Part of a content strategy any company should be doing is blogging. Blogging not only creates fresh content for search engines to crawl, but it also can help you and your employees position themselves as thought leaders. But since you need to publish new content several times throughout the month in order to stay relevant and increase subscribers, it can become really hard to come up with new topics or fresh insights to write about without sounding repetitive.
This is when we turned to our sales team and simply asked, “What are the top five questions you get asked most during a proposal or sales call?” Surprisingly, this flushed out several topics for us to brainstorm around and create really awesome blog articles that were highly read and shared. By finding out the most common issues/pain points from some of our top prospects, we were able to assume that the probability of others out there having the same problems was very likely.
Turning to our sales team for this kind of content support is also something we recommend to our clients as a way to pull out the most important things that potential buyers want to know about. Seems pretty obvious, but almost always an untapped resource for ideas!
Since our sales team typically has their ear to ground and the closest to our target personas, they had a plethora of ideas that we were able to pull great tidbits from. Once they told us the most commonly asked questions, our creative writers and marketing team was able to develop super helpful and insightful pieces to publish.
We challenged one of our clients, who became frustrated trying to think of what to blog around without writing the exact same article over and over, to approach their business developer and just have an open conversation about the types of questions they get asked. From there the business developer not only was able to give us a list of questions but it also helped us formulate a piece of content for lead gen purposes that we turned into a whitepaper. That business developer than used the whitepaper we created in their proposals and sales nurturing process. So essentially, we were able to turn a 45-minute discussion with the sales director into 5 blog posts and one whitepaper!
Other ways you can always get blogging ideas is from trending topics world-wide and putting a spin on the news so that it reflects your company or services, also known as “news jacking.” You can pull the stats from your most popular read blog posts and elaborate or dive deeper into a certain aspect of the post and always hyperlink back to the original post. It’s also a good idea is to always create blogs posts around case studies or real-business examples of how you encountered an issue with a client and what was done to solve that problem.
Lastly, if you feel that the blogging well has run dry, don’t forget to ask your salesperson for their opinion, you might be amazed at the results you get!