Content Ideation Strategies: Generating High-Performing Ideas

It's hard to be creative on demand, and even harder to fill a content calendar with high-performing ideas. Content ideation is the process of generating article, video, or infographic ideas. A solid ideation process makes it easy to brainstorm dozens of content ideas, hit a regular publishing cadence, and consistently grow traffic—without unnecessary brain strain.

The Content Ideation Loop

A good ideation process can be thought of as a feedback loop: a series of tasks that work together to make it easier and easier to create great ideas on demand.

The content ideation loop includes:

1. Read, Watch, and Listen Widely
   It’s difficult to create amazing content ideas in a vacuum. It’s much easier to respond to ideas that already exist in the world, to take in information and playfully challenge, respond to, or remix it. Every article, essay, book, YouTube tutorial, podcast interview, and spicy tweet is a potential “seed” for your next content idea.
   Don’t limit yourself to just one type of content. The more adventurous you are with your consumption habits, the easier it will be to find new and interesting ideas to incorporate into your own content.
2. Capture Inspiration When It Strikes
   Ideas are fleeting, so make sure to capture them whenever they appear. Choose a single place to function like your idea inbox—a Google doc, Trello board, notes app, or physical notepad. Jot down every idea you have, no matter how unfinished or bad it may seem, and make time to revisit them in a few hours or days.
3. Make Things That Help People
   Here’s the golden rule of content ideation: every content idea needs to be useful to another human being (and ideally, many human beings). Some content ideas will be contrarian and surprising, and may even generate a huge amount of attention on social media—but if they don’t help another human being, what’s the point?
4. Learn from Feedback
   Finally, see how your article ideas are received in the real world. Do they earn a better or worse response than expected? Which topics were most popular? Which generated the most traffic? Take this feedback and learn from it, nudging your content ideas towards more of what works (and less of what doesn’t).

Eight Content Ideation Methods

Here are eight very different, very useful sources of inspiration for your content marketing:

1. Answer Questions
   The simplest way to generate content ideas is also one of the most useful: provide responses to the questions people ask about your product, your company, and your industry. Prioritize questions that your product can naturally help to answer.
   Examples:
• Find popular questions posted on subreddits and forums: "How to build backlinks?"
• Look for search queries formulated as questions: “how to get rid of carpet beetles”
2. Address Sales Objections
   Content marketing is designed to help sales, and the most immediate way to achieve that goal is to directly address sales objections. Record the problems that prevent people from becoming customers, and write responses to their issues.
   Examples:
• Explore the differences between your product and your closest competitors.
• Explain the thinking behind the features you offer.
• Respond to criticism.
3. Capture Your Successes
   Document your customers’ wins, how they achieved them, and the role your company and products played in their success. A case study should help the reader solve a hard problem for themselves.
   Examples:
• Tell the story of your most successful customer.
• Document a business tactic that succeeded.
4. Challenge Your Competitors
   Identify the content that generates the greatest traffic or backlinks for your competitors and create your own (better, or different) version to siphon away some of their business.
   Examples:
• Improve upon your competitors’ most linked content.
• Improve upon your competitors’ most popular content.
5. Analyze Your Industry
   Help your customers and would-be customers understand the world around them. Use your experience to explain why things happen, and how people should respond.
   Examples:
• Explore the impact of new trends and technology.
• Share teardowns of companies and strategies that perform well.
• Explain why things happened.
6. Challenge Industry Truisms
   If your knowledge and experience tell you that some commonly held ideas are wrong or unhelpful, you can help people by challenging those ideas, explaining why they don’t work in practice, and suggesting a better approach.
   Examples:
• Challenge common beliefs.
• Argue against best practices.
7. Share Useful Personal Experiences
   Share hard problems you’ve solved, processes you’ve built, and lessons you’ve learned that would be helpful to your target audience.
   Examples:
• Processes built.
• Mistakes made.
• Experiments run.
8. Document Your Vision
   Content can help to create a clear, articulate version of your company’s philosophy: why you exist, why you built your product in a particular way, and what you value.
   Examples:
• Communicate your reason for existence.
• Share how the industry is changing, and how you plan to respond.
• Explain your business decisions.

Final Thoughts

Having original, creative ideas is a serious challenge, but the more tools you have in your mental toolkit—methods of ideation, types of source material, and sources of feedback—the easier content ideation becomes. And, with every idea you create, the easier it becomes to create another, as previous ideas plant the seeds for future ones.

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