Trying to think of new and engaging content can be tough. After all, there are only so many ways you can tell your journey, differentiate yourself from everyone else, and attract a new audience without getting lost among all the other words, opinions, and expressions out there.
Content is indeed king but creating it can honestly be a right royal pain in the backside.
Crossing the Intersection
However, there is a way of coming up with fresh and exciting content through the formation of ideas and concepts – ideation. Hitting the ideation ‘sweet spot’ is something that every content marketer strives for but is something very few every achieve.
The ‘sweet spot’ is found at the intersection of “Customer Pain Points Street” and “Where You Have the Greatest Authority With Your Stories Boulevard.”
As is advisory of crossing any busy intersection, the content creator should be looking outwards for inspiration rather than looking within themselves. It is crucially important to know what is happening out there with your audience. Solely focusing on your own services or products will almost certainly end up with you being hit by a speeding SUV.
Finding Your Audience
To find your audience you must first find their pain. However, the best ideation also identifies and engages with the audience’s pleasure also. Striking up a balance between strict schoolteacher and playful best friend is they key here. Knowing what genuinely excites and interests your audience is a process that is both pleasurable and painful.
Some of the key ways you can first find your audience and then define them is by picturing them, becoming them, resonating with them, and finding a new angle.
I will now take a closer look at each of these so you can learn how to map your content more easily.
Picturing Your Audience
There are a number of tools that can help you establish an idea of what your audience enjoys doing, what they read, etc. – Facebook Audience Insights and YouGov Profiles are particularly useful. Using these will help you create a tone of voice and create content that connects with your audience.
Becoming Your Audience
Google’s AdWords suite of tools is able to provide you with a list of websites for you to explore that list content on any topics you may be considering writing about. Use the Display Planner to see what topics are hot right now.
Resonating with Your Audience
If your audience is not reading or sharing your content, then the entire process of creating it is rather pointless. To understand what kind of content gets the most shares, take a swift look on BuzzSumo.
Finding Your Audiences New Angle
Content ideation software, such as Oz Content, provides articles that are related to any topic to help you quickly and simply generate new ideas and new content. It is even able to highlight keywords from these articles for SEO.
Unearthing those links between what your audience wishes to read about and what you wish to say allows you to hit the elusive ‘sweet spot’.
That Wasn’t So Tough
So, as demonstrated, content creation can be done without the hazard of anxiety-induced sweaty palms. Rather than wracking your brain in the hope that something eventually pops up, simply consider your customer’s points of pain.
Generating content is only actually difficult when you are taking an introverted look at everything. Start to look outwards and the ‘sweet spot’ will begin to appear like a mirage in the distance.
By really homing in on your content ideas and bringing the ‘sweet spot’ into focus, you will soon be creating highly readable and shareable content.