5 Tips for Choosing Content Marketing Topics

Choosing the right content marketing topic is a challenging process. You can find it hard to keep a constant stream of ideas and it may be exhausting to think about new topics that will catch the eye of your audience.

Moreover, posts should be in line with the company’s content marketing strategy, which means that each separate content marketing topic should help to meet your business’s goals, which will result in the growth of your business.

The content strategy is much more than just the content that you are creating. You need to have a clear vision of why you are creating the content, for what audience, and what channels you will use.

According to the reviews, today around 84% of organizations have a content market strategy, but only 76% of companies have dedicated content marketing teams. For comparison, in 2017 only around 40% of companies had documented marketing strategy. It means that today companies understand the importance of a carefully designed strategy for success. 

If you are wondering how to choose the right content marketing topic, we have prepared five useful tips that will help you and make this process easier.

1. Define your business goals and then align the content production with them

First of all, you need to understand, why do you have a content marketing strategy? For many B2B and B2C companies, the goals can be, for example, increasing the company’s brand awareness, lead generation, and driving engagement. This is a starting point, which will help you to choose from the various types of content. Just ask yourself a question “Will this content help me reach my company’s goals?”

Let’s say you have a flower shop. Your goal is to sell 100 packs of roses quarterly, but on your shop’s blog, you have many posts about iris bulbs. In this case, your content strategy does not meet your business goals and you need to tell your readers more about the roses. Of course, you can make posts about irises, but a significant part of the content should be dedicated to roses, making a sales funnel. SEO experts advise keeping a focus on content that meet user needs and leads them to the company’s products.

2. Ask your audience what content they want

Your audience is the people who consume your content, so it is vital to know what they want to see on your website and social media pages. There are many ways to ask your clients about this. For example, you can set up a poll or ask your followers on social media. You can also analyze the frequently asked questions on the website. When you are running out of ideas, FAQs can show you some new trends and topics in which your audience has the most interest.

The role of the customer has changed and now it is time to allow your clients to play a significant part in the creation of your content marketing strategy.

3. Choose less competitive topics

Many recognized content marketing experts advise their clients not to use very competitive niches. Instead of this, companies should consider the so-called “niche down” process. When you see that the topic that you have initially chosen, is crowded with content, investigate subtopics. If the subtopics are also overcrowded, look for sub-subtopics and so on.

As numerous reviews show, posting content in a very competitive content landscape does not bring the desired result. Instead of this, you can look at your competitors and ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of content they are posting?
• Do I see here a content gap?
• Are some of the conversion points unclear?

Use the answers to these questions together with your expertise and keyword research to create niche content that can answer customers’ questions.

4. Use older content and adapt it for new trends

When it comes to content creation, many people think that a successful content strategy requires only new pieces. In fact, this is not true. Moreover, this idea can be counterproductive. If you have a new idea that intersects with your previous posts, consider their updates instead of posting new pieces. This approach will not only save your time, but it also works well for SEO purposes, because similar content competes with itself.

Therefore, when you think about the content, remember “evergreen topics” that you can update from time to time. By definition, such topics have no expiration date, and they are not tied to a particular date. Including such evergreen content with regular updates may be a powerful tool for your content marketing strategy.

5. Test your topic for performance on different networks

In social networks, people discuss various topics and it may be useful to analyze how different topics perform in each separate network. For this purpose, you can use a fully integrated content management system (CMS), for example, from Hubspot or other providers. Such systems help to create content, optimize it and assess the performance.

When you have identified the most popular posts, in most cases you can see the common topic among them. Using this information, you can develop content tailored to the specific audience, which will bring results.

Conclusion

As you can see, choosing the right content topics requires strategy planning. You need to know what content performs well and how your audience reacts to your posts. We hope that our tips will help you to make the process of choosing the right content marketing topic a bit easier.