ways to get tension problems and how to avoid
Facts and Figures: How many people suffer with tension problems caused by knitting
Next time you are brainstorming your content ideas, give the formula a try and do get in touch and let us know how it works for you!
Source + Theme + Format + Idea = Engaging Content
To find out more about content ideas, we have a number of online courses and free downloadable resources here – enjoy!