Content Ideation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is content ideation?    

Before you can start creating content, you need to have some ideas about what types of content you want to create. You might initially jot down rough ideas to get you started. Or you could use a more formal brainstorming process with your colleagues and create flowcharts and mindmaps to outline your content ideas.

Content ideation is an umbrella term for this process of coming up with ideas to guide your content creation. It usually involves two stages:

• Generating ideas about what areas you’d like to cover, and…
• Organizing these ideas to give some structure to your content creation process

Elements of content ideation

The content ideation process comprises four important elements:

• Content clusters
• Keyword research
• Content pillars
• Competitor analysis

Content clusters

Content clusters are groups of related content pieces that revolve around a central theme. AI can be used to take broad topics or keywords that are relevant to your audience and then break them down into more specific subtopics or niches. This helps generate more focused content ideas that align to your audience’s interests.

Tools such as Globe can create visual maps of topic clusters. You can then paste these clusters into ChatGPT for further analysis. And ChatGPT can then map out the topics as the basis for a content plan. This all helps with content planning, SEO, and ad planning.

These content clusters are important because they structure your content and they force you to talk about a few specific things. You can then establish your authority and thought leadership in these areas. This can then bring SEO benefits because algorithms usually reward websites and creators that go deep on specific topics.

Keyword research          

The next element of content ideation is keyword research. This helps identify the specific terms and phrases that potential customers use when searching for information online. Armed with these keywords, content creators can develop content that meets the needs and interests of their target audience while also improving search engine visibility.

AI tools can be used to complement traditional keyword research methods such as:

• Brainstorming
• Using keyword tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush
• Gathering customer insights

With most traditional keyword research tools, you can export a CSV file and load it into an LLM. Combining AI-generated insights with traditional keyword research methods ensures your content addresses real user queries.

You can use a number of AI tools to unearth these insights. For example, Answer the Public or Answer Socrates can be used to find questions that people are asking about your topic. The data from here can be exported to ChatGPT and other LLMs for further analysis.

RankAtom provides keyword suggestions and visualizes ranking opportunities for SEO. For each of the keywords you choose or are suggested, it visualizes the top ten results, displaying domain authority and page type. This allows you to see weak results such as forum posts or low authority pages which present an opportunity for you to rank. The data from RankAtom can then be fed into ChatGPT and other LLMs, where insights can be gleaned to drive content creation.

Google can also be a useful tool in this regard. Its ‘People also ask’ feature on the search engine results page (SERP) indicates what other questions people are asking around a subject, and this can work better than keyword research tools for some very niche keywords.

Content pillars

Content pillars are the next element. They are core topics or themes that are central to your brand or organization. They represent the main areas of focus for your content strategy and are often broader in scope compared to content clusters. You can generate content pillars by identifying key themes that align with your brand’s expertise, audience interests, and business objectives.

Why are content pillars so important? They:

• Provide a framework for organizing and categorizing your content strategy.
• Help establish your brand as an authority in specific areas by consistently creating valuable content around those topics.
• Make your brand more memorable.
• Help ensure your content gets noticed by search algorithms.
• Enable you to diversify your content while maintaining a cohesive brand message and focus.
• Provide clarity and direction for content creation efforts, ensuring that all content aligns with overarching business goals and audience interests.
• Help maintain consistency in messaging and content quality, making it easier to build a loyal audience and enhance brand reputation.

You can use AI to expand on your content pillars by:

• Inputting a specific pillar into an LLM such as ChatGPT
• Asking for content ideas related to that pillar for various platforms
• Using these as a starting point for content creation

You can use the AI-generated outlines as a foundation, but remember to add your own expertise and original writing. Never regard the AI output as your final draft! You always have to use your human expertise and creativity to refine it and create something original.

Competitor analysis

The fourth element of content ideation is competitor analysis. By analyzing competitors’ content, you can gain insights into what works in your industry. This can help you to identify content gaps, and it could even provide inspiration for creating unique and compelling content. All this can enable you to refine your own approach to better meet the needs of your audience and stay ahead in the market.

You can use AI tools such as ChatGPT to perform web searches and analyze top-ranking content. You can also instruct AI to examine the top five sites for a given keyword to understand successful content strategies. ChatGPT can also gather real-time data on current trends and top-ranking content.