Food for Thought: How to Generate Your Most Important Content Marketing Asset

A good idea is a powerful weapon. If content marketing is marketing designed to heighten the potential of your clients’ brands, then the idea that the content is centred around is the foundation for your entire campaign. So, how do you create an idea that has the potential to raise the profile of your clients’ brands? We put it to you that regardless of the size, scope and style of your client, innovation is the key. Innovation of what, precisely? Your approach, your method, and your idea selection process.

Collaboration Is King

Content marketing moves fast. Extremely fast. In digital marketing, you are only as good as your best content idea. Therefore, every effort needs to be taken to generate the best possible idea, and when it comes to ideas, the more brains involved the better.

In the days of old, it used to be that individuals in companies would sit separately in their own little cubicles, and would work on their own ideas. Of course, things have changed and you’d be hard-pressed to find an office that isn’t open plan, spacious and collaborative.

Collaboration is crucial for idea generation and is almost certainly the best approach to take. Get your team together, stand up and find a quiet room. It’s all about bouncing ideas off one another and throwing things against the wall to find the best ideas.

Topic Mapping

Collaborating sounds like a total free-for-all approach to idea generation, but if implemented in according to a strict methodology, your collaborative ideas session will be highly productive. An excellent method is topic mapping.

Topic mapping helps you to take the product that your client offers, and build out all of the possible angles for engaging content. Take the example of a running shoe seller. If you’re trying to create engaging content for them, you might take the concept of the running shoe and thing of all of the possible angles available by mapping them out in a sort of web which helps you link ideas to one another. With the running shoe as an example, you might start with the idea of the best running routes in your area, how to cool down after a run, or running endurance and health tips and go from there.

The second step is inherently more challenging than the first, but there are some great free tools you can use to help you make your decision. The first is Google Trends, which allows you to enter a keyword term and discover what topics are in vogue on the web. Another tip would be to use Google Analytics to see what content your client has been successful with in the past to ensure your idea is well suited to your client’s audience’s tastes. These tools are really just the basics, and professional content marketers have a number of extra paid tools that help them pinpoint the best idea.

Ultimately, an idea is the seed from which a campaign grows, so to make the most of your idea, from your approach, your method and your idea consolidation, and you’ll be surprised by the results.