Brainstorming ideas and creating your content arcs

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Brainstorming ideas and creating your content arcs

- Before you can start actually creating your content, you need to brainstorm your ideas and create your content arcs. Coming up with content ideas can be daunting. It is easy to have writer's block when it comes to content. But before you start actually writing you content you need to determine what topics should you consider for your content. And this will vary based on your business. Often it's great to first start by taking into consideration your business priorities. This could be new markets that you might be trying to launch in, additional product launches or service launches, branding initiatives within the business, or different thought leadership topics that you want to become leaders in the industry about.

These are all great topics to write content for. You also want to take into consideration your personas and who you want to sell to. You might be writing different content for different personas. You might find that different topics will resonate with each one of your personas so you want to also take that into consideration. Industry trends, that's a great place to start. You want to make sure that you're on the cutting edge of what's going on in your industry. Many businesses want to be on the forefront and you want to be able to write thought leadership about what's going on with your peers.

So creating content on industry trends is certainly a great place to start. Search engine optimization priorities are also an important thing to keep in mind. Many companies will want to make sure that their content is SEO optimized, meaning their content will show up in search results. And you might have specific keywords that are company priorities. For example, if your company sells mobile applications, mobile might be one of your keywords and you want to make sure that you write plenty of content around mobile.

Competitor content is also an important thing to keep in mind. Take stock on what exactly your competitors are writing about. You can find this out through following them on social media, using a competitor content tracking platform, or just keeping up to date and researching. And then do some of your own digging within your organization to determine what other teams want you to write about. Meet with key stakeholders in your company to figure out what are their key initiatives? Make sure you get your product or service roadmap so you know what exactly is coming down the pipeline.

Ask your sales and customer teams what type of content would help them, not only sell deals, but also keep customers. Listen on social media to determine what your market is talking about. You also want to ask your audience on social media what they might want to hear. Send out a tweet, put a Facebook post out there, and simply ask your followers what type of content they'd like to see from you. Once you have a solid brainstorm of topics that you want to write about, then you can create your content arcs. Content arcs are monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly content themes that you can write about.

By organizaing your content in content arcs, that makes it easier for you to determine and select what to prioritize when writing your content. Your content arcs may look like this. So these arcs are broken down in quarterly themes, so Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 all have separate themes. And then blocked within each theme you have different types of content. So you might be writing e-books about that theme, an infographic, a slide deck, a blog post. But then you also have on-going initiatives throughout each of these quarters.

These might be product launches, or items based on the type of business units you sell into. So in addition to your arcs, you also need to keep in consideration any on-going intiatives that you might have. So now that you've sat down and done some serious brainstorming about what type of content to include, Sit down, write your plan, map out your arcs and let's get started.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/brainstorming-ideas-and-creating-your-content-arcs