Are you out of content concepts?

If your brain feels wrung-out and your eyes hurt from scanning short article after short article about finding new subjects and brainstorming, it’s time to come at the problem from a brand-new angle.

Particularly, the research angle.

Instead of pulling ideas out of thin air, investigating content concepts gives you concrete evidence that, yes, your audience is going to love this That’s due to the fact that you’re counting on the source itself to supply the fodder for your content.

Lean in, listen to what your audience wishes to check out, note their questions and problems, and analyze what interests them. This is the path to content gold

Here are some useful ways to dig in and gather those audience-backed material concepts through a little bit of old-fashioned qualitative research study

1. Network, Link, and Reverse with Your Suitable Leads

To find your biggest content ideas ever, focus on networking and having genuine conversations with your ideal leads.

Undoubtedly, to do this, you require to comprehend your audience and be truly engaged within your industry and community.

Then, it’s time to:

• Discover, follow, and interact with your people on social networks.
• Pay attention to your social feeds and take chances to share and talk about others’ posts.
• When you see your ideal audience members having a conversation or asking questions, don’t be scared to chime in.
• DM people with which you have actually developed a connection and ask to pick their brains.
• Attend local market events and conferences, and enter into those subjects you’re super enthusiastic about in-person!
• Remember and tape-record the topics and questions you see turning up during your networking experiences.

To genuinely make this work, you can’t do it for a month and call it stops.

You need to invest time in networking and get interested in other individuals.

Broaden your social circles with friendliness and curiosity, and your brand will benefit in addition to your well-being.

2. Mine Live Chats for Content Concepts

Next up: If you use a live chat feature on your website, those discussions are great fodder for content ideas.

At my online content agency, our live chat tool of option is Drift.

Among Drift’s finest features is the ability to examine all opened and closed discussions.

Using this tool, I regularly mine the live chats that take place on our site and look for FAQs from customers.

What questions and topics do I see over and over? These are ones to get on and compose content around.

For instance, our audience is mostly comprised of online marketers who have an interest in SEO subjects. Here’s an example from a Drift chat– this user is asking about Google Carousel:

Since we get numerous SEO questions, 30-50%of our blog content revolves around these topics.

Pay attention to the patterns you see from discussions in your live chat platform and utilize them to develop pertinent, right-here-right-now content.

3. Listen to Phone Calls from Sales

Another sales channel you should not leave uninvestigated for content concepts: Telephone call your sales team has with prospects.

These calls are gold mines for potential content topics, particularly if a user is calling with a series of concerns about your service/product.

If you start to hear the same concerns over and over, think what? Time to answer them in some meaty material pieces.

If you utilize a CRM system for sales like HubSpot or Salesforce, these platforms must have call monitoring and recording available as baked-in features. Do not leave these content resources untouched.

4. Produce a Channel for Your Group to Share FAQs from Leads

While you’re leveraging conversational marketing to come up with content ideas, do not forget to let your other staff member in on the intel-gathering.

In particular, develop a specific channel where your group can share FAQs from interactions with leads. Gathering these insights in one location will make your research and analysis a lot simpler.

Some terrific collaborative platforms this would work well on consist of:

• Slack
• Trello
• Google Drive
• Airtable

The channel can be as simple as a shared Google doc or a dedicated Slack channel. Use whatever integrates best with your group’s workflow.

Reward: The topic research you collect from leads and customers can generate not just blog site topics however also vital webpage subjects you may be missing on your website, otherwise. Win-win.

5. Action Far From Your Desk After Research-Gathering (Let Your Brain Percolate)

This last pointer for developing content concepts has to do with providing your mind room to breathe. This is the action to take after your research-gathering session has ended.

Particularly, after you’re pleased with the quantity of qualitative information you’ve gathered, step far from your desk for a while. Don’t leap directly into writing.

Why? Since that pause after research study gives your brain the time to process what you found.

According to lots of studies on the subject, taking psychological breaks helps refresh your attention, improves productivity, and creates brighter stimulates of imagination.

Offer yourself space to let those brand-new thoughts, concepts, and research nuggets percolate.

You’ll come up with better, more totally synthesized material topics that provide insight and worth to your audience. (Yes, I’m giving you authorization to daydream at your desk on the regular. You’re welcome.)

Look Beyond the Expected Ways to Create Content Concepts

If you use the very same strategies as everybody else to come up with your content concepts …

Yep. Your material likewise will appearance like everybody else’s.

To distinguish, look for unanticipated, research-backed methods to ideate. Look to all the sources of data at hand and do a little investigator work à la Sherlock Holmes.

Finally, keep in mind to try to find out what your audience desires– after all, they’re the point of this little thing we call content.

More Resources:

• 17 Sources of Inspiration for Content Project Ideas
• How to Harvest Material Ideas from Reddit
• How to Assist Your Content Group to Have Better Concepts

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Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, July 2019

In-Post Image: Mindful.org