Content ideation is always ‘on the table’, as marketers keep on looking for new engaging topics to cover in their blog posts, marketing campaigns and across social media.
“Content ideation is the process of identifying and selecting the most relevant topics that will engage your target audience.” – Smart Insights
When looking for new content ideas, we want to make it interesting, entertaining, exciting, engaging, or practically useful. For content ideation to be effective, one must clearly define the marketing objectives.
Here’s an example of how you can set your content objectives through associations, mood and SEO.
Content ideation can be achieved through various ways, from team brainstorming to customer feedback, market trends, social listening, forums and competitive research.
Few weeks ago, we were asked about the process that our own team uses for content ideation, so we thought to tell you all about it here – in our blog 
What is our content ideation process? Why is it effective?
At Neuro Flash, we start every content journey with the topic discovery using our own Explorer. First, we need to identify what topics we want to write about, which at the same time, reflect upon our brand values and meet our marketing goals. We evaluate 25-50 topic ideas based on their business impact (search volume, keyword competition), emotions (positive or negative consumer sentiment, how exciting and powerful it is perceived), and overall brand attributes (how consistent they are with our values).
Read more: How to Enrich Your Headlines with Brand Values
In the screenshot above, you see an example output we review for “content marketing”, where we would be reviewing topics around communication, promotion, marketer, blogging and brand.
Do we rely on keyword research, competitive analysis, or something else? Why?
After topic discovery, we dive deeper into long-tail keyword research. It’s an integral step to ensure a higher ranking in search results. This is done with the help of Google Keyword Planner, but also our own website data.
Do we rely on certain tools or apps? Why?
We use a variety of tools for different reasons. First, we check for the best content topics using Neuro Flash Explorer. After we have defined the overall content direction, we refer to our own website data with query reports in Google Analytics. It’s important to address the content opportunities which we already are ranking for first. We then conduct further long-tail keyword research using Google Keyword Planner, and research competition in SEM Rush. Before finalizing the content ideation scope, we refer to BuzzSumo to check what other related content has been performing best.
There are other sources where we also seek information, such as forums and customer feedback. Reddit, Quora, Slack communities and Facebook groups have great contribution to our content discovery.
Finally, to confirm the best headline, we refer back to Neuro Flash Tester to A/B test possible headline variations based on consumer sentiment.
Who is involved in generating content ideas?
Everyone in the team is involved in generating content ideas, from Machine Learning expert to Marketing Manager and CEO. While contributing thoughts to the idea box is a team activity, the Marketing Manager will be the one taking it a step further and actually conducting a thorough analysis, and finally crafting the content.
We have contributed our thoughts to CMS Wire, where this content was originally published.
For those of you who are looking to take their content ideation to the next level, I highly recommend this video from Whiteboard Friday 
