Although there are lots of good ideas The quality of the content will be the core of your campaign and is what will keep your audience coming back for more. It will also give your content vital trust, reputation, and authority in the ‘eyes’ of search engine bots. Google creates changes to its algorithm on a daily basis, but every update still has at its hear a focus on quality (from the user’s perspective) and ‘on brand’ content. And quality content starts from a great idea. But how do you create a great idea? Ideation. There are several ways the process of content ideation can work.
Sources of Content Idea
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a great way to generate ideas, but only if it is done right. We recommend drawing on a diverse pool of participants.
What questions to ask?
- Sales Team
- Ask about the competition. Do you have your competitive advantages or disadvantages against other companies?
- Ask about the recent customer or client they have contacted. What were the pain points or challenges that they have shared and wanted to be solved? Was the sales team able to close the deal or sell easily?
- Ask about potential industries that you can enter. Are there industries that your product services can provide to and matches your agendas?
- Customer Support Team
- Ask about positive customer feedback. Who are these people that said good feedback on our product/services? What industry are they from? What benefits did they receive from our company?
- Ask about the negative customer feedback. Who are these people that said good feedback on our product/services? What problems or issues did they encounter from our product/services?
- CEO or Board Members
- Ask about the CEO or Owner’s background story?
- Ask how his idea sparked the expansion and growth of the company.
- Ask about how he encountered and solved the challenges that came.
- Product/Service Team/ Research & Development
- Ask about the advantages and disadvantages of your company’s products/services. What are the best benefits of the product or services? In what ways or applications does it excel best against the competition? What aspect or feature does it lack that holds it back?
The Secret of a Successful Brainstorming
Successful brainstorming can be achieved by doing the following.
- Initiate or Find that Idea Spark:
In your brainstorming sessions, this is your main target, to get everyone to share ideas. But it shouldn’t be just an idea, let your participants think and produce an idea based on attractiveness. Something that attracts interest, desire, attention, and inspiration. This will create a more focused and efficient brainstorming session that is straight to the point.
- The field should be open to everyone
Because you are aiming for those creative ideas, it is important to keep the discussion open to everyone and accept as many ideas as possible. Accept every idea given by the participants and ask for any follow-throughs instead of denying them and explaining why it is a no.
By keeping the discussion open to everyone and respecting their ideas, you are also boosting the confidence in the room and keep the ideas coming.
- Keep the flow of creativity going
Now that your participants have the confidence to share their ideas, you should keep this flow of energy and creativity flowing. If possible, you can also about their experiences with their ideas. Ask if it is just an idea that popped from their imagination or they have the first-hand experience with it. Keep the energy going so you can keep the ideas coming too.
- Note and compile ideas
Of course, you wouldn’t want all that energy and ideas from your participants to go to waste. Keep all the ideas presented noted on a piece of paper or on your devices such as laptops, or on a whiteboard. If possible, you can also capture your sessions through images or videos which you can scan and view for references.
Competitive Research
Your competition is also a good source of content ideas. Conduct your competitive research by looking at what your competitors are best at and what they lack. But as a business that is optimizing content for the search engines, you could possibly have two kinds of competitors to note, especially if you have a physical store or shop.
The first one is your direct competitors. This could be the other destinations or businesses that are in the same industry as yours and provides product or services that are in-line with what you are offering, such as hotel rooms to stay or same activities offered with your destination.
The second group is businesses or websites that are also competing for the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page’s) as yours. Or it could also be a content writer that creates tutorials or reviews of products/services in the tourism Industry. Everyone will be competing for that top spot in SERPs, whether they are from your industry or not. An example of it is Online Travel Agencies like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and more. These sites provide direct answers to mostly travel-related searches like destinations, hotels, reviews, and even blogs about tips for travellers.
When conducting your competitive research, there are factors that you should take into consideration, namely:
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Trends
If you are opting for a keyword-based idea, looking for trending articles or stories will be great. Google Trends is a helpful tool where you can access keyword data based on their popularity at the moment.
MyTravelResearch.com members can also access our trends libraries and presentations for ideas.
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Top Traffic Earner Keywords/Content
Look for the topics or keywords that are garnering a good volume of traffic, such as Google Trends, UberSuggest, Moz’s Keyword Research Tool, etc. That is an indication that the topic or content creating a buzz on the internet or is asked by many. Take some of these high traffic content or keyword and make your own content based on it but make it better.
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High Volume Links
Take a look at what pages are getting the high number of links from other pages. This is an indication that the page or topic is gaining attention and is popular on the internet. You can see these links of your website or the competitor through, UberSuggest, Moz’s Open Site Explorer, or Screaming Frog SEO crawl application
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Content from Top Tier Brands
The top brands from the industry can also be a good source of information for your content. See what the top brands are writing about or their campaigns. You can use Google Alerts when finding brand mentions.
Previous Content/Files
Now we move to your previous content ideas or files as your source of ideas for your next content. These contents/files include:
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- Maximising the benefits from previous successful pieces of content
Successful content pieces don’t just end up delivering traffic for you. It can also create that idea spark for your next one. Use your successful content as an inspiration to create another one. Try and work out what made it successful. If there is more you could say on the subject make your next piece a continuation or related to your first successful content. For example, if it was a piece about what families can do you in your area then what other pieces can you do that would interest families? If it is an approach that works (e.g. listicles) then try that. The more you consistently talk about a topic the more search engines see you as an authority on it. Who knows, it could be the start of a great content series?
- Discontinued Content Idea
Almost everyone has a few ideas that they started but didn’t finish or considered but didn’t do anything with. Don’t let your discontinued or on-hold content ideas rot in your files. Whilst there is a reason why you didn’t use it, there is a reason that it was started or considered. Look for your past content ideas that were discontinued or not used. See which feel exciting and check what the barriers to using were.
- Maximising the benefits from previous successful pieces of content
Forums/Community
The forums or social media communities are like a bigger form of brainstorming with a wider range of people to draw on. These are a good source of information because of the abundance of experiences that are shared by the members. One example is on the social media platform Reddit/Travel with 5.7 million Reddit followers where users share their travel experiences, questions, reviews, and more.
Content Ideation Tools
Still short of ideas? There are heaps of tools out there to help you. Here are just a few of our favourites.
This free tool by Google provides you a report of your website’s performance. Take a look at your website’s top queries. These are what people are typing Google search bar and on which Google thinks you will provide value. Find content ideas from these top queries together with their impressions, clicks, and click-through rate to know which are best performing or underperforming.
Like we have discussed above, this free tool from Google provides you the data of keywords based on their current popularity or “trend”. Look at keywords or topics that are currently popular and create your content around them.
This is a free tool from Google that shows keywords data such as monthly search volume, top-of-page bids, or the cost for the keyword when used as a paid advertisement. You can use this tool to spot keyword planning gaps and improve your content optimisation.
This is a paid tool that is popular among SEO experts and website owners because of the wide range of tools if offers. For content ideation, the Topic Research tool analyses, headlines, top link earners, or related questions about the main topic that you have entered.
To put it simply, Keyword.io is a free keyword-generating tool that is loved by many because of its user-friendly functions. You can just enter a base keyword and it will generate longer versions of your base keyword. This tool can also generate keywords from different search engines such as Google, Youtube, Amazon, and more.
Answer the public is an awesome free tool that is a combination of good content and great presentation. This tool generates hundreds of related keywords or phrases in a very organized manner. The related keyword is presented as question-based modifiers like which, what, who, when, why, where, how. Each question-based modifier is presented with the possible phrases to use around it which makes this a really cool tool. (I think you can guess that we love Answer the Public!)
This is a free community-based platform where members or users can pose questions they want help on. You can easily search by topic and it will display all the related and most popular questions. Some questions are not properly answered or lack written content links which is a good opportunity to tackle and create content that fills that need.
Just like Quora, Reddit is also a free community-based platform with members discussing a wide array of topics ranging from politics, memes, video games, and more. You can search for keyword ideas or frequently asked questions through the specific subreddits related to your industry. You will be able to find people that are sharing experiences or searching for answers to their problems.
Just like SEMrush, this tool uses and provides data for you to find a content idea. Using this tool you can research content, discover individuals from your industry, or even monitor the keywords on-trend. Learn about your target audience by looking at what is popular for them and the trending individuals/influencers from the industry.
Relevance and Evergreen Content
Your content could have quality and relevance when you post it but then fall quickly behind. It is important to maintain your content’s freshness while staying relevant through time. So how do you create content whose value lasts?
For beginners, it is recommended to create a balance of relevance and freshness in your content. Build a calendar of events that you can use for your future content releases. If your content is related to a certain event or season, mark your calendar for your content release in order to garner more search traffic when the season starts and people search for it. You can check out Australia.com’s calendar of events for 2021 and see which events might relate to your destination or online content plans.
Make it relevant to your business, not just a high-volume traffic topic or keyword
High-volume traffic topics/keywords are good but should not be your number one priority. Prioritize the relevance of your content to your business. You can aim for the high traffic keyword ideas, take years to rank, and gain portions of the overall search volume. Or, you can choose the right topic that meets your industry or expertise, target a keyword from the long-tail with a good number of monthly searches and achieve ranking in a matter of months or a year.
A simple example can be a destination in Queensland that offers Kayaking activities. Say a topic or keyword “Queensland Destination” is on Google with 10,000 searches per month. 10,000 searches per month sound like a tempting topic to target, but in practical terms, it isn’t, because this is dominated by well-known sites and destinations, and ranking for the top spot will be difficult.
But on the other hand, there is a topic/keyword “Kayaking Destination Queensland” that has lower monthly searches of 4000. The destination has a higher probability of gaining more visitors in lesser time if they target this keyword or topic. This is because the topic is specific and relevant to the destination’s product offering. The top competition is also not as hard to join in as the high-volume topics. Also, Google rewards websites that provide specific and relevant answers to the searchers by placing them on the top of the search engine results page.
The choice here is obvious, unless you have a good number of staff or SEO experts you can go with the first one, but if you are short on budget or staff and are just starting out, the latter is always the one for you.
Prioritize Audience Intent
Aside from choosing the right topic, it is also very important to keep your content’s main objective; to answer the audience’s intention or need. Make your content available to answer a specific or multiple audience intent provided that they are all connected and deliver results that are beneficial for the audience.
Based on the latest algorithm changes and guidelines from Google, the content should always be useful to your target audience. Failing to do this will have negative results on your search rankings respectively.
In every piece of content that you create, your aim should be to provide answers to their pain points and challenges through your content.
Conclusion
‘Content is king’, is the famous phrase for all content marketers. But to make it more specific, quality content is king. And quality content is relevant, informative, and evergreen/timely.
By following these guidelines, your content will engage people with your destination or business and build business for you.
Noe sees his role as an advocate for innovation within MyTravelResearch.com to ensure our content is up-to-date and draws on the latest technology and design opportunities to meet or goal of providing accessible and business-focused research data for the Travel and Tourism Industry.
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