Content creation tips: Where to find inspiration

Sahail Ashraf posted on 10 June 2022

Stuck for content ideas? It can be tough to get inspired. Try these tips and you should be back on the right track soon.

As a marketing professional you will eventually run out of ideas for content, no matter what industry you’re in or the client you’re serving. But rather than throw your hands up in the air in defeat, try the following tips to help you get inspired and you’ll be back up to speed in no time. 

Survey your audience

You can pretty much set up and run a survey on any social media platform these days. And if you can’t, you can always go to the many survey platforms to create a questionnaire that you can send out.

Survey your audience with questions that ask about their pain points and general lifestyle issues. Make it fun. After you receive the first few responses, you’ll soon realise that you have the material for plenty more social media posts. Getting to know your audience is important, and if you are able to engage them with content topics you know they are thinking about, you can’t lose.

Go back 

You’ve been doing some great work. Your audience has been engaged, and with some of your content there has been a real buzz. You know this, but you don’t quite know the details.

Go back over your analytics and track the content that gets the most engagement from your audiences. That is the content that strikes a chord with them, and there is always a new angle you can take with it. 

Revisiting an old topic can lead to a whole series of social media posts. You’re probably familiar with the way some CMS take a blog post and divide it up into a series of tweets. With your old content, try a different angle and then create your own series of posts for whatever platforms you are on.

Sometimes this takes a little creativity, but fresh thinking around your old, popular content can’t fail to provide new ideas for posts.

Look at your competition

Sometimes it is a good idea to see what the competition is doing. Whether it’s checking out their blogs or their social feeds, you may find something that you can use as inspiration for your own content.

Obviously, this is not about lifting ideas, but instead finding food for thought. The latest content from the competition that touches on some key questions that you haven’t really dug into yet can be a focus for your content. Take another angle, or try to deal with the question they’re asking. 

Your competition serves your audience, so get involved and bring another approach to what they are talking about. 

Trends

One of the best ways to get some early traction on TikTok is to find a trending piece of audio that is lighting up the feeds of your audience.

The good thing about trends, from TikTok audio to hashtags on any platform, is that you can tap into an engaged audience. There is structure there too, because once you have established your approach to the trend, you can then respond and interact with your audience around that trend. It’s just a great way to get some content ideas quickly. 

And trending topics

This has been around for an age, but it is still a great way to find new stuff to create content around.

Look at any social media platform, and we do mean any, and you will find a ‘trending topics’ section in your feed. If you are stuck for social media content inspiration, simply check out the trending topics and make sure you are able to create content around them. 

This is not hard to do. In fact, barring the possibility that you simply cannot find an angle on the topics you see, you could find enough content inspiration for days just by looking at trending topics. 

Even LinkedIn, once the very model of professional reserve, has a trending topics section now. It might just be the case that you’ve never used these sections for inspiration. If this is true, get going.

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