Creating new content is crucial for improving your website’s SEO, engaging new prospects and providing your customers with value add. But it’s also pretty difficult to constantly come up with fresh ideas that will keep your audience hooked. If you’re in a bit of a content rut, these five tips should help you to get back on track.

1. Do your research

A great way to give your audience fresh, valuable content is by carrying out new research into a particular topic or area that they will be interested in. But don’t worry if you don’t have the budget to pay a market research agency – there are ways that you can gather insight without any upfront investment. 

You could carry out a survey of your customers, for example, to discover their views on a subject or find out how their business is tackling a certain challenge facing many of your customers in that sector. Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or simply add polls to your social media posts or customer emails to collect their answers. You might also want to offer an incentive to encourage more customers to take the survey. 

2. Deep-dive into your data

If you’re collecting lots of data on your customers, then you could also delve into this data to see if you can identify any trends within the numbers. Are there any commonalities between the customers using your services? Are they wasting money in a particular area, for example, or are they spending too much time on a certain task?

If you can find common threads in your customer data, you can create new content around this insight that’s sure to get your audience’s attention. We used this approach to create a B2B Marketing Awards-winning campaign for one of our clients – read all about that

here

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3. Use guest bloggers 

Sometimes switching up your authors is all you need to do to freshen up your content. So, think about who you could ask to byline your blogs – could you ask your subject matter experts’ to share some of their knowledge? 

You may also consider inviting industry influencers to contribute to your content. We recently got lots of engagement in our

Ask a Marketer

 blog series, for example, in which we posed a set of questions to marketers from a range of different sectors to discover how B2B businesses are doing marketing differently. Another advantage of asking influencers/experts to contribute to your content is that they’re likely to share it with their own audience on social media, so you could find you gain some new prospects. 

4. Join the conversation

If you’re lacking inspiration, reading some of the leading pieces in your audience’s industry can help to get your creative juices flowing. To be clear, I’m not encouraging you to rip off other people’s content, but checking out what your target market’s industry is talking about is often a useful way to find out about current trends and hot topics. 

If you identify a topic your business hasn’t yet talked about, it might be time to create some content and join the conversation. Just make sure that when you’re developing your content, you’re not just repeating what’s already been said – add original advice or opinions from your team to ensure that you’re creating valuable, unique content.

5. Let Google do it for you

Good content will answer your audience’s questions, and what better way to find out what questions they need answering than by heading over to Google? Have a go now – open up Google and type in one of the keywords that you would like your business to rank highly for. Before you press enter, review the list of autofill suggestions Google presents beneath the search bar. This will show you what queries and topics people have been searching for in relation to that keyword and could spark some new content ideas. 

For example, if Google autofill suggests ‘meaning’, this shows that people are confused about what your key term means. You could use this information to create a handy explainer.

Simply taking a new slant on a familiar topic, or finding fresh insight into a particular area through data or customer surveys, can really help you to freshen up your content and keep your audience interested in what your business has to say. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to get writing!