{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: How To Never Run Out of Content Marketing Ideas

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackle a myriad number of ways to never run out of content marketing ideas. What happens when your well runs dry? Where can you go for inspiration, insights, and starting materials? Listen to this episode to refill your content marketing queue with content that will bring great customer results.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

In this week’s in your insights, what happens when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel? And it feels like you’re out of content? This is a question that comes up fairly frequently in many of the digital marketing groups that were part of people say, how do you keep stuff from getting stale? How to keep things from getting repetitive. Even with search engine optimization and stuff, it can still be tricky to get all new stuff all the time. So Katie, how do you keep things from getting stale?

That is it. You know, that’s a great question. You put it in the fridge. And no way wrong conversation note. So we’re talking about content, we’re talking about keyword lists. And so you know, any good marketer worth their salt should have their standard keyword list of target keywords target phrases. Now, what I often see happen is, companies will run that list once, and then use that until to your point, it’s exhausted. So the first step is rerun that list, see if there’s any new key words. But then you also maybe take a step back and say, Does my strategy still hold? Are these still the things we want to be known for? And what else is happening in the space that I’m not aware of? And this is when you can start to do more advanced techniques, such as text mining of forum conversations, or social media posts to figure out what are people saying? And then add those keywords and phrases? In addition to what you have to a refreshed keyword list? I’d say that’s where I would start. What about you, Chris? I like

that I like I like the the going after forums because fundamentally, especially for a lot of marketing, we are relatively cyclical creatures, right? In fact, one of your talks on predictive analytics talks about the fact that people at tend to ask the same things over and over again. So if you were to go into say, a Reddit forum, or a Facebook group or something, and extract out all the questions that people have asked in the last few years, and then just sort of organize them by day of year or week of year, you’ll see some seasonality. One of my favorite books on this topic is by sales trainer, Marcus Sheridan, he wrote an entire book, which you completely don’t need to read, because the entire strategy is based in the title. It’s called, they ask you answer. And his content strategies, like if you want to never ever, ever, ever run out of content, just answer people’s questions as they have them. And if they’re not asking you, they’re asking somewhere, and it’s them fact that that’s where I got my series name, you ask, I answer questions like, okay, instead of having to dream up new things every day. There’s no shortage of questions. If you are in our analytics for marketers, slack group, if you go to trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. People are asking questions in there, and I just answered one this morning.

Well, you know, so but that goes back to the original question of what happens when you exhaust that keyword list. And so what you just mentioned was that people ask the same questions over and over again, do you find that you’re answering it the same way? Or you’re finding different ways to answer the same question so that people are getting more alternatives? For what first?

Really good question. So there’s two, there’s two things on that one? Yes. There are absolutely nuances. particular, if you look at a person’s background, like oh, this person works at a pharma company. So okay, how do you do content marketing for pharmaceutical companies? How did you content marketing for financial services, and so on, so forth? So there’s that strategy. But the other thing and this is much more, much more, I guess, meta is that you’re changing, or you should be changing, you should be growing in your career, and your skills and your perspective? And so unless you’re answering the exactly same question day after day, if you answer the same question you year over year, you should have changed in the last year, you should have grown in your skills in the last year. And so your answer to that question will change. One of my martial arts teachers talks about how life a calendar is like a wheel, right, and the wheel goes around, and you’re back to its back to July. But what you forget is that, as that wheel has turned, the wheel has gone a certain distance. And so you should be in a different place, when that wheel comes back around to July or August or December, whenever. And you should be able to offer a new perspective from the new place that you’re in.

You know, I think that that’s a really interesting point, and one that’s often overlooked. Because you may be giving the exact same step by step process, but the approach is going to be different, and so that you can only get with experience. But I think that that’s a really good point. And something that as marketers are answering these questions are trying to come up with content. It really is. It’s not the core information that’s changing. It’s the perspective that’s changing. And so, you know, maybe one of the things that you can do as a marketer, if you’re getting stuck answering the same five questions about Google Data Studio, go have a quick conversation with somebody who’s never used it and ask them to try to describe it to you or what they would do or what their problems are. And then you’re starting to get a new perspective. Like, you know, it’s breaking out of that comfort zone of, I’ve been given this task, I have to write this thing. I’m going to do this, but all by myself, start to crowdsource start to talk with your communities, your groups and ask them the questions. And it really goes back to Chris, what you were saying, of the US guy answer, or they ask you answer, you’re going to get even more fodder for your content, even if again, the core five tasks within the answer are the same thing. We’ve

done projects for customers, where we just ask them, Hey, just let us into your customer service inbox. Guess what? There’s a million questions in there at Grand Total lot of the same, like, why does your service suck so much? But people have very specific needs, like, how do I use this thing? What is this thing good for? We see the same thing happen all the time in, in analytics and data, like how do I use this thing? Even your way of explaining something as simple as like linear regression can and should change over time, as you understand better what it is? When you’re tackling your question to I often find people take just the very little question, don’t think about the the side questions. And the way that we typically approach it in our own content marketing is what why how? Okay, so, Pete, someone asked question about a Google Analytics feature like, well, what, what, how many views should you have? So that’s the question. But what’s the real question? What’s the purpose of view? Why are views important? How do you use them properly? So from any one given question, you can spin off five or six additional ones that give you more nuances into that particular topic?

Mm hmm. I agree with that. And I think that that’s a really good approach as well of how to really pull out more fine detail for any given topic. And I think too, it’s constantly updating what your competitors are doing. And you’re always going to have new competitors, old competitors will go away, new ones will crop up. You’ll have disruptors of your space. And that’s a really great place to farm out some additional content ideas, like what are your competitors doing. So that kind of goes back to that notion of that text mining, figuring out what people are saying, but also making sure that you’re doing your keyword research on your competitors. And so we have this SEO tool, which is very straightforward. We call it defend attack, because, you know, we like things that sound aggressive and scare people. But what it is, it’s here’s the key words that you need to defend that are yours that you want to be known for. And here is the open Greenfield of keywords that nobody’s paying attention to, that you can go and snag up for yourself. And running an analysis like that once a month, once a quarter is going to give you continually new ideas of things to be writing about and things to be creating content for. And the other thing to keep in mind is that when we say content, we’re talking about written we’re talking about audio, we’re talking about video, we’re talking about slide decks, it doesn’t have to be a 500 word blog every single time that is not the only content that exists.

Absolutely right. The other things that you can do and now if you want to get super advanced, there’s a a technique in natural language processing called vector ization, which looks at what words are mathematically most closely related to the words you care about. So let’s say that, oh, let’s say you’re talking about influencer marketing, right? What are the words and phrases that are mathematically most closely related to that business on how often they appear together? So obviously, Instagram has been you know, the the one, but in the last six months, tick tock has suddenly become a thing for you know, like the eight to 14 year old crowd, that may be an audience that you may or may not want to go after. But you cannot escape the fact that there’s a mathematical relationship between what is what constitutes influencer marketing, and and what channels? The last thing I would say on that front of, of generating content is, and this requires a lot of self awareness. What what do you what don’t you know, what don’t you know about your industry, your field, etc? Because if you don’t know it, and you have questions about it, guess what, you can research it, then you do know it, but I guarantee there are other people in your industry who also don’t know it, and would love to know about it as well. One of the criteria for content that we say is the three l rule it did you laugh when you made it? Do you love it so much? You can’t stop talking to people who don’t aren’t involved with liking, like your significant other? Did you learn something when you put it together?

I think that’s a really great way to think about it. So we’ve gone over a couple of different techniques in order to extend the life of your keyword research and continually create new content. So first, is the basic thing where you refresh your keyword research. Second, you refresh your competitors, keyword research, figure out what’s going on there. You can get more advanced and do natural language processing, you can do text mining, which is a type of machine learning, you can start to mind the forums and figure out what are people saying you can go into your communities and start to just plant those seeds and figure out what other questions are people struggling with? And then in terms of frameworks, you have the what, why how? And so you take any one question, and you extend it into the what, why and how. And then when you’ve written the content or created the content, you go back and analyze it with the three L’s, did you laugh? Did you learn Do you love it. And so these are all the different ways and these aren’t the only ways but these are a few of the more common ways to continue to keep that content fresh. And we want to hear from you. What you do to keep your content fresh. And so one of the ways you can work with us and our community is our free slack group. as Chris mentioned, that’s trust insights that AI slash analytics for marketers.

And when you’re in communities to the other thing to take a look at is who has a similar background as you this is something that a lot of people don’t do enough. They just treat their communities as sort of these monolithic places and everybody in there sort of the same, when there are a whole bunch of people that have very different backgrounds, as one would expect. It’s not the worst thing in the world to to either have like a buddy system in a community, like find somebody who does who works in the same industry as you. The other thing that it just requires a bit more experience, because it requires you to have gray hair have been around for a little while. But who is on your personal advisory board? Who are the people that you talk to on a frequent basis? If you’re if you’ve got a problem with on what you’re really stuck for content marketing? Do you go to advisory board, like who’s on your advisory board? Katie?

I’m on my advisory board is the infamous Ginny Dietrich, and she is a fantastic content creator, arguably one of the best and a mass producer of content. And so she’s someone who, if I’m stuck for where to start, she would give me some really good advice. Now I know some of the things that she does is she’ll ask a question in her spin sucks community and use that as the content. So what are the other people answering to this particular question, she’ll crowdsource a lot of her content, which I think is a really smart way to go.

I sometimes agree with that. And the only reason I say sometimes a grip, because it depends on the relative scale of your community. If you have a community, which is structured as a community of peers and equals, I think that’s a really great idea. And that’s very much what the spin sucks community is. If on the other hand, you have kind of a hierarchical community, then you will you may not necessarily get as good a set of answers. Like if you were to toss out into any given marketing query, hey, has anybody used compared Excel net versus Bert in terms of its ability to generate, you know, its content versus say, GPT to, you’re going to get a whole bunch of ha, but those he wasn’t even in English.

But what you’ve just described, so where you set off to crowdsource responses, you’ve actually created an opportunity to create content around these different things and explain what they are and how you use them. So if you don’t get the information, you’re after that it’s an opportunity to create content so other people can understand. And then you can go back and start to ask those questions again. So either way, you’re creating opportunities, new contract Lee.

And the last thing I would say on a lot of this stuff is going back to where we started, which is on SEO, as many good SEO tools offer you the ability to extract you know, words and phrases, key phrase that you just same words, similar words, words, other phrases that also rank for these types of terms, other sites and things. So you can get a ton of ideas. Even if they’re not 100% on target, they may be enough to spurn a thought process for you to go oh, you know, I never thought about including, for example, LinkedIn and my influencer marketing strategy, which what content should I create for if you want to be a LinkedIn influencer versus a an Instagram influencer, and you don’t need to take nearly as many photos in dangerous places?

Oh, my goodness. Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap it up.

I agree. As always, please do join our slack community. It is totally free at trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, subscribe to our newsletter, and to our YouTube channel and we’ll catch up with you next time.