How I generated dozens of the BEST content ideas I’ve ever created.
I work exclusively with B2B companies and let’s face it, sometimes the topics are a little dry.
They only appeal to a specific niche – my client’s targeted audience which often is not very broad.
One day I woke up with an idea provided by “the Muse”, “Infinite Intelligence”, wherever good ideas come from, that gave me outstanding source material from which I’ll develop content for months from.
One of the things that prospects want to know is how a company’s service helped someone like them, another company with the same challenges and in the same industry, a “case study”.
It occurred to me that my client’s sales team had this case study info but how to get it was my issue.
I created a simple form with Google (forms.google.com), sent it to the sales manager asking him to ask his salespeople to fill it out where possible. I wasn’t sure if I’d get even one response.
Every sales person plus the managers responded. Boom, I had 12 great responses with specific information such as;
- Job location (they work with contractors)
- Describe your customer’s job (what are they building, what type of equipment were they using, etc.)
- What problem did they have before [company name] became involved? (honestly I was expecting two word answers but received a paragraph or more)
- What consequences did they face due to the problem? (for example, they experienced downtime due to the problem)
- How did [company name] solve the problem?
- What time or cost savings did the customer experience as a result of [company name’s] solution? (again I got big fat paragraphs instead of scrawny little sentences)
- Any other positive feedback or observations from the customer that you can share? (more gold)
I got 12 responses. From the Google form, I clicked “Responses”, then clicked “View in Sheets” and all of the responses appeared in a spreadsheet. (this kept getting better)
From there I was golden – I wrote case studies for each. I am a fanatic video creator (not a great one but an enthusiastic one) so a few got nice longer, landscape oriented videos, others got the “short video” treatment.
I call this “starbursting” where you take one piece of content and use it to create more content in different formats.
The best part is that the content is so useful. Aside from writing about individual case studies I can write about the various problems [company name] has solved, types of ROI or time/cost benefits solved in general.
So then I thought that ChatGPT should take a look. I downloaded the spreadsheet into a .CSV file, uploaded it to ChatGPT (deleting all client names or identifying information) and entered the following prompt:
Act as an expert in data analysis. Review the attached spreadsheet, give me 10 examples of what you can do with that data that I can use for a marketing campaign.
It replied:
1, Create Customer Success Stories:
2. Develop a “Problem Solved” Video Series:
3. Infographic of Common Industry Challenges:
4. Customer Testimonial Quote Cards:
5. Create a Blog Series on Industry Pain Points:
6. Build a Time Savings Calculator:
7. LinkedIn Carousel Post: “From Problem to Solution”:
8. Email Campaign: How [company name] Solves Real Problems:
9. Build a Resource Guide: How to Avoid Job Site Delays:
10. Create a Social Media “Did You Know?” Series:
I won’t use all of these but that “Linkedin Carousel Post” was something I hadn’t thought of and was a great idea. Then I asked it:
What are the most common problems these customers faced?
And it gave me a list of seven common problems faced by their customers. (more gold)
This data from only 12 responses will give me content ideas for many months and the fantastic thing about this process is, a few months from now – I can ask the sales manager to send the form out again and I’ll have a fresh batch of source material to work with.