Find your own Fountain: Content Marketing Ideas

Digital Technology

Would you believe me if I said there was a fountain of ideas flowing freely all around you? All you have have to do is grab a bucket, start capturing them, and put them to good use in your content marketing strategy!

Ask any small business owner what obstacles stand in the way of their content marketing, and you will usually hear one of these responses:

• I don’t have any time!
• I don’t have any ideas!

We’ve already looked at various ways to streamline the process to save you both time and energy, in an earlier post here on the WNA blog: “Suffering from Content Marketing Overwhelm?”.

So today let’s look at how to get those ideas flowing everyday, ready for you to capture them.

7 Tips and Tools for Creating Content Ideas

1. Google Alerts – If you haven’t already, set up a Google Alert for important words in your industry. This way you will be notified of the latest news and developments and you can write your own blog, social media update, or other piece of content about them.
2. Answer the Public – When you enter your product or service in this useful site, it will generate dozens of questions people ask about them. Your answers can form the basis of a great new piece of content, such as an ebook or video!
3. Calendar of Events – Are there any anniversaries or events that are important to your business? Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day are obvious dates that inspire content. But you can always spread the net wider by checking out the Our Community calendar, or the Australian government website for health events for any relevant events that you could potentially align with.
4. Questions – What questions do your customers ask? Recently one of my clients emailed me with a question about Voice Search. The reply I sent became the basis of the next post on my business website about how voice search is impacting the way we do SEO.
5. Keep a Swipe File – Make a point of collecting the inspiring pictures, articles, graphs, etc which are relevant to your business or industry, ready for you to access when it’s time to create content.
6. Case Studies – If your business has made a real difference to a client, ask their permission to share their story or a testimonial – like this real life success story from my own business blog.
7. Back to Basics – Often, content marketing is about educating your audience about your product or service. Consider creating a step-by-step guide (video, ebook, or blog post) for example. Or how about a series of social media updates to demystify the most common jargon or acronyms in your industry – your clients will love you for it!

I hope by now you have realised that ideas really are all around you – it’s just a matter of capturing them and putting them to work for you.