How The Best Content Marketing Managers Brainstorm Blog Post Ideas

 

When it comes to business blogging, you have to find topics that will resonate with your audience in order to create compelling content. Whether you’re a marketer or a publisher, you need to keep in mind your target audience to understand their pain points, motivations, and what gets them excited and engaged.

You might have a general idea of what makes a good blog, but coming up with ideas for blog posts is more difficult than meets the eye. You might have a couple of ideas, but writing blog posts consistently require you to have more than a few topics to write about.

In a landscape where it’s tougher than ever to gain the attention of your audience, how can you come up with ideas for blog posts? We asked the best content marketing managers we know to share their secrets.

1. Lean on your customer-facing coworkers for ideas
As the person running the blog, you might spend most of your day writing and delegating work. How often are you talking to customers? Probably not very often.

Guess what? Your customers are the best place to go for ideas. Jana Barrett, Senior Content Marketing Manager at GetFeedback, a software platform for surveys, constantly leans on her customer-facing colleagues for ideas. “Sales, support, and customer success teams interact with customers every day, so they have amazing insights into the challenges customers are facing,” she said. “Staying in sync with them is the #1 way for me to produce useful content that our customers and prospects actually want to read.”

On a daily basis, Jana jots down ideas for blog topics based on the questions and comments that her customer-facing colleagues bring to meetings. Jana also set up a Slack channel called “Content Ideas” and regularly encourages these colleagues to contribute.

2. Stay connected to the news cycle, read a lot, and collect ideas
There’s a lot of great content out there– content that’s generated by customers, random people on the internet, and brands. As a content manager, you have to stay connected to the news cycle and read what’s out there. As you encounter compelling content, collect what you find.

Take it from Mia Quagliarello, Head of Curation and Community at Flipboard, a social platform that aggregates and organizes the world’s stories into social magazines. “The Flipboard Editorial team reads a lot,” she said. “And that informs almost everything we do, as does our mission: to highlight great journalism through unique packages of stories. When it comes to thinking up ideas for blog posts, my philosophy is ‘always be collecting.'”

No matter what Mia is writing about, her process remains the same. She’s always collecting interesting topics, finding unique hooks for a certain audience, researching, and writing, packaging content in the most attractive and consumable way, and then sharing it with the world.

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