Content is in high demand as a key player in any marketer's toolkit, it engages the audience and attaches them to the brand. Not to mention driving traffic to websites, turning 'passers by' into prospects. With such high demand for content to be distributed and across so many mediums, you need to do your bit to create your own, a simple and obvious way to do this is with the addition of a blog to your site.
Your own blog creates a weekly, monthly, daily - however often you can - update for your customers, followers and website. The reason that content works so well for marketers is 2 fold (at least!). The battle for brand attention is now online, and being online means flexing those SEO muscles, regular and useful, properly constructed content can work wonders for your SEO. Secondly, consumers need more from a brand in 2019, they need to know that the brand has values and a personality that they can identify with, and what these are, they want more ideas, inspiration and social media interaction. Content Marketing Institute found that "The most popular content marketing goal is brand awareness (79%)".
So yes, the demand for content has risen and as this happens, the ‘modern’ content and digital marketers and ‘old-school’ marketers are turning their hand to the new wave marketing. Managers who are realising this trend and entrepreneurs who act asare their own content marketers, are frantically brainstorming for a waterfall of new ideas! But how do you know what to produce and come up with blog topics? Well, we’re here to give you a little helping hand with some top tips for generating plenty of relevant blog ideas for your business.
What are people searching for?
There are a few different ways to assess this, this might be getting on to Google and taking note of the most searched questions around your industry, or using Google Trends to figure out what’s hot right now. You might take a look at your Google Analytics, if you’re not a big Google Analytics user, it's more than worth getting to grips with, by drilling down into the data you can see which pages and potentially past blog topics have gained the most and longest views and attain from this which topics your audience is actually interested in hearing more about.
Defining your keywords.
Your marketing or SEO team will likely already have these lined out and if they don’t, they should! Use this list of keywords which are already working to drive traffic to your site and build a number of titles around each one! This will give you a brilliant balance between what people are searching for (above) and what you want to be found for!
Areas of expertise. What are your areas of expertise and are you showcasing them? Without giving away your knowledge for free, your customers will be able to see that you do know your stuff and by showcasing this in a blog demonstrates what you have to offer in expertise and knowledge of your industry.
What’s happening?
Right now or in the near future, what is happening that is relatable to your business? If it’s something which is trending, this is a chance for you to get in-demand content out there. Perhaps there are events going on which you can cover, a news related story or trends in your market which you could build a story around, for example, is Brexit affecting the housing market you work in?Create a calendar of upcoming events and occasions (in industry or externally) to provide inspiration for upcoming, timely content.
Brainstorm and bounce ideas around
Often if there is only a relatively small team working on content and ideas become hard to come by, asking the rest of the office or bouncing some ideas off them is a good plan, you all work in the same industry, and sometimes a tiny bit of outsider perspective is all we need to open up a new wave of inspiration. Diversity of thought is key. By exploring outside of traditional content themes, you may strike gold with a unique perspective from someone unexpected!
Introduce a series
A weekly or monthly series will give you focus for some of your blogs. This might mean that you introduce some interviews either of your internal team or clients or an interesting industry body, or it could be a review or podcast of the week. This will limit the amount of thinking you have to do when coming up with your ideas - it’s already half baked if you like.
Use a tool.
There are tools out there to help you get started or get back on the horse when you’re feeling stumped! Try exploring either BuzzSumo or Hubspot, you’ll get limited information with the free versions but it will definitely get some ideas generated and if you feel it’s worth paying to unlock the other tools then you’ll get some much deeper analysis and a higher volume of idea generation!
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