Content Ideation 101: 13 Proven Strategies

Ecommerce businesses invest a lot of resources in content marketing—but creating valuable content is about more than just excellent writing. You need to generate content ideas that both resonate with your target audience and support your marketing efforts. 

Here are 13 strategies to help you generate content marketing ideas. They include five content ideation tools and insights into the ideation process from lifestyle blogger and Hotel Lobby Candle founder Lindsay Silberman. 

What is content ideation?

Content ideation is the process of generating topics to write, film, or talk about in relation to your business. It’s critical to effective content marketing, a digital marketing strategy. In this strategy, a business creates valuable content for its target audience to build authority, increase brand trust, and remain top of mind when customers are ready to make a purchase. These ideas can spark blog articles, social media posts, email marketing, newsletters, and more.

Good topic ideas support your content marketing goals, reinforce key brand messages, and communicate what makes your brand unique. From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, they’re also search engine friendly, incorporating common search terms and answering searches relevant to your target audiences.

Content ideation happens after you’ve developed a solid content marketing strategy and before beginning content creation. The content ideation process often happens in three stages: research, generation, and selection. Once you have a list of topics you plan to work on, you can create a content calendar and begin workflows to outline how you’ll tackle them.

How to generate content ideas

1. Use keyword research tools
2. Analyze traffic
3. Create content pillars
4. Involve your customers
5. Track social media conversations
6. Cover what’s current
7. Do competitive research
8. Review your existing content
9. Ask generative AI
10. Find your audience’s pain points
11. Involve your team
12. Stay on topic
13. Experiment with different content formats

Content ideation is a creative process. It’s a chance to get inside your customers’ heads, understand what valuable and useful content looks like for your audiences, and generate ideas that solve their problems. 

It’s also a chance to distill what makes your brand unique.

“My best advice for a small business owner is to stay authentic to your brand’s identity," says Lindsay, adding that good ideas bring customers in on your genuine expertise.

“It’s important not to shy away from centering yourself in your content,” she adds. “Some of our best-performing posts are behind-the-scenes moments and storytelling—whether it’s how the brand came to be, what we’re working on, or my story as a founder.”

Here are 13 content ideation strategies to help you generate the best ideas for your business. 

1. Use keyword research tools

Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner,Semrush, and Ahrefs provide insight into trending online search queries and related topics. Users enter a specific keyword, and the tool displays exact matches and related searches, along with search volumes and keyword difficulty scores.

Google Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account. To use it for content ideation, select “Discover new keywords” and input a term to display results based on Google search data. “Vegan purse,” for example, displays vegan leather bags, vegan handbags, and vegan crossbody bags.

2. Analyze traffic

You can also use Google Analytics or your site-tracking tool of choice to analyze how your existing content performs and identify the topics driving traffic to your site. Google Analytics allows you to evaluate customer behavior by traffic source and identify topics that drive conversions so you can brainstorm related content ideas. For example, if you generate high-converting traffic from social media posts about puppy chewing and housetraining, you might brainstorm social media and blog post ideas for a puppy behavior troubleshooting series.

3. Create content pillars

Content pillars are the broad general subjects your business plans to cover. They’re part of your content strategy. Instead of reinventing the wheel with each new push, you’ll revisit your main subjects and create new ideas that support them. 

A custom shoemaker, for example, might start by writing an introductory “pillar” article about shoe styles in general. Then, they’ll focus on writing auxiliary articles going into each style in greater detail.

4. Involve your customers

Hotel Lobby Candle uses customer input and social media conversations for content inspiration.

“Our followers also play a huge role,” says Lindsay. “We treat them like a focus group, using their feedback and interesting conversations from our DMs to spark new ideas.”

Solicit customer questions through social posts. You can also ask your customer service and sales teams to report on common inquiries. Engage with customers who contact you via email or direct message (DM) to compile ideas they’re interested in.

5. Track social media conversations

You can also use social listening tools to follow hashtags and subjects relevant to your business and track mentions of your brand on social media platforms. This strategy helps you identify trending topics to cover. Lindsay suggests reserving spots for emerging trends in your content plan.

“I like to plan key things, but I also leave room for spontaneity,” she says. “You never know when a brilliant idea might strike based on a trending moment, so we always want to leave space for that.”

6. Cover what’s current

Create content around your business activities. You can use social media posts to promote sales or in-store events, or create blog posts or videos expanding on product launches or educational activities. Lindsay suggests starting the content planning process here.

“Typically, we use upcoming launches and promotions as the main subject matter and then fill in evergreen content around those key dates,” she says.

Industry news and current events relevant to your audiences are also reliable sources of fresh content ideas.

7. Do competitive research

Competitor analysis (or competitive analysis) involves reviewing competitor content to determine what other businesses in your market are covering and how their customers are responding to their efforts.

Use competitor research tools to study direct competitors (i.e., businesses selling solutions like yours) and content competitors (i.e., businesses covering the same content topics). You can also perform a competitive gap analysis to find subjects your competitors aren’t covering and generate content ideas to fill those content gaps.

8. Review your existing content

Use a content audit to review your own content, identifying topic clusters for expansion and using content gap analysis to spot overlooked topics. Content audits can help you find and remove repetitive content and identify pieces to rework in other forms. 

9. Ask generative AI

New technologies like ChatGPT and Gemini are also effective content ideation tools. In an interview with Shopify Masters, marketing expert Nik Sharma recommends giving an AI tool some background on your brand and using successive prompts to generate and research ideas.

“If I’m a cookware brand, I might say, ‘Give me 25 ideas for TikToks that would do well based on this audience,’” he says.

You can then ask for more information about a topic or ask the tool to explore topics related to its best ideas.

“The cool thing about these tools is you can say, I like numbers three, 17, and 23. Write me 10 more just like those,” Nik says. “That’s where I think AI gets a good reputation in this space.”

10. Find your audience’s pain points

Review your target audience research to identify key pain points relevant to your business and create content ideas to address them. Hotel Lobby Candle started its blog to address pain points around product use.

“The blog was initially created to provide educational content around our products," says Lindsay. “We found that a surprising number of people don’t actually know the dos and don’ts of burning a candle, so we started with a lot of posts on candle care and how to get the best burn. The blog has become a place to share helpful information and product education.”

11. Involve your team

Looping in your marketing team for content ideation is another great strategy. You don’t have to stop with marketers: Your sales team, production team, customer service reps, and product development teams can all offer fresh perspectives on your business and customers.

This approach can also streamline other business processes, such as answering questions that tie up your service team and seeding key selling points in advance of sales calls. Hold semiannual or annual brainstorming sessions and encourage team members to share content ideas on an ongoing basis.

12. Stay on topic

Imagine you’re writing a how-to blog post about roasting the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. A thorough treatment will touch on multiple ideas tangential to the main point or that you don’t have space to fully explore.

You might come away with new blog post content ideas like: 

• To stuff or not to stuff: The science of bread in the bird

• The pressure is on: Carving your turkey (and looking good doing it)

Make sure all these tangential ideas remain in alignment with your overall content pillars.

13. Experiment with different content formats

Many content strategies also include preferred content formats and types, such as how-to articles, explainer videos, profiles, infographics, case studies, ebooks, guides, and testimonials. Review examples of these formats to see if any types spark topic ideas. If your content strategy doesn’t specify formats, you can research types and consult them for content inspiration.