Picking the Right Content Ideas to Publish

3 minute read

Upland Admin

how to filter through content ideasAfter developing your content marketing ideation methodology, prioritizing ideas is the next step to optimizing your content marketing operation.

Let’s consider two content marketing professional’s thoughts from Intel, Jennifer Lashua and Luke Kintigh, and see how they select the most critical pieces of content to push to production.

The Planning Stage

In yearly planning sessions, Lashua asks a question when considering which pieces of content should be produced: What do you want the customer and audience to think, feel, and do after they’ve seen this? Additionally, Lashua and team compare ideas to the larger marketing goals of the brand, and define how an asset would support internal stakeholders.

Other considerations during these yearly planning sessions is what sort of weight, frequency, and percentages of distribution each type of idea will receive.

Analyzing Your Data

In her talk at the Content Marketing Bootcamp, Lashua promotes using data for deciding which content ideas to produce. It is a great way to understand the baseline reasons of why you are publishing content.

Understanding how content performed in the past makes it easier to benchmark and set goals, and you’ll always be able to measure and track the progress of your content and ideas. It also ensures your content team is held accountable for meeting (and hopefully exceeding) these goals.

This data can also highlight which content types or topics you should double-down on, and which to ease back on.

Lashua says, “The quarterly data analytics we run are pretty robust…and we use that to form the mold for the type of content we’ll create for the next quarter.”

Long-Term vs. Short-Term Content

During a content planning session, start by discussing content pillars—large pieces of content that can be broken down into smaller, more consumable pieces of content. The derivative assets from a single content pillar can fill your editorial calendar for (at least) a month.

Posting about opportunistic, timely subjects that are highly relevant to your community is a great way to boost engagement and social distribution. In regard to Intel’s “Museum of Me” campaign, Lashua said, “It’s timeless. People are still finding it today, and it’s still as relevant now as it was over a year ago.”

Kintigh also said when speaking about publishing timely, relevant content, “We developed a unique algorithm to curate trending technology stories from sources that younger audiences read and shared by our known influencers.”

Marketing Objectives Do Not Equal Audience Interest 

Kintigh talks about how brands and content marketers should try to think like publishers when choosing which content ideas should be created. Just because there is a marketing initiative or campaign happening, this cannot exclusively dictate what the editorial direction will be.

By being able to “take off my marketing hat and put on my journalist hat,” Kintigh is able to keep the overall relevancy and engagement of the content he plans to publish, while creating a more fertile ground for more marketing-focused material to be interspersed over time. 

With Intel having such a methodical and measured, yet flexible approach to deciding which content they produce, what other considerations would you take while planning out your content marketing strategy?

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