Content Topics That Move the Marketing Needle

Traditional content marketing strategies determined topics based on popular keywords for the niche. 

First, the campaign planners will find the keywords with the best MSV-ranking difficulty balance. Then, they will list the broad topics around those search terms. Broad topics easily yield long-form articles, making it easier to include lots of keywords.

Finally, they built generic backlinks from authoritative publications through guest posting and digital PR.

This approach worked until AI models revolutionized how internet audiences searched for information on the web.

Now, people don’t particularly use keywords, especially when they are looking to find relevant information that shapes their purchase decision. They either go to social media to check out relevant video content or ask highly specific questions to LLM-powered search tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT.

In this chapter, let’s learn how you can identify the best content topics that hit the mark with your audience in today’s era of AI-driven search.

Product or service specialty

The first question a customer will ask when you pitch them something is: why you?

This is where you have to differentiate yourself from the market. If you are lucky, your brand value will be enough. There are plenty of companies that get away with subpar products just because they’ve built a name.

Apart from that, you need to demonstrate how your offering is best in the niche for your potential customers’ personalized requirements. Read that sentence again.

It’s all about making your buyer feel that you’ve developed a custom solution for them. No product or professional service is perfect, but they can be ideal for certain buyers in certain circumstances. Your content’s job is to connect those dots to deliver that message.

From a technical standpoint, you can mention how your offerings bring more value per dollar spent to the buyer. Talk about the innovation, the expertise of your team, and the principles behind your products or services. Here, the goal is to show tangible superiority.

Then come the intangible aspects, which are related to brand perception. If they view your company as something that caters to folks like them, then you are good to go. Social proof, such as case studies, testimonials, and UGC, is extremely important.

To determine useful topics around your offerings, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask why you should spend your money here.

The significance of the benefits

Let’s say you are selling employee tracking software. These tools monitor which applications are opened and for how long. This allows companies to know how much time is spent doing deep work and how many hours are lost to unproductive action items.

That’s a clear benefit — knowing where exactly your team members are losing time.

But why is that significant?

Because it helps you streamline operations by spotting areas of improvement in daily operations. That’s exactly what you have to tell your audience.

Explaining the importance of the value of your offerings allows your prospects to visualize their lives using your solution. In this case, the buyer can easily see themselves iteratively elevating their workflows to improve output.

Simply put, benefit is what your product or service does. These are usually straightforward, such as gaining more visibility, saving time, optimizing costs, etc. Telling them won’t tip the scales in your favor because every single human looks for these advantages.

It’s the reason why these advantages are crucial for their business that gets them hooked on an emotional level.

This is where you need to sit calmly with a pen and paper to generate these topic ideas. Or you can ask ChatGPT or Claude to do it for you. For best results, share a screenshot of this section so your preferred LLM can recognize the context.

Unique perspective on trends

There’s always something happening within your industry in terms of technology, market shifts, customer preferences, and regulations. Monitor the major respectable publications and media outlets to catch these stories as they come out.

Then, create short-form content on it quickly, where you share your perspective from your brand’s POV. Speed is critical here because trends are always transient. If you arrive late, regardless of how well-formed your opinion might be, your reach will be limited.

The short-form content pieces can be 600-800-word articles, LinkedIn posts, infographics, X threads, and newsletters.

Whenever something new comes out, people are always interested in knowing how it might affect them. However, they don’t want to do the thinking themselves because it’s cognitively demanding. This is where you come in.

Commenting on trending topics is an easy way of shaping your audience’s perception. If you are a small marketing team, then the odds are in your favor because you can ship the content much faster compared to established companies.

Stories that champion customers

Stories that justify your brand’s existence are the ones that champion customers. 

Case studies, detailed interviews, and testimonials fall in this category. Here, you explain the impact you’ve driven for your buyers to highlight how that was the purpose of your company all along.

Keep in mind that every piece of content, including the ones that fall in the above categories, is customer-centric. However, the digital assets that fall in this bucket showcase that the ultimate goal of your business is to help individuals who fit your ICP.

The best way to approach this is by sitting on a 30-minute call with your valued customer and asking them tangible questions. This root content piece can produce several repurposed assets that fit into this category.

First, you can convert it into an in-depth interview article. Then, tangible portions of it can be carefully extracted to create a case study. You can also trim the video interview selectively to produce a short testimonial clip.

All of these positions portray you as a company that exists to solve problems of its target audience rather than a business that sells products or provides services solely for profit.

Conclusion: Stay on brand

Customer-centric from the brand’s perspective.

The above sentence should serve as a north star that validates topics and approves content.

Marketing is the process of producing persuasive content that builds a brand. 

Persuasive content contains customer-centric messaging, where you empathize with them, provide solutions to their problems, and tailor your offering based on their preferences.

The messaging should emanate from your company’s philosophies that have developed its offerings for your audience.

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Next Chapter: The Foundations for E-E-A-T in B2B Content Marketing

Previous Chapter: What is a Content Strategy and How to Create One

Index (with Prologue): Content Marketing 101: For Lean and Agile Teams