Content marketing is, in essence, writing about your industry. You’re looking to produce content that will appeal to your clients and customers that relates to your organisation, and chances are you can write until the cows come home about your own company and industry. However, many struggle with this because your written content needs to not only retain some relevance to your industry, but also attract readers from far and wide, working as ‘click bait’ to drive traffic to your site. Generating relevant, readable, on-topic content ideas can be a real challenge, and many companies fall into the trap of gazing into their own navels and becoming too insular to attract anyone from the wider web. Here, we’ve compiled a few pointers to help you brainstorm better content ideas in future, retaining that all-important industry relevance whilst attracting more interested parties than ever before.
Thought leadership
It’s important to keep abreast of the latest developments and any current affairs relevant to your industry, giving you an indication of what your clients and customers might be talking about. Such topics are crucial if you are to keep up with a fast-moving industry, but simply reporting on the newest developments won’t be enough to attract new readers to your site. The problem with popular, current affairs topics is that they’re available to everyone, and the chances that your competitors will be discussing them too are high indeed. Instead, seek to go a little deeper and bring something new to the discussion. How will any new developments affect your industry in future? How will your customers’ lives be changed, and is there anything the news websites haven’t touched on? Thought leadership is a vital aspect of content marketing as it gives your readers something they can’t find elsewhere.
A different stance
By the same token, it’s important that your content ideas aren’t simply regurgitating concepts we’ve all seen countless times before. There are only so many subjects one can write about whilst remaining relevant to your industry, so why not take a different stance when examining a subject someone else has already covered? Perhaps you can go into more detail than others have managed, use an allegory to make an otherwise dry topic more interesting or tackle a concept from a different point of view. Content marketing differs from business writing in that there is a profound creative element to the practice, so exercise your brain and offer your readers something a bit different in future.
Entertain, inform, enlighten
When developing content ideas for your company’s blog or newsletter, you must always bear this mantra in mind: ‘entertain, inform or enlighten’. If you aren’t achieving one or more of these three goals, what’s the point of producing content in the first place? Potential customers are not going to pick up on your content unless it’s offering them something in return, so use whatever intellectual tools may be at your disposal to win them round. Humour can make even the dullest topic more readable, while many readers are likely to follow a link if they feel it can provide them with additional knowledge. Don’t be scared to be controversial or different if it means you’re providing unique and engaging content.
Read and learn
sometimes, the best way to develop new content ideas is to look elsewhere for inspiration. You ought to read the blogs and newsletters of your competitors as well as the web’s most popular sites – think Buzzfeed or The Guardian. Obviously it’s not a good idea to plagiarise the content ideas of others, but the more you read the more you’ll become aware of what the average reader is looking for. Determining the most successful formats, subjects and styles will allow you to produce more popular, readable and on-topic content ideas in future.
Naturally, developing new content ideas can be a challenge – once you’ve brainstormed your potential titles, you’re still left with the task of writing the content itself! Why not leave it to the experts and make the most of our content marketing services instead?