Coming up with ideas for creating content for your audience is the hardest part of content creation, especially for someone who doesn’t want to pump out low-quality content with no value to customers. The effects of below-average content are detrimental. It can hurt your marketing strategy and cost you, customers.

Once you have an idea, it is always a smooth ride. 

Have you exhausted all your ideas for creating compelling content that converts? Give these five little-known tips a try and ideate new content for your audience.

Keep up with Content Trends

Keeping up with content trends will keep you aware of the content that your audience is craving. Trends will help you generate content that is relevant and up to date. Companies like Semrush and HubSpot publish well-detailed content trends you can watch out for every year. 

You can use these trends to tell what the audience wants. One of the biggest trends for 2022, for example, is creating content that crusades for social responsibility.

You can use this trend to develop compelling content that advocates for human rights and environmental protection. This type of humanized content builds trust between you and your audience.

Also read: Why Is a Content Strategy Important for Business Growth?

Monitor Public Forums and Q&A Platforms.

Public forums are where the most enthusiastic consumers gather. You can get a gist of what your audience wants and create content to address that by monitoring forums specific to your niche.

Some of the most popular forums you can monitor are:

• Telegram Channels
• Facebook Groups
• Subreddits on Reddit.
• Discord Servers
• Quora

In these forums, consumers always discuss the problems they face and the kind of solutions they expect. Let’s see how you can ideate content by identifying consumers’ issues.

Assuming you create content for dog owners, you can visit a Subreddit like /r/DogAdvice and look at the problems consumers are looking to solve. Here is an example of such a problem:

By just addressing this person’s problems, you can get ideas for three blogposts. The ideas are:

• How to Socialise Your Dogs Quickly.
• Why you should Socialise your puppies when they’re still young.
• X Ways to Keep your Dogs Active in Small Spaces.

You can do this with every niche, and you will never run out of content ideas for your blog. Collect those questions and use them to create compelling content.

Switch your Content Format

Sometimes, you can’t develop an idea for content because you’re subconsciously bored of creating the same content repeatedly. And you are not the only one bored; your audience might be more bored. You send your audience to look for more content elsewhere by providing only one type of content.

Here are some ways to switch up your content:

• Switch Written Content to interactive infographics – Using tools like Infogr.Am, Votion or ThingLink, you can present your written content in a fun and engaging way. Interactive infographics will also increase your website user retention rate in ways written content couldn’t.
• Switch to Animation videos and Naratted slide shows: Video content has proven to be the best medium to get an audience’s attention fully. But consumers are getting bored of the plain ol’ videos. Next time you make an explainer video, present it as animations or narrated slide shows. 

Animations tell stories in a way that is fun and easy to understand, and slideshows can show high-level professionalism.

• Switch your eBooks to Audiobooks: Audio is the future of marketing. You can leverage this by creating an audio version of your ebook content. Consumers are gravitating toward audio mainly because, unlike other types of content, audio content is consumed while multitasking. 

Switching up your content format can spark new ideas, and not just for new content; you could change how you presented old content and post it afresh.

Brainstorm. You can’t do it alone.

Ideas can be born by involving other people in your content strategy. The most important people to collaborate with are those closest to your customers: the sales team and the customer service representatives.

Here are three questions you can pose to them to get an idea for your content:

• What are the feedbacks and concerns from our customers?
• What is holding back our prospective customers?
• What are our competitors up to, and how can we stay ahead of them?

By doing this, you get to know what is going on in the minds of the consumers. What you are doing wrong and how you can improve. What are your strengths and weakness? You could get more customer feedback from your sales and customer care team than you would online. According to a study published by Podium, most consumers (81%) leave four or fewer reviews per year. But they’re more likely to give solid feedback when they call your customer service representatives.

You can convert the information you collect from them into content ideas and create content that your customers want. This can be in the form of testimonials or an FAQ page.

Get Inspiration From Real Life.

Yes, the internet is the best and easiest to get ideas. There are a lot of tools like HubSpot Blog Idea Generator that will help you generate an idea in seconds. But where is the fun in that? You want to create content that is as authentic as possible. That starts with looking for content ideas in a natural way.

Your environment has a lot to tell you. All you need to do is listen. You can listen to what people around you are talking about and watch what they are doing. By being aware of your surroundings, you can find inspiration for your next content idea. 

You can create content using the things you do outside of content creation. For instance, you can create sports content and naturally combine it with your blog content if you like sports. 

A good example is this lifestyle blogger who loves playing video games. Look at how she combines both to give her audience fresh content.

The Bottom Line

With all your competitors churning out content, you have to go the extra mile and create different and better content in every aspect. And without a compelling idea, there is no way to do that.

The audience is looking for great content, and where they find it is where they will leave their bucks. You want to be the one to profit. 

Follow those five tips, and you won’t struggle with coming up with ideas to create high-quality content that will make you stand out and increase your revenue. 

Also read: A Quick Step by Step Guide to Developing an Effective Content Strategy