Content marketing has been around for several years now, and for good reason. In 2018, educational content was ranked as the second most used marketing channel to nurture B2B audiences (behind email marketing).1
Providing valuable information to your audience, typically in exchange for their contact information (as in the case of gated pieces), helps build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and differentiate your organization from competitors. What’s not to love?
The thing is, coming up with content topics again and again—especially when you’ve been working in the same industry or niche for years—is HARD. It can feel as though you’ve said all there is to say 50 times over. What’s left to talk about?
Say you sell water filtration systems to factories. If you have a solid content marketing strategy in place, you’ve probably brainstormed every possible water issue a company could face from all angles. You need something new to keep the leads coming, but your ideas are stale.
There’s a solution for this creative block. It’s all about venturing outside your company and industry for inspiration.
For example, what if you applied an unrelated concept, like sports, to your content creation process? You might come up an idea for a video that uses a football analogy to explain your new product, making your sales pitches more persuasive.
Here are a few more outside-the-box ideas to get the creative juices flowing:
- Other industries – kids’ products, eyewear, medical practices, fashion, charities, you name it!
- Interns and summer students – people with less experience than you will always teach you something
- Family and friends – outsiders will lend a fresh perspective
- Group brainstorming sessions – planned activities can help break through creative block (check out the book Disciplined Dreaming for ideas)
- Advice, tips, and hacks – frame a topic as a problem-solving tool
- Recent news – add your viewpoint to stories people are talking about now
- Old content – recycle or put a new spin on something you’ve done before
- Artificial intelligence – try a blog topic generator using keywords you’ve chosen
This quick exercise should arm you with a solid list of fresh topics to incorporate into your content marketing strategy. Happy writing!
