Finding great topics – ones that excite your audience and serve your business – is the cornerstone to content marketing success. No matter how well you execute the writing or creation, you simply cannot have a successful blog if your topics aren’t juicy enough.

With that in mind: here are 6 ways to find topics that your audience will love, but that’ll also help you meet your SEO, link building and lead generating goals.

Collect Questions

What questions do your customers ask you?

What are their fears and concerns? What do they want to want to know when they speak to you? What do they type in your website search bar? What do they ask your chatbot?

Speak to your sales team, account managers, customer support, social media managers – anyone who can help you discover what your customers are asking.

There is no simpler or better content to create than content that answers customers’ questions.

If you’re a new business and you haven’t yet got the customers to ask the questions, check out Quora and Yahoo Answers. You can also do some searching on social media to get a sense of what your competitors’ customers may be asking.

If you haven’t, check out Marcus Sheridan’s book “They Ask, You Answer”, or watch this 3 min video below:

Make Better Use Of Keyword Research & Social Media

Even if you’re not a digital marketing pro, you can still get a lot of juice out of simple keyword research.

Head to Google Keyword Planner or keywordtool.io (an easy-to-use substitute), type in your topic of choice and take a look at the list of popular keywords.

You’ll no doubt see a few in the list that you hadn’t thought of writing a blog post about. You’ll get great inspiration from just a simple search like this – and you’ll often be surprised at what you find.

Publish Your Own Unique Data

No matter what type of business you run, you’ll have access to data that no one else does, and this can make for some really great content.

First, think about type of information you collect as a business. This could be anything, from client requests to customer information, to statistics to common problems and more.

For example, if you run a real-estate agency you can publish data based on the home features that most requested by your clients (This feature makes your home irresistible to buyers). An accountancy firm could publish the 3 most misunderstood features of a tax return, plumbers could publish the most common household plumbing problems & how to avoid them… Get creative with it. If you can back it up with real data, client case studies and stats, even better.

To you, this information is something you ‘just know’ because you deal with it every day, but to your audience it’s something they would never have learned without working in your industry. Any knowledge or data or statistics you’ve collected can be turned into a great blog post that no one else has!

Case Studies (and the reverse)

Case studies also make fantastic posts. If you’ve had any successful projects, write them up and turn them into a blog post.

On the flip-side, honest and insightful “what went wrong” posts also make great, trust-building content. Whether it’s a mistake you made and how you fixed it, or an important lesson you’ve learned as a business, chances are readers will really value hearing about it.

Check Your Own Analytics

Don’t underestimate the power of your own analytics. We’re talking Google Analytics, as well as social media analytics and insights.

It’s always valuable to see what your most popular posts have been, and then repurpose them.

For example,  if a post or video you created was really popular on Facebook, you may want to consider writing a blog post to accompany it, or even doing a follow-up video on that same topic.

Using your analytics to understand where you’ve struck content gold in the past can really help you come up with better topics in the future.

Use Tools (for free)

There are so many great tools that will help you find out what type of content is popular with your audience. They can also tell you what type of content is performing best in your industry, what the key search trends are, how many links a piece of content has, and more!

This is helpful as it will show you the content that is already successful, and thus give you a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

Our top tool picks are Ahrefs, Social Animal, Buzzsumo, and NinjaOutreach.

Now, many of these tools come with a sizable price-tag, but there’s hope for small budgets too: many of these tools are either free at a basic level, offer a limited number of searches per month free, or offer free trials.

If you make the most of the free trials and offers you can still get a lot of great ideas. In fact, using the free version of a combination of any of these tools can actually furnish you most of the information you’d have paid for on just one.

Great topics are the key to content creating success. If you’re running low on ideas, try using the tricks above to spark your creativity and help you write content that is not only interesting to readers, but also beneficial to your business.

If you’d like to learn more about content marketing – here are some other posts you might like.