Creating content can honestly become a ballache (or an equivalent anatomical ache) pretty fast if you don’t have a starting point.

As creators, we’re faced with a seemingly endless demand for content on all of our marketing channels. From Instagram, to Facebook, LinkedIn or writing blogs or articles.

It’s easy enough to go online and get a feel for the type of content that is performing well in your specific industry, which can be a great place to start for some inspiration —

But! Recycling content that your competitors are already putting out, isn’t exactly original nor does it serve your audience in an authentic way.

You’re inevitably going to create some content that is similar to your peers (you’re in the same industry after all) but be sure to put your brand’s spin on it, use your unique voice, and tailor the content to your audience not theirs.

Cool, so in the title I mentioned a tip to generate content ideas that you can build from and don’t worry, we’re about to get into it…

Let’s say you’re in the business of selling combs (bear with me, I’m deliberately being obscure to demonstrate how easy this is) — you’re thinking holy Christmas Batman how on earth can I write about combs every few days until the end of time.

When creating blog content, a popular strategy for generating ideas is to establish what’s called a ‘pillar page’.

The ‘pillar‘ represents the core product you’re selling, in this case, combs.

Surrounding the central pillar are all of your ideas for content, be it for social media, blogs, emails, ads, whatever the case may be. These are called topic clusters.

Here’s a poorly designed graphic to illustrate the point:

So, from here we start brainstorming all of the things related to your product that can be used as content.

For example, let’s use this cluster model for a social media content strategy:

Without unpacking all the nuances of each platform and consumer buying habits blah blah, let’s agree that consumers want to be entertained, informed and made to feel valued. Right?

Now, we have something that looks like this…

God, I’m shit at graphics.

Now that we have our subtopics we can start listing all of the types of content that fall under each one.

For example, in ‘Community’ we might list:

1. Local retailers selling our product
2. Detailing a sponsorship with a local business or sports team or charity
3. Explaining how the comb can be used by different types of people, within your local demographic
4. Starting polls and surveys for feedback
5. Giveaways and other shareable competitions

And so on. This method can be applied to each subtopic and before you know it, you’ll have a healthy amount of ideas in less than 30 minutes. (just don’t get distracted trying to make subpar graphics)

But wait, there’s more…

Are you all ears like this guy?

Those really are a mighty pair of dishes he’s rocking there.

Anyway, the best tip to maximise your ideas is to cross-pollinate the content. In other words, take an idea and recycle it through each of your subtopics.

For example, let’s take our ‘Community’ idea of “explaining how the comb can be used by different people within your local demographic”.

If we had customers send in a video of them using our combs we can hit several clusters in one fell swoop.

1. Video content for socials like Instagram
2. Social Proofing as others will see it which builds trust and credibility
3. Highlight our product with infographics/ captions
4. Engage our community of followers
5. Offer promotions
6. Higher chance of being shareable content

This is a quick example but hopefully, you can see what I’m getting at here.

With just one idea we can generate numerous more that snowball into lots of content pieces.

Remember…

Pillar content (the product) and cluster content (the subtopics).

Try this method in your next content creation session and see what you come up with. Let me know if it works for you!

I hope to see you soon, hit the subscribe/ follow links below to stay pals.

And if you need some content writing done, look no further, get in touch and tell me all about it.