“Content is king” is one of the mottos you often hear in today’s modern world, where content marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful pillars of digital marketing. Creating great content and regularly updating and revamping it can often be a tough task and times will come when you will find yourself completely drained of new ideas. When those times come, don’t despair, just look around for some inspiration and locate the sources that will help you come up with top content ideas once again. So, just where might the much needed inspiration be hiding?
Your Competitors
More often that not, your competitors may well be an excellent source for drawing inspiration, gaining insights, devising strategies and “stealing” ideas for content. Take a look at their website or blog, as well as the titles they use and they sort of questions they answer or address. Do not rush to discard their content if it is low quality or poorly crafted. If you look beyond the surface, the idea hidden behind your competitors’ content may be brilliant and you can well take it up and create something much better with it than the others.
Your Customers
Research and communication forms, as well as messages or discussions and customer questions, may also prove a unique source of inspiration. Besides, the best content is the one that successfully answers customer questions, covering and addressing their own needs. To make the best of your customer feedback, you need to ensure that your customer service department fosters and maintains a close relationship and good contact with all your customers and that is passes on all the information and data yielded from this type of customer relations to your marketing department. The more persistent the questions and queries about a particular service or product that you offer, the greater the need to create corresponding niche content, either in the FAQ section of your website or blog articles and video tutorials. Once this is done, whenever the same or similar query pops up again, all you will need to do is send the relevant link to the interested person.
Members of your team
A mistake often made by marketers is looking for content ideas outside of the actual company. On the contrary, it's often much more likely to find great, imaginative ideas among the members of the business and its employees. So what is it that you have to do? Talk to the people working in the business: vendors, dealers, etc., especially with those who come in direct contact with customers. Ask them to share with you what kind of feedback they hear most often, what trends they predict for the future. Also ask them to identify what they feel the best features of the business are and which are the weak points that need to improve. With all this insight and knowledge you can move on to create great content.
Other Sources in your Field
Here, of course, we do not mean only the sites of your competitors, but also more objective entities such as organizations, institutes, professional associations, etc. which have a strong influence and prestige in your industry. You need to study what such industry agents and stakeholders say, feel and do. In doing so, not only you draw inspiration, but you also ensure that you stay up-to-date with developments in your industry and better serve your customers.
Social Networks
Social networks have made it easy for companies to indulge in self-praise that is often unjustified, but we must not forget that they are also a vital channel of communication for consumer to raise their concerns and air their complaints about the business.
Therefore, it is important to spend time to ascertain what is said about you and your products or services in all major social networks. Very often, customer feedback, especially negative, is a real treasure! Also make sure you know what the best hashtags are, as well as ways to tag your content properly, optimize it for searches to be easily identified. If your content simply exists without attracting attention and drawing interest then it is almost useless and you need to ensure that you always make the best out of your content.
If you feel that propelling your own website to the top through great content is something you still need specialized help and guidance on, then talk to a member of our team today!
