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7 tips for coming up with ideas for your brand’s blog space
As a business, it is essential to utilise content to kickstart conversations with your customers. Your blog space is a great platform to communicate with potential leads, enabling you to reach people from all over the world online.
However, to draw in a substantial crowd to your brand, you need to optimise and align your blog to the interests of your target audience. This means selecting compelling topics and blog post titles relevant to the products and services you offer and engaging readers in line with their known preferences.
Often the most significant challenge is coming up with ideas that make for great blog content. Creativity and contemplation are required to help you develop exciting concepts for your brand’s blog space that will attract an audience and grow your presence in the digital domain, alongside understanding who your brand is and what your customers want.
In this blog, we have listed our top seven tips for coming up with captivating blog ideas for your website, even when you’re low on imagination, so your content marketing efforts excel.
Keyword research
One of the most common and most effective ways to identify blog ideas for your business is through keyword research. This will help you find the questions that people are asking search engines to ensure your blogs are aligned to your customers’ needs and that there is existing demand for the content you are creating.
Start by searching broad terms related to your business or even blog topics you have previously written about. From here, you can review the related searches. This can be done in a specific SEO tool, such as SEMrush, or in Google itself by checking the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ sections that appear on the search results page.
You can also try typing out phrases into Google and allowing the auto-complete function to provide suggestions based on the common searches people undertake in that subject.
Tools like Answer the Public will also enable you to generate more detailed keyword phrases to target by taking broad topics and detailing what people tend to search around them for further support.
By undertaking extensive keyword research, especially when combining sources like the tools mentioned above, you should be able to compile a long list of potential blog ideas. Better yet, these will be aligned to the informational desires people have around your business, helping to boost your SEO efforts while drawing in traffic through careful keyword targeting.
Social listening can be another option to generate blog ideas for your brand. With social listening, you simply choose your social media platform of choice and search terms related to your business in it, such as product names or product applications. The platform should then show you anything that people have posted containing that term. You can also identify related hashtags and track these to see a curation of what people have shared around that topic.
The benefit of social listening is that it enables you to gauge public attitude and opinion towards specific topics, which will shape the way you write about them and allow you to align your content to your readers’ behaviours.
It also tends to take place in real-time, helping you to add ‘current’ blog titles to your plan alongside more evergreen content. Many platforms will showcase trending topics at any given time, allowing you to pinpoint popular subjects and create content accordingly, so you can publish it while the interest is still peaking.
Competitor analysis
If you are struggling with content ideas, undertaking competitor research is incredibly helpful for understanding what other businesses in the industry are talking about and, by extension, what you should be talking about too.
Look at the blog spaces of your known competitors and notice what topics they tackle or the exciting content that they have created. Similarly, you could also review industry publications (such as online magazines, blogs or forums) to determine what subjects and angles are included in their current content and whether it relates to your products and services.
Obviously, you should not plagiarise any content you find. Instead, consider your own take on that subject and seek ways to add more value to customers. This will differentiate your blogs from your competitors’ while giving you an edge that may detract readers from their website towards yours instead.
Your products and services
The blogs you create on behalf of your brand must align with your value proposition. The content should aim to help readers either understand more about your offering or the challenges that they face which, could be solved through what your business has to offer. So, when seeking blog ingenuity, it’s worth starting with your products and services.
Re-examine the products or services that you offer and identify what their role may be in people’s lives. Contemplate what might lead them to purchase from your brand in the first place and how they might use that product or service. For example, if my business sold gym equipment to use at home, it’s safe to assume people will come to me because they’re looking to improve their fitness without having to venture to the gym. Examples of blog titles I could write would be ‘How to get fit without a gym membership’ or ’10 easy exercises to do at home with free weights’.
Another option is considering the questions customers may have about your business and turning them into blog form, with titles like ‘How does [product name] work?’. It’s also possible to be more inventive with your content in this area, such as creating product guides or video demonstrations that sit in your blog space.
Remember, content can help your customers learn more before their purchase (and even lead them to it), as well as add value post-purchase, so be sure to brainstorm blog ideas that cover both.
Your customer services team – and your customers
It’s easy to overlook internal sources when you are seeking creative blog ideas. However, when the aim of your content is to inform, help and attract customers, it makes sense to take the time to speak to your customer service representatives who talk to your customers every day.
The customer service team should offer insight into the common questions and comments your audience has. If a trend or a fascinating question you’ve never thought of emerges, it is worth considering how that could be turned into a content opportunity. The benefit of referring to customer services is that, unlike other forms of insight, they aren’t telling you what the data suggests your customers think about – they’re drawing on real-life experience and conversations with the very people who buy from your business.
It will also enable you to gauge sentiment about your brand, which you may address through your content strategy. For example, if customers commonly complain about a specific product being hard to use or confusing, it’s a flag that you should create content that helps to explain it and simplify the complex areas.
By creating blogs that align with the findings of your customer service department, you can improve the customer experience by giving people access to the information they want without them having to contact you first. It will also ensure all titles you choose are relevant to your customers and their needs, making it easier to convert them onto the next stage of their buyer journey.
To take it a step further, the customer service team may be able to identify buyers who have particularly enjoyed their experience with your business, who could become brand ambassadors. This can then lead to user-generated content for your blog space, such as testimonials, guest posts and so on. These offer an authentic view of your brand that other leads are far more likely to trust, while helping your existing customers feel more valued – everybody wins!
Record your ideas
Inspiration can strike at the most unlikely times – and often, it’s not when you’ve scheduled in content planning for your business. By the time you sit down to create a content plan, any ideas you had may have been long forgotten. Therefore, another helpful tip for compiling blog titles is to ensure you record your thoughts whenever they emerge.
Consider having a working document that you can periodically update as and when those blog ideas come to you. This could even be a scrap piece of paper if that works best for you! By having this ready to go, you can add ideas as you go, like when something inventive pops up in your social media feed, or you receive an email containing inspiring content that might work well for your brand.
Eventually, you will be left with a bank of exciting ideas, so that when you come to the stage of planning new content, you need only refer to your document, which can then be refined, built upon and crafted into an effective core of content for your business to utilise.
Optimise existing content
While it’s crucial to add new blogs to your website, aligned to current data and interests, to keep things’ fresh’, this doesn’t mean you should forget about your older content. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, it could be a sign you need to recycle or repurpose what already exists on your blog instead.
When updating historical content, you should seek ways to either optimise or add more value. This could include updating out-of-date information or adding sections that discuss more modern concepts or thoughts on the subject.
Revisiting old content can also inspire new, by either giving you ideas to talk about that you’ve touched upon in other blogs or allowing you to rehaul dated content. If you’re doing the latter, it’s worth adding a note in the copy or blog title that shows it’s been edited or updated for the current time, like the example below.
Remember that if you are including years or dates in your titles, you will likely need to revisit it once that time has passed. Subjects can become outdated very quickly with Google algorithms and rules changing periodically, therefore, keep a note of when those changes happen or are scheduled to happen and make sure that you update your blog in a timely fashion.
The advantage of republishing old content is that it enables you to re-optimise it for SEO. Over time, your blog may have fallen in search rankings, or the terms you initially targeted have become defunct. When updating it, you can revisit your keyword research, analyse the content that may now be ranking above, and find ways to gain a competitive edge. This will drive traffic while offering value that is relevant to your audience at that time. It can also save effort from having to write a new blog from scratch.
Conclusion
By choosing exciting and engaging blogs for your brand, you can reap incredible benefits. This includes better performance metrics (such as a reduced bounce rate by keeping users on your website for longer and improved traffic) and value offered at every stage of the buyer journey, helping you to attract, convert and retain customers.
The key is getting the right ideas tailored to your brand identity, products and services, and your customers’ requirements. By using the sources of inspiration outlined above, you will be able to unlock limitless potential for your blog space, so you identify titles that start conversations, draw attention to your brand and build the foundations for long-lasting relationships.
Social listening