For many brands and businesses, one of the most difficult aspects of content marketing is coming up with fresh ideas that will resonate with their audience. Not everyone is creatively minded, especially when it comes to blogging or creating visuals, but there are some tips and tricks that you can follow to generate fresh, exciting content.Â
When you are developing a content marketing strategy you should keep your audience in mind at all times. Start by working backwards, thinking of what information your user wants and needs and then creating content to match these questions. Your content should provide solutions to problems, but where can you find these problems? Below we discuss how you can use forums to find topic ideas for content marketing.Â
Find The Right Forums
The first, and most important, step in using forums for content marketing is to find the right forums for your needs. This can be as simple as heading onto Google and searching for “(subject) forumâ€. For example, if you sell handcrafted wooden furniture, you could search for “wooden furniture forum†to find the right forum for your products.Â
You will need to look at which forums are the most active and which have the most recent and active posts. It can be difficult to find forums about niche products that are very active, but you can use platforms such as Reddit and Quora to find these topics. Look for forums that appear at the top of search engine results, as these are likely the most relevant.Â
Search For Communities
Once you have found the right forums, you will need to look for the communities in these forums that match your audience demographics. For example, you might be targeting luxury villa owners with your wooden furniture, so looking in the “homeowner†communities will provide you with the best consumer questions.Â
Be sure to bookmark these pages so that you can find them easily the next time you need to look for content ideas. By creating a list of targeted communities in these forums, you will be able to develop content that directly answers their questions and will encourage them to interact with your brand. Be sure not to look at too many communities, as this could cause confusion.Â
Look For Questions
Another way to use forums for your content marketing ideas is to search for questions, either in Google search or within the forums themselves. Look for threads (a term used for a conversation with the initial post or question and its replies) that ask questions, seek advice, and receive a lot of interaction.Â
Searching these threads manually will take hours, but you can speed up the process by using some simple tips and tricks. You can use a search query such as:Â
site: name.com/forum/help|advice|recommend|recommendations|problem|suggestions
Using these question-related queries will help you to find issues that your consumers speak about regularly and create a content marketing strategy that answers these questions.Â
Pick The Best Topics
After searching for questions and queries that have high engagement levels, you can pick the best topics. These topics should be the most relevant ones and the topics which have the most interactions and posts. If we continue with the theme of selling handcrafted furniture, you should be looking for topics such as, “New house, what furniture should I choose?†or, “Best advice for maintaining wooden furniture?â€.Â
These topics can provide you with content marketing ideas such as a blog post about choosing furniture for a new home or how to care for wooden furniture. These topics will help to ensure that your content is relevant and valuable to your consumers. Be sure to use topics that have a significant amount of engagement and that are not older than 5 years, as these will be outdated.Â
Create Your Content
After you have found the right forum and picked the best topics, you can move on to creating your content and implementing it in your content marketing strategy. This could be in the form of a blog post, an infographic, or even a video. The most important aspect is that your content should answer the questions of your audience.Â
Once your content is created, you can use it to form the basis of a content marketing campaign by creating a related Instagram post, a Facebook post or video, or even a blog series about the topic. You should also share it in the forum where you found it, with a link to your website or a link to the article where it can be easily found by users. If you would like to tap into the power of content marketing for your brand, contact NetMechanic to find out how we can help you.Â
