The reality is we all get the vital role of content and why it matters. But when it comes to content ideas, that’s where the real grind starts. Sound familiar? 

Today, we’re tackling a marketer’s classic headache: coming up with fresh content ideas. Ever felt that struggle? Well, get ready. We’re diving into the art of content brainstorming, the secrets to creating content that accurately represents your brand, delivers your message and clicks with your audience.

But first, let’s quickly discuss the importance of content marketing in this day and age and how its relevance is increasing day by day. 

The State Of Content Marketing For Businesses 

So, with things shifting rapidly in the digital marketing landscape, where does content marketing stand today? Knowing that might be a good place to begin with. 

• Marketers have various objectives when it comes to content marketing. About 80% prioritize content marketing to build brand awareness, the others find content marketing to be important to build credibility and educate their audience. In summary, content marketing is not a one-size-fits-all, and therefore businesses need different content ideas and different ways to execute them. 
• Nearly 42% of consumers are reportedly annoyed by content that’s not personalized to them. Which means that understanding your customers and fine-tuning your content ideas to strike the right chord is important – now more than ever. 
• Today, about 90% of marketers use social media as a go-to platform for content distribution. And it’s an evident fact that on social media, you cannot succeed with just one format or just simple ideas. You need the best content ideas in the most visually engaging formats to deliver variety and consistently keep your audience engaged. 

Having laid down a few quick facts for you to ponder over, let’s now talk about working on content ideas – whether it be text-based content like the copy of your ad or a caption for your social media post, or visual content like images and videos. 

7 Tips to Uncover Captivating Content Ideas 

1. Use a brainstorming technique 

There are several actually – brainwriting, brain-netting, 5-whys analysis, and so on. These are all handy ways to stay organized while gathering a pool of content ideas. These techniques particularly come in handy when collaborating as a team rather than working solo. 

Here’s a quick run-down of some of the well-known brainstorming techniques. 

• Brainwriting: The process involves brainstorming in silence, as a group. Once the requirements are laid out, every person in the group silently jots down ideas that come to their mind. The people in the group then review the ideas from the others, add their comments, and add more ideas to the list. In the end, there is a bulk of ideas along with the satisfaction of involving everyone in the team. 
• Brain-netting: Similar to the brainwriting process this one involves collating ideas from the team but in a virtual setting. This is suitable for remote teams working on their content strategies. 
• Starbursting: This technique involves coming up with an idea and analyzing the who, what, when, where and how of it. Therefore, it helps better refine the idea and align it with the goals. Here there are a few detailed ideas rather than several brief ones as with the previous techniques. 
• Mind Mapping: This technique also begins with an idea but rather than confining the analysis within a star pattern with 6 questions, this one focuses on branching out and finding variables from related ideas. 
• Reverse Brainstorming: This works when there is already a problem to address. The idea here is to find solutions even unconventional and creative ones. 

2. Lookout for ideas on discussion forums 

Reddit, Quora, Discord – there are plenty of online forums where brands can monitor and reach out to niche audiences. And these are great spots to find out what your audiences are looking for. From burning questions in their minds to the kinds of factors that affect their purchase decision, you can learn a lot about them on online discussion forums. These details can be pretty valuable when coming up with content ideas. 

But then, remember, when you scour for ideas, it’s best to engage in discussions and ask questions. That’s when you can strike up a conversation and also eventually lead your audience to your content. 

What are some of the benefits of looking for content ideas on discussion forums? On such forums, people are often discussing current trends and requirements. Therefore, if you are finding it difficult to keep up with the changing interests of your audience, these forums might provide you with a goldmine of insights. 

To take this idea up one notch, you can also create a dedicated forum for your audience to communicate with your brand as well as with other customers in the niche. This is particularly useful when you have a niche-focused brand and can create a community of people with shared interests. 

Take Sephora for example – their target audience will be people interested in beauty and skincare. So, their Beauty Insider Community is a buzzing spot where their customers as well as beauty enthusiasts discuss their doubts, tips, and products in the segment. 

The best part about managing such forums is that you only need to worry about content moderation here. Then upon monitoring the discussions happening on the forum you know exactly what type of content feels more intimate and relevant to your target audience. 

3. Monitor your comments sections 

This applies to all channels that allow 2-way communication like blogs and social media. Often, customers who have questions about your product or feedback about your content reach out via the comment section in your blogs and social media posts. 

On keeping a watch, you will be able to identify recurring themes or questions that even indicate the possibility of a wider audience group to target. On observing this and responding to your audience’s opinions and thoughts immediately, you not only have great content ideas but also have a better shot at conversions. 

So, where can these comments be useful? You can gather the common questions that people have and create FAQ videos or even optimize your content strategy based on the feedback and thoughts shared. 

A couple of years ago, Instagram announced an update that lets you create Reels to respond to comments. This shows the significance of the comment section for brands and creators looking for content ideas. Hence the feature is pretty beneficial for brands to create visual replies and demonstrate their products or services based on the questions their customers have. 

We love the communities that creators have built on Instagram. 😊❤️

That’s why we’re excited to launch Reels Visual Replies, a new feature to interact with your audience. You can now reply to comments with Reels and the comment will pop up as a sticker. pic.twitter.com/dA3qj1lAwE

— Instagram (@instagram) December 10, 2021

Insights like these are particularly handy to gather feedback on your designs. Sometimes if your post idea is great but the visuals do not do justice to the message or if there is something that’s not clear in your design, customers might talk about it in the comments. So scrutinizing your comment section also helps understand whether your visual content achieves the intended impact. 

4. Use topic research tools 

There is a plethora of tools available to do topic research online. In fact, some of these tools are handy in analyzing content gaps and even providing you with instant content ideas based on trending topics, keywords, and more. 

Use these online tools to identify high-ranking keywords. But focus on the slightly less competitive ones first. This lets you boost your search ranking and get discovered. Educational blogs are pretty effective for this. But to do this, use the same tool to make a list of commonly searched questions around that keyword. And have a good list of related keywords to include as well. This gives you a good starting point. A blog built on this is highly likely to put your website out there in the first few pages of Search results. 

A few good options to explore are:

• Semrush’s Topic Research Tool 
• Ahrefs Content Explorer 
• BuzzSumo Content Discovery Tool 
• QuestionDB
• AnswerThePublic 
• Google Trendz
• Google Keyword Planner 

These tools are also useful in identifying content gaps, the gaps between what customers are looking for and the answers they find on the internet. In other words, if there are some questions that customers are asking a lot but there are not many credible and resourceful content pieces for the same, that’s your opportunity. You can also create video content that answers these questions and add them to your website and social media! 

5. Sign up for your industry newsletters 

Industry newsletters are a great way to stay in the now. And they are also great reserves of content ideas within your niche. Identify the most authoritative and productive newsletters within your industry and sign up to get timely updates on industry trends and buzzing discussions. These are the kinds of topics that you can easily understand and therefore creating content about these topics would be easy too. 

Moreover, these newsletters bring you fresh perspectives through thoughts shared by industry experts and thought leaders as well. This way, you can come up with conversational content ideas even without having to scour through the internet. 

Through such an informed content creation process, you are also letting customers know that you are up-to-date with the happenings in your industry and therefore strengthen your brand’s credibility. 

Take The Hustle for example. It is a great newsletter for anyone who wishes to stay updated with tech and business news. If you are looking for more niche-specific ones, then there are plenty – like The Pretty Little Marketer Newsletter. The below image shows a snapshot of what their newsletter looks like. 

As can be seen, there’s a quick summary of some of the trending discussions on brand campaigns and ads. If you are a business providing marketing-related services, then creating content based on such current happenings within your industry gives you a great boost and visibility. 

Watching these discussions and industry updates also gives you a heads-up if there are some visual trends evolving in your industry. With this information, you can fine-tune your design strategy so as to keep up with trends, especially on visual-driven platforms like social media. 

6. Ask your customers 

The best content ideas evidently come from the people you are creating the content for, your customers. But how can you do that? 

Surveys are age-old techniques for gathering customer insights and fresh perspectives. They not only help businesses refine their processes but also help them identify potential high-performing content ideas. You can design a custom landing page displayed with an exit pop-up. Or you could leverage email surveys. 

The other most useful format will be – interactive posts like polls on social media. On platforms like LinkedIn and X polls are effective. The below post on X was from a popular Uganda-based furniture manufacturer. Polls like this one boost engagement and also help brands understand what types of content their customers are actually looking out for. 

AMA (ask me anything) sessions on Instagram are the other best options for collecting questions from customers and thus compiling content ideas. This can be used in many ways. In the below post, Glossier used this option to build buzz and create awareness before a product launch. This was followed by a series of Story posts that answered the questions and showcased the product as well. 

Duolingo used this option to enhance engagement during Women’s History Month. They followed the below post with a series of video responses from their female employees. Executions like this one help you create content to authentically celebrate big holidays and also make more meaningful connections with your audience. 

KIMP Tip: Creating a strongly recognizable theme helps improve the visual effectiveness of such campaigns that call for a series of designs. Like the series of Story Posts in the above examples. 

Need help designing consistent-looking visuals for social media? Get KIMP! 

7. Learn from your competitors 

One of the best ways to find out what works in your industry is to see what is working – the tried and tested ideas that your competitor seems to be having good success with. Competitor analysis involves monitoring your competitor’s websites as well as social media. 

Doing this helps you in two ways – one is to verify if you are on the right track – especially when you check a competitor who has been in the game for a long time. And the second is that you can assemble useful content ideas based on the blogs and posts that seem to be doing well for your competitors. Because their target audience overlaps with yours, a good response to their content means that your target audience likes and engages with them. 

But for this approach to work, here are a few things to remember: 

• Go beyond the surface – it’s not just about the topics that your competitor discusses. It is about the tone of their voice, the emotions in their designs, their visual themes, and how they are related to their brand identity. All of these nuances help you understand beyond the likes, shares, and comments. 
• Look for the comments on their posts. Are there any flaws or gaps that customers seem to be discussing often? These gaps could be unique opportunities for you to create valuable content. 
• Use the success and failure of your competitor to understand what content strategies work and what doesn’t! 

Up Your Visual Content Game With KIMP 

Visuals are crucial components in content marketing. On-point visuals ensure that your content ideas take shape as intended. That’s where an unlimited design company like KIMP comes into the picture. Because an unlimited design service can take care of an endless number of designs for your business. Besides, a dedicated design team helps you create consistent-looking visuals to accurately and effectively execute your content ideas. And finally, you also get to make unlimited revisions so as to perfect your designs! 

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