5 Smart Ways to Generate Endless Ideas for Your Startup Content Marketing

As much as you want to publish stellar content on your blog on a daily basis, it can be exhausting. Sometimes, you simply run out of ideas to write about. If your brain stops thinking the moment you decide to write a post on your website, you aren’t alone.

A study done recently revealed that about 36% of online marketers say that creating engaging content is a big challenge.

If you work alone or with a small team, ideas for your startup content marketing can dry up pretty quick. So, you may need to recruit Caffeinated, an experienced content agency to help you get creative again.

Here are top five smart ways of creating endless ideas for your content marketing.

1. Find out what your competitors are doing

Analyzing your competition is one of the smartest ways of researching content marketing strategies. Focus on finding detailed about the following elements.

• The primary source of their traffic
• The keywords that make their sites rank well on search engines
• Their favorite content themes
• Their business partners and why they opt for such partners
• The social media networks and posts they get most traction on

In addition to analyzing your immediate competition, check other non-competing publications and businesses in your industry. Probably their presence is similar to you are creating online.

Use Ahrefs to identify backlinks to other businesses’ domains (their main source of traffic). BuzzSumo can offer you insights on the most shared posts for a particular keyword. It can also show you how many backlinks and social media shares you need to beat your competition.

Growthbot which is a slack integration bot can help you carry out quick keyword research.

2. Create clear guidelines and templates

Once you learn what your competitors are doing and how they do it, prepare to match or exceed their content marketing efforts. You can create a standard framework and templates for consistency in the implementation of various marketing strategies. Here are three important types of guidelines you should create.

• Brand’s content directives: These are the objectives (targets) you intend to achieve through content marketing, the channels and platforms you want to use, and your content marketing approach.
• The Brand’s style guide: These are the colors, personality, and the design you intend to associate with your brand.
• The buyer personas: Define the buyer characteristics of your target demographic for your brand.

Online tools such as HubSpot have templates for buyer personas that you can utilize a reference point when creating your own templates. Setting up a content framework and guidelines are guaranteed to help you be consistent and precise in implementing your content marketing strategies.

3. Use web tools to set up idea funnels

Use the web and social media tools to search and save particular content for you to analyze it in one interface. This will give you actual ideas. Here are some of the tools that can help you.

Tools that offer keyword-based content suggestions. Consider using DrumUp as it offers fresh content suggestions daily. It also lets you store these suggestions in the in-app libraries. Social media monitoring tools can also help you get ideas from your influencers. Thus, it’s wise to follow their Twitter handles.

4. Bookmark or save important resources

You must have heard that Neetan Zimmerman is a genius at producing viral content. One secret he uses is checking close to 1000 websites to inspire his content ideas. He picks websites that are not mainstream.

Spend some time hunting niche websites in your industry. You can either save them or bookmark them for future references.

Avoid discarding impromptu ideas. Instead, save them on your computer or smartphone so you can check whenever you need inspiration. You can also take screenshots of what influencers and other businesses are doing online. Keep these screenshots in individual folders.

5. Commit to an effective rejuvenation schedule

Creating back up resources is a wise for taking sometime without researching. However, it’s wise to revisit and renew your resources after some time.

Keep in mind that internet is ever-changing and you should focus on keeping up with these trends if you want to create an effective content marketing plan and implement it.