Most marketers understand how important content is to their marketing efforts. In fact, 99% of marketers say that a steady stream of ideas is central to their success.
But a recent Kapost survey revealed that only half of marketers feel like they have enough ideas to fuel their marketing content. Lack of visibility, process, and time were the major reasons behind anemic idea generation.
Sourcing ideas from within your company is a great way to establish a steady drumbeat of content throughout the quarter and the year to come. Below are five questions to get you pointed in the right direction.
1. Who Are My Internal Thought Leaders?
Make a list of all of your internal thought leaders from each team on your organization. These leaders will be able to offer different and valuable perspectives on what types of content to create.
2. Who Will Approve or Reject Ideas?
Sourcing a lot of different ideas is a great first step. But you need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Identify the person on the marketing team who will review all the ideas that come in and reject or approve them.
3. What Buying Stage, Persona, or Business Process Do the Ideas Map to?
The SiriusDecisions Model for Content states that one of the most important steps in the ideation phase is “architecting,” which is the process of mapping a specific buying stage, business goal, or persona to a content asset. To make sure you get the most out of crowdsourced ideas, map each idea to a key business process, sales stage, or step in the customer’s decision-making process.
4. Who Will Put These Ideas into Action?
While idea generation is critical to fuel your content efforts, you need to put a plan of action in place to make those ideas a reality. Assign tasks, task owners, and deadlines to make sure your awesome ideas become a reality.
5. How Will You Track Success?
To improve your idea generation process, it’s important to track your success. Identify key success metrics like the number of ideas sourced, number of ideas accepted, and number of ideas implemented.
Want to dig deeper? Check out our new digital workbook on idea generation to kickstart your process.