The importance of quality content within a company’s marketing strategy is no longer in question. It is a growth generator that allows to attract visitors without resorting to aggressive advertising that has shown its limits. However, one of the challenges faced by almost all companies that own a website is the difficulty to constantly find interesting content (blog article topics, social network posts…). They want to satisfy their audience’s needs and inspire them to action. This is even more complex, as the company has to combine this with the many daily tasks needed to keep the business running smoothly and retain existing customers. In this comprehensive guide, Invicta provides practical advice on how to successfully implement this vital step for your digital growth. We’ve also listed some tools to help you come up with content ideas.
Content marketing: what is good content?
In order to implement a content marketing strategy focused on the regular publication of interesting content, we need to look at what good content is from a business point of view. Good content can be defined as an editorial element that a target audience is looking for. It can be easily found and its reading or exploration satisfies a precise need, inciting the visitor to action (sharing, making a purchase, comment, like…). It can be a text like a blog article, a video, an image, or an infographic… The quality of the content is also determined by the channel through which it will be distributed. For example, quality content published on a blog may not be suitable for use on social platforms or in a newsletter sent to leads. It will therefore have difficulty reaching its objective.
Knowing how to create good content is the starting point for identifying interesting thematic ideas that can impress your audience and move them to action.
The different content models :
There are basically two models of textual content that you can publish on your website depending on the objective you are pursuing.
SEO optimized content
Google is currently the most used source of information by consumers. They are looking for information about a product or service, to find the solution to a problem, or the answer to a question. To provide the best possible information to users in all circumstances, the giant of Mountain View has therefore implemented algorithms. These algorithms take into account a variety of criteria to judge the relevance of content available on the Internet.
Each site manager must therefore produce quality content with high added value to hope to be highlighted on the search engine results pages (SERP). This is what SEO optimized content is all about. It is a text written with the aim of answering a precise search intention of the Internet user. The semantic field must be rich in order to allow the search engines’ algorithms to easily associate it with the targeted query. This content has a high added value for the audience, because it respects all the quality criteria of Google:
- text size,
- absence of plagiarism and overoptimization,
- use of keywords,
- user satisfaction through a precise answer to his concern…
Optimized content is the one that offers better performance in an inbound marketing strategy. It helps to outperform the competition and generate qualified traffic to your blog or sales pages. This is the type of text you need to publish if you have an e-commerce site with a blog, or a showcase site with pages to present your services.
Informational content
Simple information content is text written to meet an informational search intent. Just like optimized content, it can offer the possibility to cover a subject in a complete way, to offer advice or to present the instructions for using a product. The difference here is that no in-depth work is done to integrate keywords and enrich the semantic field. This content is therefore less effective on the SERP of search engines than an optimized text. However, it is still very useful for Internet users who can find answers to their concerns.
At Invicta marketing, we offer both types of content: optimized and premium. Our copywriters are committed to providing you with quality content, regardless of your industry and the specifics of your business. SEO copywriting services are specifically designed to help you rank among the top results on Google. We make sure that your search intent associated with each of your keywords is met and precisely addressed during the content creation process. The process is focused on both human reader satisfaction and engine satisfaction. Before delivery, a team of in-house proofreaders checks each piece of writing. We ensure that the sentences are correct and that the optimization is of high quality (without keyword stuffing or abusive techniques).
Always with a view to efficiency and performance, most of our texts (optimized and premium) are enhanced with at least one image. Having purchased the rights to these images, they are most often chosen by our team, but you can also provide them yourself for integration. An optimized or premium editorial project? Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss it.
How to vary your content?
Identifying content ideas to feed your website or social networks is one thing. Knowing in which format to present them to really impact your audience is another. Indeed, there is a variety of content formats to choose from depending on the nature of the information you want to publish.
The different content formats
The most frequent content formats on a website are
- lists (lists of steps, top x…),
- how-to” articles or articles that answer a question,
- question and answer articles,
- why” type articles,
- case studies,
- testimonials,
- interviews,
- comparisons,
- case studies,
- hot/cold news,
- product sheets,
- complete guides.
Each format has a specific use. For example, for purely informational content, “how to” and “why” articles are perfect. On the other hand, to answer a transactional request, comparisons and product sheets are more effective.
The different word sizes
Coming up with content ideas isn’t really helpful if you don’t then choose the ideal number of words to cover each topic properly. Indeed, it is important to take into account the search intent associated with your keywords to define the length of your texts. Other important elements to consider are the search volume (the number of times the query is made per month) and trends.
Word count is very important in content marketing. Content that is not of the right length for the search intent it is responding to is simply doomed to fail. It will lag behind competitors’ content and won’t help you reach your ultimate goal of impacting your audience and getting them to take action.
Is your content idea associated with an informational, transactional or commercial search intent? The most important thing is to study the SERP and see what Google and users really want. This will help you determine the length of your articles. For example, for a transactional page, a long content will not necessarily mean conversion.
Why is it essential to keep an editorial calendar?
One of the most important tools when setting up and executing a content marketing strategy is the editorial calendar. It plans publications over a given period of time and offers the possibility to avoid empty periods that can be characterized by a lack of inspiration. With an editorial calendar, you can identify ideas and integrate them directly into your schedule several weeks or months in advance. This way, you won’t forget them.
- On an editorial calendar, you should mention for each idea found :
- the keyword to work on,
- The source,
- The content that will be produced,
- The channel through which the content will be published (blog, sales page, social platforms)
- The person in charge of creating the content,
- The targets.
A well-executed editorial calendar guarantees you time savings and constant content production in the short and medium term. The tool also helps you to have a global view of all your content (already published and to come) in order to make a variety of analyses.
10 tips to get content ideas
By now you’ve seen how important good content and planning is to your content or inbound marketing strategy. Invicta gives you 10 tips to find ideas for topics to develop on your site.
1. List all your customers’ questions
Listening to buyers and prospects is a very reliable way to find interesting ideas. Since they are the target audience for your content marketing strategy, they are in the best position to give you clues about their concerns. So refer to your sales people or sales team to get a list of questions that your buyers or consumers who are interested in your services or products frequently ask. You can also find useful data in the comments section of your social media pages. Some sorting can then be done for curation of the most relevant questions.
2. Develop your company’s areas of expertise
If there is one area in which you will almost never run out of inspiration, it is the one in which you have real expertise. Your company’s areas of expertise are a great way to keep your blog fresh with articles that are both comprehensive and varied. For more content ideas, don’t hesitate to interview company executives, or those directly involved in the product or service design process. Based on the information you get from these contacts, you can develop a list of topics to include in your editorial calendar.
3. Analyze your competitors’ blogs
Competitor analysis is an effective way to identify content to publish on your site. The objective is not to copy the entirety of your competitors’ blogs, but to use them as inspiration for your decision making. By analyzing the keywords they target and the topics they cover, you will have an idea of the content that works best in your field. Creating new topics will then be easier.
4. Do marketing research on your market
Not only your competitors’ blogs can inspire you to create interesting content. All the players in your field of activity can be a source of inspiration. That’s why a marketing watch is very important. It consists in staying attentive to the news that emanates from your company’s environment in order to draw relevant elements for your activities. Make a list of partners, blogs on similar themes, competitors, or influencers whose news is related in one way or another to your activities. Ideally, you can centralize the monitoring with a content aggregator in order to easily sort and annotate the ideas to be included on your site.
5. Anticipate the trends of your market
In a competitive environment such as the web, anticipating trends is essential to avoid being overtaken on the SERP. It is also a golden opportunity to find content ideas and get ahead of the others. There are many tools that allow you to identify the most popular themes over a given period as well as the most searched terms. Google Trends is an example. Analyzing hashtags on social networks also offers the possibility to see emerging trends that you can surf on to create traffic generating content.
6. Subscribe to newsletters in your industry
Newsletters from other companies in your industry are a useful source that can help you find inspiration for new content. Don’t neglect them. It’s also part of the competitive intelligence you need to stay on top of what’s going on in your industry. Spying on newsletters also offers the possibility to collect some practical information such as the length of competitors’ texts, semantics, illustrations used, format and editorial style…
7. Create a mind map
In content marketing, mind mapping is a process that allows you to start with a concept or a general (or main) theme and then break it down into ideas and sub-ideas. At the end of this exercise, you get a mind map with main branches and sub-branches to explore. If you are about to launch a new site, this is the best time to set up a mind map to define the tree structure of the site. You can also do it for an existing site to find content related to a keyword.
8. Tap into foreign sources related to your business
Foreign blogs can be a real source of inspiration for your content creation if you know how to do it. Start by making a list of the main foreign sources (e.g. English-speaking sources) related to your field of activity and select those that regularly publish articles. You can set up a strategy to not miss anything they publish: newsletter subscription, RSS feed subscription… In some fields of activity, foreign sources often have a head start on certain news. Use this to your advantage to provide quality content to your audience.
9. Survey your community
Polling is another way to directly gather the opinions and concerns of your community. You can set this up via social media or other specialized survey sites. This strategy helps you get relevant ideas that are just waiting to be developed.
10. Update and decline your old articles
It’s not a necessity to constantly innovate when running a blog, or a business website. On the contrary, updating old articles can be very effective from time to time. To do this, you need to identify among your archives the texts whose data or statistics are outdated, but which are still of interest to your audience. These articles can be republished or split into several other texts with updated data.
Content ideas: which tools to use?
Identifying ideas is much easier when you have the right tools. Here are the solutions that can help you.
Google Alerts
Notification service launched by the Mountain View giant in 2003, Google Alerts offers the possibility to closely follow keywords or specific terms (your choice) on the web. This service also allows you to receive an alert by e-mail each time a targeted term is used. You can configure the frequency of the alerts, the sites you want to use as a source, the language, the geographical area and the number of results (the most relevant or all). It’s an effective tool to perform marketing intelligence on strategic keywords in your field.
Google Forms
Google Forms is one of the most practical tools to collect data directly from your community. It can be used for a survey or to send a questionnaire to specific targets to better understand their needs. You have the possibility to conduct anonymous surveys or to collect the contacts of survey participants. The collected data is available in real time on the tool’s interface.
Google Trends
Google Trends informs you about the most popular queries over a given period. It is useful to quickly identify trends and topics that are trending. You can see the trends for different geographical areas and languages.
AnswerThePublic
To provide marketers and webmasters with suggestions for topics to develop, AnswerThePublic leverages data from Google and Bing. Starting from a main theme or topic, the tool generates an exhaustive list of “why”, “how”, “what” questions. AnswerThePublic’s suggestions correspond to the most popular searches of Internet users on the engines. You can export them in CSV format or as an image for further analysis.
People Also Ask
People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google feature you can leverage for ideas. They come in the form of a list of questions that appear after certain queries and link to additional information that the user potentially needs. Creating optimized copy around these Google-generated questions is a great way to improve your SEO.
Semrush
A very comprehensive tool, Semrush is very useful for identifying your content ideas. It is useful for :
- checking queries,
- know the search volume of each keyword,
- analyzing competing sites…
It can help you find keywords to work on.
Related searches on Google
The related searches are suggestions of keywords that Google makes to users at the bottom of the SERP. These are automatically generated queries based on a number of criteria: popular queries, user preferences, geographical location… They help you find additional ideas to flesh out your pages and reinforce the relevance of your site to your main theme.
In conclusion
Finding content ideas is therefore a process that requires creativity and a good sense of observation. A good marketing watch is also necessary to avoid being overtaken. Do not hesitate to contact Invicta marketing agency to entrust your SEO writing to professionals who are experienced in this task.
