Content is essential for any business as it influences a reader’s decision to buy or not to buy a product. It helps in building brand awareness that ultimately leads to the growth of business in terms of higher sales. According to Cision, 70 percent of internet users prefer to learn about your products and services through content rather than traditional advertisements. Great content can drive real-life sales and grow your business, but what if you have not planned your content ideas?
Challenges Faced by Marketers and Business Owners
Here are specific problems that marketers and business owners face while looking for content ideas:
• Insufficient resources and lesser time are one of the most significant issues that businesses face. It takes skill, time, and effort on your part to produce quality content.
• Another possible issue that marketers face is increasing competition. It escalates the audience’s attention and heightens their expectation. It keeps you under high pressure to deliver quality content frequently.
• The growing interest in paid promotion is another problem that marketers are facing. Relying solely on organic promotion is a big mistake in today’s landscape. You may have to make more investment to make sure that your content reaches more people.
What are the consequences of not planning your content correctly?
• Unplanned content may reflect aimless advertising and marketing efforts, which will never reap profitable results for your business organization. It would not help you determine your target audience and find a better approach towards engaging them.
• You cannot chart your progress with unplanned content. It never aids in comparison as to what type of content draws higher traffic. If you don’t have a properly planned schedule for content, you would not be able to assess which kind of content your leads and customers are coming from.
• When it comes to paid promotions, a comprehensive content schedule would include a budget. Here you decide which type of content requires more attention in terms of money. If you don’t have a content plan, then, you would randomly place ads and run commercials over different platforms like websites, social media channels.
• The worst scenario that your company can face due to unplanned content is low traffic as you run out of content to post every day. If you are not able to post content regularly, it fails to engage the existing customers and attract new ones. And, if your customers don’t get to see your content, then it fails to capture their mind, and we all should know that once anything is out of sight, it is out of mind.
How Can You Find Better Content Ideas?
1. Newspaper and magazines
These are quite basic and have ample opinions and perspectives that a general audience would carry. It also gives you great content for analytical reading as the material is written in an old classic style that gives you in-depth coverage on any topic. Sourcing your content from local newspapers and magazines gives you ideas that you might not get in any story or article.
2. Google trends
Google trends is also a great option as you would notice a broad spectrum of topics and suggestions when you type any keyword. It gives you ample idea of what is on people’s minds and what they are looking for.
3. Social channels
Every minute there is a new update on social media channels, and you get great content ideas from there. It would be best if you searched for updates that have been most successful in 24 hours. It gives you a hint as to what people care about and can extend those ideas into your content.
4. Popular Blogs & Competitor’s Blogs
If you are looking for new content ideas, then, why to go so far, just look at your competitor’s blog posts. Also, go through some popular blogs in your niche, it would give you content topics that you need for your blog. For instance, you run a travel-related blog, find popular blogs that benefit from travel related articles, increase your knowledge, and take advantage.
5. Quora
Another popular source of trending content topics is Quora. Here you find frequently asked common questions that give you a sneak peek of what people are thinking in the current scenario. You can take these questions as your content topics and provide them with a better solution.
6. Google search suggestions
Google has an extensive knowledge baseline that you can benefit from. When you search for any topic on Google, just add some question phrases. It includes what, why, or how to and look at the popular phrases that pop up. That’s the quick way to get content topic ideas.
7. BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo is a social sharing giant that helps you ideate content with a little effort. Make use of two tools that come within Buzzsumo: Topic Explorer and Content Explorer.
Topic explorer has the content suggestion feature that saves your time and highlights topics and popular content.
Content explorer is one where you can type a website and get a list of popular content based on social sharing. Moreover, it gives you room to make improvements in the content structure of your website.
8. Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, go to “behavior”, and search terms to locate your keywords. The reports of Google Analytics will help you improve the navigation of your site that enables you to find gaps in content that you can fix to make content topics.
9. Topic generation channels/platforms
There are many content generation channels and platforms that help you discover top-performing content for your website. It ensures better investment in producing content that has the potential to drive maximum traffic. It includes Social Animal, Hubspot, StoryChief, GetSocial Outbrain, and many more.
10.Create topic lists in bunches
Another way to generate better content topic ideas is to do a comprehensive search. This way, you can extend the tiny bits of information into a whole new content topic. For instance, you search what are the benefits of gardening then, make sure you also search for issues such as how to do gardening, how gardening can uplift your mood, and so on.
11. Use the five questions law
Use the 5 question law while searching for content topics. Always go for a question format that includes the initials such as what, where, why, when, and how. Asking questions on Google gets you tons of fantastic content ideas that serve vast knowledge to the readers and has the potential to draw higher traffic.
Benefits of Planning Your Content
A content strategy helps you allocate your time, money, efforts, and knowledge efficiently. It helps you find the scope of improvement where you can make changes in your content to reinforce your campaigns. All this optimizes your workflow in a significant way that offers a comprehensive idea of analyzing your content approach, which helps improve your results in a longer run.
If you lack a proper content strategy, you may lose on the big chunk of money. You all might be knowing about Netflix, it could lose much of its value to users as the competition is heating up day by day. It spent $100 million to keep the show named “Friends” on its surface which is more than triple its previous licensing fee of $30 million.
It is getting hard for Netflix to keep up with its rising expenses and the reason behind this is the lack of proper content strategy. It is failing in its original content strategy and has witnessed a fall number of subscribers. Moreover, the huge spendings is also not doing much to add new subscribers. This indicates that Netflix is throwing more money to curb the issue rather than acknowledging the limitations of their content strategy. And, this is going to pose a serious issue in the near future.
Now, you can understand the importance of planning your content, if you don’t you may have to face similar consequences. It is crucial to have a content strategy as it has the main role in the whole process from ideation to execution.
How can we help?
Content is the king, and it is certainly true in every aspect. Creating exceptional content that engages the audiences is a bit tricky. So, next time you find yourself completely lost with the content ideas, these points would help you to shape a better content planner for your business.
Well, what are you doing to get new content ideas and improve your online presence? We can help you in ideating content that has the potential to engage readers and build authority online. If you need our help, feel free to contact us.
