Creating content is important for your entire customer lifecycle; for brand awareness, consideration, decision, retention and advocacy stages. This helps to gain and keep customers and if they are very happy, they might refer new customers to you. From my own experience it can be difficult to create topics if you are just creating them out of the blue. But how to come up with exciting blog post and content ideas and which tools can help you?
Contents:
- What is an idea?
- Know your basics before starting to create your blog post ideas
- Come up with blog content ideas that create a ‘buzz’
What is an idea?
According to Merriam Webster an idea is “A formulated thought or opinion… A mental image or formulation of something seen or known or imagined, to a pure abstraction, or to something assumed or vaguely sensed.” This means every single one of us is capable of creating ideas. We just need to learn how to put them on paper or communicate them.
Know your basics before starting to create your blog post ideas
Make sure you have the following information together before you start creating ideas, so you create topics which are useful to you and your audience.
Marketing Goals & KPIs
Set your marketing goals and KPIs before you start to create your marketing plans or topics.
Tone of Voice & Brand Guidelines
Establish your tone of voice and brand guidelines.
Target Audience
There are blog posts online worth 41,600 years of reading! Wow, you might think, there’s no chance people will read my blog posts. But, at the same time almost 80% of online users read blog posts regularly. Therefore, set your target personas and find out what they would be interested in reading.
Personas are characters that represent certain demographics, traits, values, goals and challenges your target audience is facing. Only once you have researched and created profiles of your personas will you be able to create topics that will actually help you to reach your marketing goals. Usually, you would need two to four personas.
Competitors
It is always good to know who your competitors are to find out where you are standing in your market. If you don’t know your competitors yet you can perform a competitor research. Moz has put together some good insights about competitor research here.
Research, gather & read existing content
Get familiar with the content that’s out there and what people are looking for. Find content and create your creative board. For example, you can use an extension on your browser like Pocket. It allows you to save articles your come across to your content lists. You can set up Google Alerts for specific topics and receive notifications if there are new articles regarding your chosen topic. Have a look on your competitors blogs to see if there is anything interesting. The good thing about competitors is that they have a similar target audience and therefore the topics are likely to be relevant for you as well. Here are a few more tips for your research.
- Find out what the target audience in your industry is asking in your own FAQs page or competitors’ FAQs pages
- Ask clients what they would like to read about
- Find out what people ask about on Quora
- See the top content for specific keywords with Buzzsumo
- See what people are asking around a certain topic with AnswerThePublic
- Find out what people are searching for on KWFinder
- The auto-complete function or the related searches function of Google Search
Come up with blog post content ideas that create a ‘buzz’
The artist, Anish Kapoor said, “All ideas grow out of other ideas.” A very true statement as reading and informing yourself about different subjects and combining them will help you to come up with exciting new ideas. Therefore, once you gathered all the information above start processing it. To process it take a little creative break to take your mind off it. Believe me, during this time you can take a step back, see the full picture, let your mind relax so it can then work wonders. And afterwards, you can start firing out your ideas in a brainstorming session with others or alone.
But, don’t fire them out without structure. Build a template which allows you to organise your brainstorm session. I found this template by HubSpot very useful. I’ve just adapted it a little bit so that I could create ideas for brand awareness, consideration, decision, retention and advocacy stage of the content wheel. Keep your goals and your target audience in mind.
Relevant content on your website for all stages should be diversified and not only include blog posts. This could include ideas for infographics, videos, how-to guides, email newsletters, portfolio items, price packages and more. Remember that no idea is too crazy, try and think outside the box. Write all of your ideas down.
Try to set a timeframe for the brainstorming session so you don’t overdo it. Once you’ve finished your brainstorming you need to sort your ideas and choose the ones you would like to use for each stage and persona. Then start creating your editorial calendar.
