Blog posts that make headlines. Viral social media posts. Web series watched at breakneck rates. That’s the power of well-curated content marketing.

But it’s not enough to have Pulitzer Prize-worthy copy and National Geographic-style imagery. Truly tempting content often begins with one thing: topics that are relevant to your target audience.

Choosing the right topics for your content marketing efforts is part art, part science, and these trade secrets are just the boost yours needs to start improving their ROI.

1. Talk about the topical.

You don’t want to talk about trends exclusively, but if there’s a relevant breakout story that’s even semi-related to your brand, it’s worth talking about while it’s timely.

One free tool that will give you endless easy-to-use data is Google Trends. Whether you want to explore the topics that are breaking the internet that week, or search for something related to your business, this is the place to start.

The very top section allows you to enter a search term or topic you’re interested in. From there you can scroll to the bottom of the page to see related topics that might be more niche and of interest to your readership.

You can keep scrolling down the trends.google.com homepage to see recent stories and trends the internet is already consuming.

Just make sure to exercise all possible channels to help disseminate your high competition topics. We’re talking paid advertising, influencer partnerships, and content with high production value.

2. Get niche.

In the same way, long-tail keywords can help you zero in on topics your target audience is searching for, niche topics that are less competitive tend to yield higher results.

Let’s take content marketing vs influencer marketing as an example. The former is a household name – one that established businesses know they must use in order to stay relevant. However, influencer marketing is an emerging frontier where social media brand ambassadors are just beginning to establish themselves.

Point is, choosing to write about a topic that’s hugely relevant for your brand or industry, even if it’s not well-known yet, can put you at the forefront of thought leadership and bring in loads of new subscribers.

3. Pick network-specific topics.

Whether throwing your hat in the meme ring or comparing terminology used on different social media platforms, make sure to keep where you plan to share your content top of mind and create accordingly.

You can also promote the content differently on various networks for a cross-channel attention grab. 

4. Repurpose once-popular content.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you had a once off-the-charts piece of content that has since gone dormant, you can likely revive it with newer, more engaging topic phrases.

Whether you republish it on your own site or send it to affiliate sites to remarket it to different audiences, it’s a great way to make your content marketing do double duty without putting in a lot of extra hours.

5. Use content marketing tools.

Remember that you never have to do it all on your own. There are plenty of content marketing tools available to you at low to no cost.

Paid versions give you invaluable insights to see what your audience is searching for, the channels they’re using to find it, and how the search volumes compare over time.

Remember that what you’re not writing about, your competition probably is. Staying ahead of the curve – or at least following along its trajectory- is the best way to ensure your content marketing topics are timely and click-worthy.

Need some help putting pen to paper? Let us do the legwork for you!