Yousuf Rafi
Whether you are a digital marketer, a small business owner, content marketer,social media expert or a blogger,at one time or another you have likely writhed at night, riddled with a content conundrum. In this digital age, consumers demand updated information to stay up to date and meet their needs. To keep your audience updated and engaged, your brand needs to create meaningful, top-notch, and engaging content.
Producing valuable content can help you attract more and new customers while keeping the existing ones engaged. But coming up with fresh, new ideas, that haven’t already been used anywhere else can be tricky, especially if your products or services are highly competitive.
Producing great content ideas takes a lot of time, practice, efforts and experimentation. It is an in-depth process that requires detailed knowledge about your brand, as well as a willingness to look for new methods, latest tools,and inspirational sources so that you can bring your content to life.
Here are a few easy and effective tips to revive your content marketing game in 2018 and create out-of-the-box and awesome content ideas to leave your readers in awe:
Use Instagram
In order to figure out what type of content is resonating with your target group, it is advised to find and follow up on the most popular hashtags within your community. You can identify top industry influences and thought leaders in a particular niche and then start looking for the hashtags these influences are using. Clicking on those tags will give you the most famous content items that you can use as a source of inspiration for your own blog or content marketing campaign. Instagram now allows you to follow hashtags, making it easier for brands to track what type of content is faring well with different audiences.
Have a look at this post, and see how Toms used behind-the-scenes videos to connect with their followers.
Use Quora
Quora is a popular Q & A site that empowers people to ask questions and glean unique insights and quality answers. In essence, it’s a great place to share and gain knowledge. You can quickly skim through Quora to stumble upon the latest questions that are related to your industry. You can leverage“top stories”, “trending” and “questions” to garner a deeper insight on queries pertaining to your niche. You can even write a post to solve any real-life problems and dilemmas that your target audience might be bugged with.
Get Yourself on Pinterest
If you haven’t already used Pinterest to post your visual content, it’s high time to start testing out the waters. If you are a web design agency, you can post fonts to textures, book covers, film posters, abstract art, latest graphic design trends, quotes and anything else that draws the attention of your audience. Pinterest is brimming with amazing photos and inspirational quotes that can definitely spark your creativity.
If truth be told, it is an amazing hunting ground for creative ideas that you can use for creating your next blog post. Find out the type of content that people are re-pinning and commenting on, and jump on the ideas for your next content marketing campaign.
Stay Fresh with Twitter
You can use Twitter to generate exceptional content ideas and regularly follow up to see what people are tweeting about. There area flood of ideas coming out every fraction of a second, regardless of your industry. Find out keywords, topics,and questions related to your industry. Use the Twitter search option by probing keywords and hashtags and you will get the desired results pertaining to them. You can simply check what is trending on Twitter,and if the trend relates to your industry, what’s stopping you from capitalizing on it.
Create Video Content
Needless to say, people can never get enough of this medium and want to see more video content, especially short, informative videos that solve a problem or answer a question. If you provide your audience with valuable content in the form of videos that have a propensity to help them solve their real-life problems, you will soon become an authority in your field.
Record a screen cast demo video showing your audience how your products can improve their lives. Create a thank you video for your customers, film short testimonials from real customers, or simply create an informational video showing your audience how to perform a specific function of your tool/product.
You can also turn your previous blog posts into how-to videos. In addition, you can inform your audience about your company’s mission and values by using the power of video storytelling. Creating more video content can also broaden your brand reach, since you can connect with a host of new audience across myriad platforms such as blogs, YouTube, social media and search engines.
If you consider Asana, this knowledge-intensive and easy to digest video has wonderfully explained the features of their product to help out their customers.
Use ‘Answer the Public’
Answer the Public is a great tool that aggregates data from search engines, such as Google and Bing, and identifies important queries being searched around any given topic. All you need is to enter a topic or a brand and it gives a collection of related useful terms to help you come up with a detailed post.
Survey Your Users
To find out what ticks your audience, you can use Survey Monkey to ask a question on Facebook and Twitter. Invite your users to reply and confide in you the problems that they are facing and what questions they have in their minds. When you engage with your readers, it makes it easier for you to create content that is readable and shareable.
Your Turn!
Creating an endless supply of fresh and unique content is a tough nut to crack. However, content creators can produce interesting and fresh content by following the above-mentioned content generating ideas. So,are you ready to come up with some awesome, valuable content to improve your content marketing efforts in 2018 and to better connect with your audience?
Joe Clark
Mohammad Ali
Ashad Rehman