Ideation can be one of the least understood elements of the creative process for people who haven’t worked in the creative industry.
Generating ideas, brainstorming, or whatever you want to name it, often brings the impossibly enlightening adventures we’ve seen over and over again in books and movies.
But anyone who’s attended a brainstorming session in real life when trying to accomplish a business objective understands that coming up with a compelling idea can be a lot harder than in the movies.
But coming up with an idea for your marketing efforts doesn’t have to be complicated. All it takes to breathe a new life into your efforts is to add some structure and intention to your ideal sessions. In other words, there is nothing that can replace talking to customers and maintaining an in-depth voice of customer research (VOC research).
When you’re tasked with coming up with new ideas regularly, doing whatever you can to streamline the process can go a long way.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the United States of America, said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This quote highlights the importance of planning to achieve your goals.
The same principle applies to your business as well. Taking the time to develop your ideas, either on your own or in a team, will ensure that your content is targeted and help you achieve your goals, from increasing the traffic and social shares to strengthening your brand or improving conversions and sales.
So if you need the inspiration to help you come up with your own content ideas, check out the recommended brainstorming methods below.
1. Start by Going Back to the Basics
When we hit a creative wall, it’s easy to over-analyze a particular topic and lose the status of our content goals. Take a step back and ask, is your goal to:
- Increase Conversions?
- Answering customer/customer questions?
- Creating brand awareness?
- Driving traffic?
Prioritize your goals to find out how your content currently supports your objectives and identify areas where you have failed to meet your goals. Ideally, your content should touch all of these goals, whether your content includes landing pages, blog articles, or product pages. The idea is to strike a balance of knowledge, education, and entertainment for your readers. By assessing these things, you can quickly spot the direction your content needs to achieve this balance.
2. Timely Content
Have you checked news websites lately to see what’s happening in your industry? Monitoring media with tools like Mentions and Google Alerts helps you stay up to date.
These tools automatically send alerts when a specified word is in the news or is mentioned on social sites. Incorporating timely posts into your content publishing mix keeps your customers feeling connected and informed.
Industry events and workshops are always a great topic that attracts a broad audience. So if you come to a fantastic local event or specialist trade show, keep an eye out for them. Document any thoughts that come to mind. Even if the idea isn’t helpful for a while, it may become more relevant later down the road.
3. Internal Resources
Customer service, sales, and account management teams interact with customers and clients daily. As a result, they have a wealth of information about what types of questions are asked and what pain points customers get.
Reach out to individuals on such teams and create content that eases these pain points and answers your customers’ questions. Keep a shared document so teams can contribute to frequently asked questions. Then use this data to create topics for different content formats.
4. Spot Social Media Insights
While you can find great ideas on Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, and Instagram, one of the less appreciated social media sites for content research is Reddit.
There is virtually a subreddit for almost any topic, from eCommerce, entrepreneurship to personal finance and a deluge of ideas.
The easiest way to find subreddits is to search for your topic. You can get the best content ideas from paying attention to any trends or patterns that are beginning to emerge in your research:
- What are the most common questions?
- What are the most common issues?
- Which topics are repeated?
- What are general topics?
It will give you a better idea of how your target audience is searching or talking about this topic online. Plus, once you have some ideas, you can use Reddit and other social media sites to test out the idea with a short post to see if it resonates.
It’s a smart way to test small-scale ideas before investing the time and energy to create one long piece of content.
5. Forums & Blogs
Forums and blogs are often ignored, but a few simple Google searches can send you a dozen of ideas.
As mentioned, you’ll need to pay attention to common questions and topics and identify what types of content are performing well and who is posting it.
When you look at blogs around a niche, it’s helpful to plug them into tools like Ahrefs and look at their most successful content regarding links and social shares.
6. Try Group Ideation
Two heads are better than one, and even more so, they can lead to brilliantly creative thinking. Groups can build on each other’s ideas to find solutions and topics that you may have never thought of.
Getting multiple team members to collaborate and discuss new ideas isn’t always an easy task. People in a group setting can become easily distracted or possibly feel threatened and more reserved.
To combat these types of obstacles, try to incorporate some group activities into the mix to reduce stress. Trying out some role-playing games can make the process seem more fun and less like, well, work.
If you can’t get all of your team members into the same room because of different schedules or remote work situations, using group collaboration software can be vital to keeping everyone on the same page.
Working together in a marketing campaign field can help your remote team members gather for some great brainstorming sessions wherever and whenever required.
If you want to grow your online business through content marketing, you can contact us. Our experts are here to help you for free. Call now!