We surveyed 300 marketing professionals, and found that the biggest bottleneck in content marketing is coming up with ideas about what to post.
43.2% of marketing professionals said the lack of good content ideas was the reason they were not posting more, or why they were not successful in their content marketing efforts.
Are you sometimes stuck for ideas when it comes to content marketing for your company?
This blog post will provide you with an easy guide on how to be more productive and efficiently come up with content ideas in just 15 minutes! You don’t even have to write the headlines yourself, instead you can use copywriting AI to give you blog post title ideas and you can just pick the best ones.
This same tactic works whether you are thinking of blog post topic ideas or social media post ideas for example for LinkedIn, where the first sentence of the post sort of works like the headline.
First, create a content matrix.
Second, start generating blog post/headline titles.
You can use an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet or use your favorite method for content management.
Write Down Content Themes
Most likely you already have content themes decided in your content plan. These can be also called content pillars.
You should have a minimum of 5 recurring content themes, but you can go as high as 30-40 themes, as long as they all fall under a few themes.
For example, your main theme could be “social media” but subthemes could include LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
Write Down Content Styles
What styles of content do you want to publish?
Analytical deep dives, quick tips and how-to’s, interviews, listicles, inspirational posts, observations or contrarian comparison posts?
List a minimum of 5 types of recurring content styles in your content matrix.
You can go as high as 8-10, but 5 is a good starting point.
Pair Content Theme With Content Style In Your Content Matrix
Pair a theme with a style and you will receive a starting point for your post content. Create a content matrix, where you can easily manage the content ideas.
Example.
I chose blog post topic themes: social media, content marketing, digital marketing, video content and content creation.
I chose post styles: analytical deep dive, actionable how-to, listicle, inspirational and comparison.
First 5 blog post topics could be:
- Social media x analytical deep dive
- Social media x actionable how-to
- Social media x listicle
- Social media x inspirational
- Social media x comparison (this vs that)
Do the same with each topic you have. If you have 5 topics and 5 themes, you already have 25 post ideas waiting for you.
Next step is to think of specific blog post titles for all of your posts.
Use AI To Come Up With Blog Post Title Ideas
Get AI to help you with some headlines for your blog post. Use ChatGPT or any other copywriting AI tool.
AI copywriting tools Copy.Ai, Copymatic and of course Open Ai.
Give the AI prompt what you are looking for.
I am focusing on one content idea at the time, and starting with the "social media x analytical deep dive".
I gave AI a prompt “write me 5 blog post title ideas about an analytical deep dive into social media”.
AI gave me these suggestions:
- Mastering The Art Of Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide To Growing Your Following
- Social Media Strategy: How To Grow Your Followers And Increase Engagement With Content Marketing
- Unlocking The Power Of Content Marketing: How To Grow Your Audience And Drive Engagement With Social Media
- 10 Proven Strategies To Grow Your Social Media Following & Engagement
- The Ultimate Guide To Growing Your Brand With Social Media and Content Marketing
For now, I am just adding all of these suggestions in my content marketing matrix, and I will decide later on which exact topic I will create content about later on.
If you have 5 themes, 5 styles and you create 5 headlines of each mix, you will actually be able to generate 125 post title ideas with this tactic.
Now, of course, you will still have to create the content, but at least you just streamlined and made one part of the process go faster.
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