Finding content marketing topic ideas no matter how creative you and your content creation team are can be hard. There’s likely to be a time over the course of your content marketing campaign when the idea well will have seemed to run dry and you feel like you’re scraping the bottom of the content barrel.
One of the biggest struggles content marketers have, according to eConsultancy, is keeping their content fresh. Having a list of content marketing topics and ideas at the ready can help you when it seems that all you do is stare at blank pages or screens.
Take a look at a few of the best content marketing topics, then find out how you can choose the topics that work best for your brand.
A Few Content Marketing Topic Ideas
Customer testimonials
What they are:
A customer shares their experience with a product or creates a piece of content that reviews a product. This can be a great way to find good content marketing topic ideas.
Why they work:
People trust reviews and opinions from “real” people posted online, according to Nielsen. Asking a repeat customer for their opinion and publishing that opinion on your brand’s website also helps to build loyalty.
How to use them:
You can ask for submissions from people publicly, or pick a few people who’ve purchased from your company before and ask them to create testimonials, either in video or written form.
How-to’s/tutorials
What they are:
Step-by-step guides that show people exactly how to do something, whether it’s cooking a roast, building a tree house, or using a smartphone.
Why they work:
People want content that provides something of value and that’s useful to them. A tutorial or how-to that breaks down how to do something step by step is pretty much the most useful thing you could create.
How to use them:
You can create how-to’s that teach people how to use your products, or that teach people how to do something connected to your industry. Remember that you’re not trying to explicitly promote your brand, but rather want to help others solve problems.
Personal interviews
What they are:
A good way to get content marketing topic ideas is to interview people that provide an inside look into their lives or creative processes. You can interview people who work for your brand, or go with outsiders. You can choose a theme for your interviews, such as “entrepreneurs” or “creators,” or just choose subjects based on who seems most interesting.
Why they work:
People love interviews, as they love to hear the personal details and inside thoughts of others. Here’s proof: The radio program “Fresh Air“ has been airing since 1985. Each episode features an interview with someone, such as an actor, writer, or scientist. It’s one of the most popular programs on NPR, and is broadcast on more than 400 stations around the country.
How to use them:
Find interesting people to interview and ask them insightful questions so that you and your audience can really get to know them.
Histories
What they are:
Histories give people the inside details about an event, product, or pretty much anything you can think of.
Why they work:
Histories can help give people the background of a particular subject or brand. They help to satisfy people’s curiosity, and can give people facts and figures to use to impress their friends during trivia night.
How to use them:
Choose a topic in your industry and it’s likely there’s some history behind it. For example, sneaker companies can create histories showing where the idea for the first sneakers came from. Medical providers can create timelines that show how certain medical treatments and procedures have evolved over time.
Explainers
What they are:
Usually coming in video form (according to Forbes), an explainer is a short-and-sweet explanation of something. According to the Economist, explainers provide the scaffolding to help an audience understand more complex topics. Explainers can take multiple forms, from quick how-to’s to lists of benefits of an object or service, and from FAQs to demos.
Why they work:
People want to know things, but they’re often pressed for time or have limited attention spans. Since explainers are short, they make it painless to learn more about a subject.
How to use them:
You can use explainers (whether in short text form or video form) to give people quick, simple instructions, to offer quick tips, or to answer commonly asked questions.
How to Choose the Right Content Marketing Topics for Your Brand
Now that you know what some of the more popular content marketing topics are, how do you go about choosing the best content marketing topic ideas?
For starters, it helps to keep your brand’s goals for content marketing in mind. If you’re trying to build trust with an audience, one way to do that is by sharing other people’s stories with them.
The audience base you serve can also help you choose the right topics. For example, if you are a B2C (business-to-consumer) brand, explainers might be a better fit for you than for a business-to-business (B2B) brand. A B2B brand might find that interviews with industry professionals better appeal to its target audience.
You can also ask your audience what they want to see from your brand. Remember that when you create content, the finished content should serve your audience in some way. Finding out what people want to see and what topics are of interest or value to them is one of the best ways you can do that.
In some cases, it takes a bit of trial and error to find the right topics for your brand. You might think that in-depth interviews will appeal to your audience. Only to realize that your interviews get the fewest likes or shares. Buffer recommends looking at the content you’ve created that has performed the best, then copying it or at least sticking to that topic. In the world of content marketing, there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken.
