Agile Marketing: Building Endurance for Your Content Marketing Team by Jeff Julian

Author:Jeff Julian
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Agile Marketing
Publisher: Squared Digital
Published: 2016-01-18T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

3 Tools to Help You Generate Killer Content Ideas

For most marketers, coming up with ideas are easy at first. I have them when I am at the gym, driving to work, or sitting at my favorite coffee house. Most of us are pretty creative and we develop some very compelling content.

Problems start to arise after you have been generating ideas for a little while and the well starts to run dry. These issues creep up again when you focus on one segment of the funnel, or path on a customer journey and huge gaps surface in your content that cause you to alienate some members of your audience. And sometimes you just don't know where to begin when working with a client in an obscure vertical you cannot relate to.

Over the past 13 years, I have been creating many blog posts, articles, and content for many different audience types. At Geekswithblogs, I wrote nearly 1000 posts which were developed for an audience of software developers and new bloggers. I have found that when the cabinets were empty and you really need to generate some ideas, these three tools helped me focus and allowed the flow of valuable content stories to begin.

Warning: These tools require groups of 2 or more. In fact, I would aim at having a group of 4 to 20 available for 30-minutes or more to really get the ideas flowing. These participants should be subject matter experts, fellow content writers, or my favorite, audience members.

Brainstorming

Over the years, brainstorming has gotten a bad rap. It became a corporate buzzword as they would "synergized" and began thinking in groups. With the mass adoption of the tool, they threw some of the rules out the door and I think they could use a refresher course.

When you begin a brainstorming session, someone is assigned as the moderator and they present a problem or question. In content development this could involve a persona goal, content type, or any another area you want to focus on. Then the group is asked to individually write down ideas for a short amount of time. When the time is up, the moderator goes around the room and collects the ideas verbally. After the ideas are presented, the group interacts and fleshes them out.

Mind Mapping

When coming up with ideas, it is good to have structure. If you find you have gaps in your content, this tool will help you see where those gaps are or it can be used to prevent these gaps from happening. Mind mapping builds from a core focus and branches off into multiple levels. These branches have branches and those branches can have branches, but the core purpose is always at the center.

In content idea generation, I like to use a persona at the core, list of goals at the second tier, and content types at the third. Then I list my content ideas at the fourth tier based on the conversation you want to have with the persona about the goal, using the content type.

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