How to Find Topics for your Content Marketing Plan
The principles behind content marketing span all your online (and perhaps offline) actions. Planning out a content marketing plan will make your life so much easier when writing blog posts, sending emails, and posting to social media. All of a sudden online marketing seems to be an easy task. At any time, you can reference your schedule and know exactly what you should be talking about. Sounds great, right?
So, how do you find topics for your content marketing plan?
First you need a starting point. Make a list of industry-themed topics. Think about your day-to-day operations; what highlights come to mind? Then think about your clients; what problems can you solve for them?
Take it to the web and do some research. The best content is strategic so fine tune your topics to ensure each one is primed for optimization. Here are my favorite seo tools:
- Askthepublic.com: This quirky landing page lets you Ask the Seeker. Enter your keyword topic and he’ll suggest content ideas in seconds. Explore the who, what, where, when, why and how of that topic and click any idea to see real time search results in Google to compare the competition.
- Google search: The best way to find what your audience is looking for is by using the same tools. Go to google.com and start typing a topic, but don’t press enter; just note down the auto suggestions to see what people are actually searching for.
How do you put your content marketing plan in action?
When you put your topics on a calendar, you should look like a pretty busy bee. You put some work into your topics so let them breathe and take up some calendar space. For starters, think of one topic spanning the focus of one week. One topic should give you at least:
- one blog post
- one email
- five social media postings – see more about Finding Social Media Topics
Here’s an example:
One of my clients released a new collection of dresses. We found through performing this exercise that people were searching for what to wear to interviews, with boots, and as a wedding guest. This awesome visualization is what you can expect at askthepublic.com.
