Coming up with content is ideas is surprisingly easy . . . for the first few months.
After that queue of brilliant, strategic ideas runs dry, what do you do? You know you need to put out engaging content on a consistent basis, but how do you keep great ideas streaming in without letting the quality slip?
I interviewed 13 marketing leaders to find out how their teams are discovering high-quality content ideas.
There were a lot of answers: some lean heavily on data, some on case studies, some on customers, some on sales, and some on industry news. This should be encouraging; you have lots of options for figuring out what works for your brand.
Check out the leaders’ responses below: I guarantee they’ll spark some ideas for keeping your content queue full.
1) Abe Cohen, VP of Software Marketing at Kaufman Hall
For Kaufman Hall, content ideation is collaborative. Internally, it’s a collaboration with the sales, pre-sales, industry, and product teams.
Another way they come up with content is via direct research. Abe strongly believes in market research. His team conducts multiple ongoing surveys with their target audience to give them data throughout the year.
Other idea sources are competitive analyses and third-party research.
2) Adam Fridman, Founder of Mabbly
The Mabbly content team brainstorms current trends and examines what is happening within their own company to determine topics to write.
For example, if they are discussing the possibilities of artificial intelligence in technology, they may decide to write a piece of thought leadership on the impact AI will have on digital marketing.
They also try to use real-life case studies based on their interaction with clients to help them brainstorm blog topics.
3) Allen Nance, CMO at Emarsys
Content ideation is particularly important for Emarsys: they have to fuel ideas for a daily blog strategy. Allen shared three resources they use: two objective and one subjective.
The first objective resource is Google AdWords. Even if you don’t buy Google AdWords, you can create an account. There’s a feature inside Google AdWords that will give you search volume of a particular topic or keyword.
Allen’s team was having an internal debate on whether to use “cross-channel” or “omni-channel.” How did they settle it? We went and saw that “Omni-channel” gets searched for five times more than “cross-channel.”
Their other objective resource is a set of online questioning tools. Those tools help them look at what digital marketing questions are being asked on Q&A systems.
The subjective resource is having a theme. In 2017, they have a content theme at 50,000 feet; then at 20,000 feet it will be broken down by quarters; then by month.
The content theme for the year gets two sentences to describe it. For the quarter, one sentence. For the month, one word. That’s the framework Allen’s given to his team.
“It’s also fun,” he says.
4) Ashley Zeckman, Director of Agency Marketing at TopRank Marketing
Coming up with content ideas is a collaborative effort for TopRank.
They want to get all heads and stakeholders in the room when working on content strategy and planning: account managers, content leads, social and influencer team members, and their SEO team . . . it takes all of them to create stellar content.
They do, however, have a main content team that focuses on the quarter or year, trying to decide how to create different types of content that all align with a central theme and idea.
5) Carl Tsukahara, Chief Marketing Officer at Birst
“The challenge,” Carl told me, “is that we’re in a noisy category.”
The Birst team has their own viewpoint about the market and where their product fits relative to others. So they try to come up with content in which the differentiating pieces of Birst stand out.
A lot of content is the same. As Carl’s team comes up with content ideas, they focus on helping the prospect understand the unique situations where Birst can help. “If your current circumstances fall under [insert a certain category], we can help.”
6) Janet Matsuda, Chief Marketing Officer at Nimble Storage
There are a lot of ways to come up with content ideas. Janet encourages her team to scan what’s going on in different organizations, whether competitive or in different industries.
Then everyone brings their ideas. They get together face-to-face as a team three times a year to share ideas and brainstorm. They end up testing a lot of things, and they don’t all work—which is completely OK.
7) Jenn Day, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Tableau Software
Tableau taps into its community for content ideas. They have a very active community, so they examine what that community is talking about.
They have also given a group of people the title of “Tableau Zen Master.” These are Tableau users that are thought leaders in the market and invaluable sources of ideas.
Beyond that, Jenn looks across the business in general and at what’s happening in the social world. She also goes back to look at what’s performed best.
There are also some anchor pieces of content that they use in their evergreen program. There are about five pieces of content that perform well year over year, so they put them on a regular refresh schedule, still based around a basic topic, but making sure the message is fresh and relevant.
8) Jennifer Hetherington, SVP Marketing at TSheets
It helps to have the right people in the room. Specifically, you need people who are really creative.
Jennifer likes to say, “People who have been around the business block are people who understand business, but they can put that business in a context for you.”
News junkies are great people to have on your strategy team. If there’s a law that affects your industry, or anything with a looming deadline, you want to be on top of addressing it.
The TSheets team also gets great ideas from their data. For example, they surveyed employees who tracked their time with TSheets about their fears in tracking their time that way. It was great content.
9) Kara Walsh, CMO at The Muse
Some of The Muse’s content ideas stem from their unique selling proposition. For example, they wrote two popular ebooks: “Employer Branding 101” and one on attracting millennials.
Those ebooks address the essence of their industry’s news. And as Kara’s colleagues participate in sales calls, go to conferences, and share industry news, all of those are fodder for content ideas.
10) Kim Albrecht, VP of Corporate Marketing at Nintex
Right now, a lot of Nintex content is generated as trends arise and the voices of customers and prospects are heard.
Kim shared a recent example of creating content for financial services. She started looking at the people who had purchased Nintex products in the last month. She saw a high number of financial services companies purchasing Nintex’s solution. Interesting.
In that situation, she said, “If we've already got a fair number of customers coming, there are probably a lot more out there that we could be looking at. They've got some common interest.” So they created content accordingly.
They also develop a lot of content from use cases. People want to know what they do with the Nintex tool set. It's not a prepackaged application: you can basically build whatever business process you want.
“You have to prompt them,” Kim says. “So, you want to show them a spectrum of easy to complex. A lot of our content generation lately has been trying to help define that spectrum of things you could automate. It gets people to think.”
11) Kraig Swensrud, Chief Marketing Officer at Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor has five content idea sources in total:
- Feedback from the sales organization.
- Feedback from customers. They have hundreds of thousands of customer tickets worked every year. From those conversations they gather a lot of information about what people want to hear about.
- Specific technology advancements. These might be related to the Campaign Monitor product. The content includes tips, tricks, and how to’s.
- Industry hot topics. An example of this is holiday campaigns for retailers. In the time leading up to the holidays, people want to talk about gearing up for their email campaigns, so the Campaign Monitor content reflects that surge.
- Forward thinking. Finally, there are specific campaigns that Kraig’s team wants to run in order to shape the entire industry and the future of their technology. A great example of that is a brand-new product they announced in the category of marketing automation. They want to produce content around their marketing automation because the evolution of their industry is also the evolution of their company.
12) Mick Hollison, Chief Marketing Officer at Cloudera
The Cloudera content ideation process involves not just their demand generation team, but also their creative team. They are adamant that everything stays in keeping with the overall brand characteristics that they’re attempting to portray.
So they begin with a theme: “What’s the core message we’re trying to convey?”
They boil that message into into five “key plays,” basically end-to-end go-to-market motions.
If a piece of content, story, or event doesn’t line up to one of those five core go-to-market motions, Mick questions whether they should do it at all.
That very much applies to content: if it doesn’t help them move their agenda forward against one of those key plays, then they don’t put the time and energy into building it.
13) Utpal Bhatt, VP of Global Marketing at Neo Technology
The content creation process is driven by Neo’s personas—and an understanding of each.
Uptal tries to understand what kinds of questions the personas will have during various stages of their involvement with Neo, the whole consumption chain. Do they have assets that they can offer to help people flow through the various stages?
They also look at the biggest trends in their industry. Can they be associated with a stack that is gaining in popularity?
One of the most powerful things they’ve done over the course of last year is a concept they call “data journalism.” They have proactively worked with organizations like the ICIJ, and with journalists who are interested in analyzing data sets, then creating stories out of them. One of the results of those efforts was that ICIJ ended up analyzing the Panama Papers and using Neo4j to do it.
That just gave Neo incredible publicity. They had over 100 different articles placed within a span of about four weeks or so, all talking about Neo and Panama Papers.
Conclusion
Even if you have an airtight content creation process in place, you still need ideas to fuel the engine.
Luckily, there are all sorts of potential content sources out there—and some don’t even take much creativity. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking your sales team what they’re hearing, or asking your customers about their biggest pain points.
Content ideas are everywhere. You just have to figure out the best way to bottle them up and feed them to the market that you want to serve.
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James Carbary is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, a podcast agency for B2B brands. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post & Business Insider, and he also co-hosts a top-ranked podcast according to Forbes: B2B Growth. When James isn’t interviewing the smartest minds in B2B marketing, he’s drinking Cherry Coke Zero, eating Swedish Fish, and hanging out with the most incredible woman on the planet (who he somehow talked into marrying him).