We know firsthand just how intimidating that blank Word document staring back at you can be.  That blinking cursor teasing you, taunting you to come up with something that engages your target audience and acts as a traffic-driving resource.

But with a little research and understanding, you can effectively give your marketing content direction for weeks, months, and even years.

The challenge is identifying how, and also where, you can develop the content and the topics necessary to engage your ideal prospects.

Here’s the good news; we’ve detailed three proven ways that marketers and business owners commonly refer to in order to help provide direction for their marketing content. (To dig even deeper, be sure to check out our free ebook, “How to Be the King of Content Marketing.” 

3 Ways to Identify Content Ideas

1. The Right Keyword Research

Typing some stuff into the HubSpot Keywords tool and then using those top ranking keyword results is obviously not going to get you anywhere if you incorporate them into your content.  There’s just too much competition for those keywords out there, so unless you’re Apple or Nike, you’re hurting your business more than helping by using such a strategy (this is where you’d use long-tail keywords).

What you will discover with the HubSpot Keywords tool or the Google Keywords tool is that you will be able to uncover some untapped and surprisingly related interests by running a simple keyword search.  For example, you can use your keyword tool to look up keywords that are most commonly searched to find content for you site.

If you run a blog about gaming consoles and games, you may find keywords like “PS3” and “XBOX360”, “Halo4” and “Resistance” up there.  But you may be surprised to find that other keywords, like “iPhone apps for running” or  “cheap shoes Boston MA”, are being frequently used to find your content.

So what does this mean to you?  Start producing content that caters to these newly discovered keywords!  You can still keep them relevant to what you site’s about.  Choose your angle and run with it.   Check out our eBook “The Essential Guide For Mastering HubSpot” for more ideas on how you can use HubSpot inbound marketing tools to get great targeted content ideas.

2. Sales and Customer Support

If you have a team of individuals who are regularly interacting with those who engage with your brand, then they can be a great resource for hot content ideas.  Once a week, pull the teams together and ask them things like:

  • If there were any trends in the sort of comments or questions being made
  • What challenges some of the leads and customers faced
  • If anyone would be or could be willing to provide a positive review or case study

Alternatively, you can create an online forum where members from both teams can submit common questions or content ideas as they come up.  It may be a bit difficult at first, but as you continue to build up a strong content culture at your company, you’ll soon find that your sales and support members may even be able to start penning their own articles and blogs for the company website.

3. Check Your Historical Data

Anyone using HubSpot software will be able to quickly and easily pull historical data that’ll show exactly what content topics have been your top performers.  HubSpot’s Page Performance report can export important metrics like performance data, comments, like inbound links and page views to give you a good, clear picture of how well any particular blog post or general topic has performed.

For example, going back to the gamer website example, let’s say that topics about the PS3 have been doing tremendously well.  Now that the new PS4 was announced this week, you’ll likely want to start blogging about that.  If you keep tabs on your historical data, we bet that you’ll find that blogs about the PS3 will begin to decline in performance, and that content about the PS4 and games for that console will start to improve in performance over the next quarter.

In reality, all of this IS kind of like playing a game and has a lot to do with how YOU perform. Although adopting all of the habits of gamers may not be a good idea, the fierce intent, constant analytic mindset, careful timing, and steady perseverance are gamer  attributes that would serve you well and help you succeed at judging what your audience wants.