From the course: Content Marketing Foundations

Finding relevant topic ideas

From the course: Content Marketing Foundations

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Finding relevant topic ideas

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- Choosing the right topics to focus your content on can feel overwhelming. With all the available options, it's difficult to narrow in on which subjects your customers care about the most. And at this point, I bet you've experienced the frustration of publishing an article, or a report that you thought was the perfect match for your audience only to have it met with silence. To avoid this, let's review effective techniques for finding relevant topics. Start by referencing your customer personas. More specifically, the challenges each of these customers are faced with to decide which could be addressed in your content. For example, a company selling agricultural equipment could review its customer personas, and identify that its customers struggle mostly with increasing their crop yield yearly and limiting operating expenses. These challenges should be then researched since they could be the ideal topics for this agricultural company to use to connect their customers through a webinar, e-book or a series of articles. No matter what topics you're considering they must be related to your organization's expertise, or the product or service you're offering. If they aren't, it might be too difficult for your audience to make the connection between the article they're reading, or the video they're watching, and what your organization actually does. For example, it wouldn't make sense for this agricultural company to produce content about the best video games being released this month. It is just not relevant to them or their customers. Another useful source of topic inspiration is paying attention to patterns in the questions and feedback you receive from your customers. Is there a topic or question that keeps popping up from your customers over email? Maybe this might be a place to start as a topic to cover. Keeping records of common questions or pain points will help you down the road when looking for topics to cover. This feedback can be indirect as well if you have access to behavioral data about your customers activities through an analytics tool, CRM or a POS system. For instance, you might review your analytics to understand what content kept visitors on your website the longest, or pay attention to which tweets generated the most feedback. These spikes in activity can indicate what types of topics you might want to explore further. Lastly, it is great to review what's already been published. This is less about keeping tabs on competitors and more about finding the gaps in what's been covered by googling a topic you've been considering, or searching on social media. A few months ago, a client of mine was hesitant to publish a video on an important educational topic because a competitor had already covered it. But after we looked at it, the competitors video was only three minutes long, and only provided a brief overview of the subject without any additional insight. We decided that this was actually an opportunity for my client to go more in depth in the topic and explain how to take action in their video. When it comes time to ask what topics should we be covering with our marketing, remember these techniques for identifying topics that matter to your customers.

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