Content marketing is a creative and strategic process that requires constant experimentation to find out what works best for your audience and your goals. But how do you come up with and test new content ideas without wasting time, money, and resources? In this article, we'll share some practical tips and tools to help you experiment with content ideas and measure their impact.
Before you start experimenting with content ideas, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. Do you want to increase traffic, leads, conversions, engagement, loyalty, or something else? How will you measure your success? What are your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how will you track them? Having a well-defined objective will help you focus your experiments and evaluate your results.
It's essential to assess your available resources, including budget, time, and team capacity before diving headfirst into generating ideas and experimenting with different content strategies. Setting realistic objectives that can be achieved with the resources at hand will prevent disappointment and ensure a smoother content creation process that is aligned with your overall business goals.
Determine the scope / scope the amount of effort You may be able to do this on the front end if, for example, it's for a client. A defined budget may eliminate some options and help focus your efforts. Some questions to answer might include: -Is there a pre-determined format such as video, e-campaign, or customer success story? -Will you need to include or integrate content from others such as video footage, quotes, or analyses? If you're riding solo on the content creation, you can scope the amount of effort on the backend, such as during the prioritization stage.
Once you have your objective, you need to generate some content ideas that align with it and your audience's needs, interests, and pain points. There are many ways to brainstorm content ideas, such as using keyword research tools, social media listening, competitor analysis, customer feedback, surveys, interviews, or online communities. You can also use tools like AnswerThePublic, BuzzSumo, or HubSpot's Blog Ideas Generator to find popular topics and questions related to your niche.
You need to look outside the popular platforms when coming up with original and engaging content ideas for you to experiment with, there are countless niche communities where passionate individuals gather to discuss specific topics. Join these communities, forums, or groups related to your industry to listen, learn, and engage. By immersing yourself in these ecosystems, you can identify content gaps and experiment with ideas that cater to these specialized audiences.
After you have a list of content ideas, you need to prioritize them based on their potential value, feasibility, and relevance. You can use a simple scoring system or a matrix to rank your content ideas according to criteria such as audience demand, keyword difficulty, content gap, content format, content type, and content goal. You can also use tools like CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer, Google Trends, or SEMrush's Topic Research to help you assess the viability and attractiveness of your content ideas.
Now that you have your top content ideas, you need to create different variations of them to test their performance. You can experiment with different headlines, images, formats, lengths, tones, calls to action, or distribution channels. You can use tools like Google Optimize, Unbounce, or Optimizely to create and run A/B tests or multivariate tests on your content variations. You can also use tools like Canva, Lumen5, or Anchor to create different types of content from the same idea, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics.
The final step of experimenting with content ideas is to analyze the results of your tests and compare them with your objectives and KPIs. You can use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Kissmetrics to track and measure the performance of your content variations across different metrics, such as traffic, bounce rate, time on page, conversions, social shares, comments, or feedback. You can also use tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, or UserTesting to get insights into how your audience interacts with and responds to your content.
Based on your analysis, you can learn what works and what doesn't work for your content marketing strategy. You can identify the best practices and the areas of improvement for your content creation and distribution. You can also use the feedback and data from your experiments to generate new content ideas or optimize existing ones. Experimenting with content ideas is an ongoing process that can help you grow your audience, increase your authority, and achieve your goals.
Sometimes looking through your own content archives from a different perspective is the best place to find fresh new ideas for content creation and distribution that you can improve, it's similar to rereading your favorite book and learning something new that you may have missed. Review your prior content, identify the pieces that your audience responded to the most, and think about expanding on or repurposing those pieces. This not only saves time but also guarantees that the tone and message of your material remain true to your brand.
User-generated content, an asset that is often neglected and underutilized, can open up a world of content possibilities. Invite and encourage your audience to create and share content related to your brand or industry. User-generated content encourages authenticity and community while also igniting creativity. Repurpose and showcase this content to provide a fresh perspective and engage your audience.