We’ve all heard the saying “content is king” and it seems to be true. Throughout the past few years, content marketing has become a focal point of many organizations’ inbound marketing strategies. Content marketing is an effective way to draw your customers/clients to your website by providing valuable, interesting and most of all relevant content for them to read and learn from.
Effective content marketing can increase website traffic, boost sales and the company’s overall digital presence. Seems easy enough right? If you’ve managed or been involved in content creation, you know that sometimes, you’re just out of ideas. Whether it be strict regulations about the content you write or just a classic case of writer’s block, how do you create content if you can’t even come up with a topic? Here are 6 ways to help you develop content when you’re stuck in a rut:
1. Use your resources! Ask friends, family, social networks, colleagues, managers or anyone you can for content ideas. Often times, people not involved in the content development can give a fresh perspective and offer insight as to what people want to learn about your industry.
2. Curate content. If you don’t already curate content, get going! Content curation has become a widespread tactic in digital marketing strategies. By amassing content from numerous websites you’ll get a wide variety of content. Throughout your content curation you may also develop some of your own content topics as well.
3. Check out what your competition is writing about. In no way is this suggesting plagiarism, but browsing their content strategy and topics can spark ideas for your content topics.
4. Invite a guest writer. Depending on what industry you’re in, inviting someone to write a guest post is a great way to introduce fresh and exciting content to your audience. The guest post is a new voice that your audience hasn’t heard from yet and can shake things up if you’re in a rut.
5. Ask questions. If you’re flat out of any idea and none of the above 4 work for you, ask yourself as many questions as you can. What does my audience care about? What have I not written about yet? Has anything newsworthy happened at my company? Any success stories to share? Ask yourself questions about your audience, industry and company, then try and answer that question with content.
6. Use what you already have. Look back through your old blogs, press releases, interviews, or any existing content and see if there are any topics you could expand upon or write a follow-up piece to.
If you’re already a master of content and have fresh ideas for the next step in your career, check out our current marketing and creative job openings and connect with us today!
