How to come up with content ideas quickly

What’s covered

• 00:45Why running out of ideas is a research problem, not a creativity problem
• 03:30Ideas one to three: mining your inbox, DMs and sales calls
• 08:00Ideas four to six: reviews, competitor comments and search suggestions
• 13:20Ideas seven to nine: objections, myths and behind-the-scenes process
• 17:40Idea ten: the repurposing loop that turns one idea into six posts

Show notes

Running out of content ideas is one of the most common reasons marketing stops. In this episode Anna gives ten ways to generate ideas quickly — all of which have the useful side effect of teaching you more about your audience, so the posts land harder as well as arriving more often.

The framing matters. Anna argues that a blank content calendar is almost never a creativity problem. It is a listening problem. Businesses that struggle for ideas are usually businesses that have stopped collecting what their customers say, so every post has to be invented from nothing. Businesses with a capture habit have more ideas than they can use.

The first three sources are the ones already sitting in your business. Your inbox: every question a customer emails is a post, because if one person asked, dozens wondered. Your DMs: the informal questions people ask before they are ready to buy reveal the real hesitation. Your sales calls: the phrases prospects use to describe their problem are the exact words your content should use back to them.

The next three look outward. Product reviews — yours and your competitors' — tell you what people value and what disappoints them, and a three-star review is more useful than a five-star one. Comments on competitor posts show unmet demand. And search suggestions, whether from Google autocomplete or the questions section, show you the literal phrasing of what people are trying to find out.

Ideas seven to nine are angles rather than sources. Take the objections that stop a sale and address each one directly as its own piece. Take the myths in your industry and correct them, which positions you as someone who knows the territory. And show process — how the product is made, how a service engagement runs, what happens after someone books. Process content builds trust because it is difficult to fake.

The tenth idea is the repurposing loop, and Anna spends the last section on it. One substantial idea should not be one post. It becomes a long-form piece, several short posts pulling out individual points, an email, a set of graphics quoting the key lines, and a talking-head video. This is not laziness or padding — repetition is how a message gets absorbed, and almost nobody in your audience saw the first version. The practical outcome is a system where thirty minutes of listening each week produces a month of content.

If this is the constraint in your business right now, it’s what our marketing coaching is built around.

Transcript

Resources mentioned

• Marketing coaching