One of the fundamental online marketing techniques is to gain meaningful traffic to your website and boost your social media presence through great content. Many of us need a little help to come up new innovative ideas for content and luckily there are lots of tools we can use to draw inspiration. In this article we’ll look at a number of ideas you can explore for those times when you get stuck.
1. Trending analysis
Your first stop should be to check out what is trending. This shows you what people are searching for in real-time. Google Trends is one of the most useful tools for this as its results are directly related regular web searches but most social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have them too.
luckily there are lots of tools we can use to draw inspiration
2. Idea generators
Another genre of tools worth checking out are the so-called content generators. There are lots of them, all targeting slightly different aspects of idea generation.
- for generating keywords try Google Adwords
- for generating topics try Hubstop’s Blog Topic Generator
- and for generating titles try Portent’s Content Idea Generator
Looking at what your competitors are writing about will give you an advantage
3. Social discussion platforms
Similar to social networks are platforms dedicated to sharing and discussion. Two of the biggest are Quora, which is a question and answer platform, and Reddit which describes itself as a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website.
4. Your competitors
One of the best place to get ideas is to see what your competitors are writing about. This gives you an advantage because you can be inspired by their ideas and improve on them, perhaps delivering a new spin on it. In this fast-changing world of digital marketing you need to regularly invest time looking at what is trending within your sphere of interest.
5. Ask your customers
As well as looking at what your competitors are doing you should also consider your own customers. If they’ve already bought from you or subscribed to your services they are valuable assets to your business. Consider asking them to answer a quick survey asking about why they chose you, what they liked, and what they didn’t like. Prompt them for ideas on other products or services they might be interested in. This also shows them that they are important to you and that you genuinely care about what they think. That helps to cement loyalty!
6. Speak to your employees
If you are big enough to employ staff you have one of the greatest assets with you already. Employees have a direct interest in seeing their workplace succeed and grow. They’ll also understand the business they work in and have a number of ideas of their own. Asking them for ideas about new opportunities and streamlining existing ideas is a great way to help them be creative and feel like a valued member of the team!
7. Collaboration with others
You’ve heard the saying “two minds are better than one”. Well, it’s true in terms of content generation too. Working with another leader in your industry can help boost the brand image and traffic for both of you. You could run challenges together, co-author content or even produce content for one another as guests.
8. Utilising analytics
Finally, you can make use of tools to analyse the traffic generated by your online. For example, Google Search Console can provide important data about what keywords people are using to find your content. You can then use that directly in Google’s search engine to make use of Google Suggest to see what their powerful algorithms suggest. In this way you can simply explore parallel ideas closely related to what is already working for you.
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