The Top 10 Ways to Source Content Ideas for Your Business

Every business will at some point face the horrifying reality of being out of content ideas for their blog. 

A lack of foresight and planning can leave you without content to publish. 

But what if we tell you that there’s a workaround for this pressing problem? 

Creating a System or Strategic Workflow is Key

You don’t need to sit down and think of blog topics every time your website has an article scheduled to go up. 

Instead, your writing team can create ideas in focused sprints instead of at the last minute. Add ideas to a backlog so that you have enough topics to last you a couple of months. This allows organizations to work efficiently because you end up investing just a couple of hours gathering content ideas. 

When you sit down to come up with blog topics, make sure you’re creating content that your target audience will actually read and benefit from, not just content promoting your product.

On that note, let’s dive into how your company can churn out blog post ideas and create a database of content that audiences will come to appreciate and love. 

Method 1: Use Online Forums for Inspiration 

Online forums such as Quora and Reddit are always buzzing with questions and discussions on a variety of subjects on the daily. We’re talking about thousands of conversations between strangers who are passionate about a certain subject. 

For example, if you’re selling a software product or service online, simply type in a search query related to your business and watch the magic unfold. You will undoubtedly find conversations and questions based on the popularity of your niche. 

Method 2: Make use of Social Media Spaces

Even if you don’t have a huge following on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can put your social media channels to good use. 

• With Instagram, you can either choose to scroll through comment sections of posts to see what sort of questions or feedback is doing the rounds. 
• Facebook is hugely popular for its varied Facebook groups. People who are often fans of a hobby or a specific product and/or service typically come together and discuss everything regarding it within the group. They end up picking apart the subject, discussing possibilities, what businesses can do to bring about improvement, offer advice, provide reviews - you name it. 
• Twitter is another brilliant online tool for organizations to get ideas from. You can follow hashtags specific to your industry and find topic ideas. Or search for a query related to your product or service and scroll through tweets to see what people are talking about. You can even look at what people are saying about your competition and check if there are any complaints or confusion that you could write about in order to sell your own product.

Method 3: Talk to Your Sales Team 

Your sales team is constantly in touch with prospects and customers. 

Any feedback, concerns, or questions that your customer base has would first be communicated to sales. Since sales teams are often out there doing the leg work, equipping them with a tool such as Letterdrop’s Content Idea Board would go a long way. It lets your sales team add content ideas straight from their email inbox or Slack.

Method 4: Insight From Customer Support Tickets

Customer support tickets can also be a source of inspiration for the writing team. Look for questions that are asked most frequently and address them in your blog instead of just adding them to your website’s FAQ. 

Questions with enough scope can be turned into a full-blown article. For example, at Letterdrop, we have both a help center article and a blog post on referral programs since many customers ask how to run one. Once again, you can have your support team contribute to the content ideas backlog via our email and Slack integration.

Method 5: Advertise Your Business as an Alternative

A great way to let prospects know that you’re the best out there while also ensuring that you have new content ideas is to advertise your brand as an alternative to more established competitors.  

This way, not only are you putting your business on the map, but you’re also listing out the reasons as to why they should choose you instead of your competition. 

Method 6: Deliver the latest Industry News

Did you know that you can lean into the excitement around a topic by using Google Trends? Understand which current events that are relevant to your target audience are spiking in search volume and use it to your advantage by covering the event as soon as it takes place. 

Method 7: Make Interviewing Customers a Habit

By interviewing satisfied customers and making case studies out of them, you’re hitting two birds with one stone. Firstly, you get to advertise your business and tell your audience about how your product has shaped a customer’s experience and so forth. 

All you need to do is prepare a list of questions to ask a happy customer before you decide to interview them and write about it in a case study format. 

Method 8: Speak With Your Employees 

A brilliant way of engaging future candidates into your company as well as the source of an ingenious article for your company’s blog is by Interviewing your employees. You can ask them questions related to what they’ve learned and experienced from the industry they’re working in, what advice they would have to give to professionals who are vying for similar positions, etc. 

Method 9: Make Keyword Research Tools Your Friend

Keyword research tools allow businesses to come up with a plethora of blog post ideas. Search terms will be ranked according to search volume, popularity, and whether there’s a buzz around it. Letterdrop automatically pulls suggested keywords, search volume, and competition for any topic idea you add to your backlog so you can prioritize content ideas easily.

Method 10: Utilize Company Stories to Advertise Your Brand

Audiences always appreciate a company’s back story. Readers are eager to know how a business was formed, who were the people involved, the challenges they overcame, how the company grew to its current number of employees and customers, and so on. 

There’s plenty to write about, once you get started along this vein. 

Wrapping Up

Content ideas are abundant. Businesses just need to find creative ways to come up with them. We’ve listed the top ones for you that should help you build a large idea backlog.

Focus on building a system so that you have an idea backlog that you can always source from. At Letterdrop, our content marketing tools are built to make this as easy as possible for you. You can discover new ways to create content and build successful content marketing campaigns.

Watch this space for more content marketing-related topics. Until next time!