Generating blog ideas may not come naturally but that is OK and normal especially if you are just starting out with blogging or have recently discovered the power of it.
Your sales team are constantly in contact with potential clients. Every day, they hear their stories, challenges and objections. With their experience, they are a gold mine of information that they can share to find ideas for your upcoming blog articles. With that in mind, you should set a time to gather all your salespeople and facilitate a discussion.
The first thing you want to do with your sales team is to explain why blogging is so important. Let them know that blog articles will help generate more traffic to the company’s website and will generate leads for them. Helping your sales crew understand the significant impact on their sales pipeline will motivate them to participate and give their best.
Keep in mind that this is not a brainstorming session. Instead, you want to lead the conversation by asking what are the pain points and challenges of the prospects and customers that the sales people meet with. In addition, ask them what their customers are thanking them for. The reasons for their gratitude will provide you a clear understanding of the solutions that you have provided to alleviate problems that they were facing.
There are many online tools that you can use to help generate blog ideas for your financial service firms. The easiest one would be search engines.
Simply type in a question that your potential customers may enter in the search bar and analyze the results. You will see many search results that may answer the question. This is a great way to find compelling blog titles.
For example, I typed in “How to invest in the private market”. One result that caught my attention is titled “5 Things You Need to Know Now About Private Investments”.
If you want to take it up a notch, you can use an online tool called Buzzsumo. This tool is very similar to Google but with a focus on identifying popular articles that are circulating online. Type in a keyword related to your industry and you will be given back search results according to popularity. This could help you identify what’s hot and what’s not. Identify those that are popular and widely shared on social media and write blog articles about that topic.
Another tool that you can use is the HubSpot’s Blog Idea generator. You simply enter 3 nouns related to your business and they will come up with 5 blog titles that you can use when writing up your own blog articles.
Despite these previous methods, hearing directly from your clients could actually be your best bet. You may view this as annoying your clients but If you have truly changed their lives with your solutions, they will be more than happy to help.
Whether you want to interview your clients or send them a survey, when you approach your clients who invested in your product or services, you need give them a compelling reason as to why they should help. You can do so by letting them know that you are looking to continue changing the lives of many more people like them and want to hear their side of the story to encourage others like them.
The key is to make them feel that they are part of something bigger. That they have the power to influence and help others with their story.
When you are coming up with blog ideas for your firm, one of the first places that is natural to look at is the WHAT you do and HOW you do what you do. This narrows your thinking and you could become frustrated that you’re starting to run out of ideas on what to write, or end up writing blog articles just for the sake of having content on your company website.
It is always important to keep in mind that your blog articles are there to help and educate. Therefore, focus on the WHY of your business. Why do you provide the financial service solutions that you have? What is the reason of your company’s existence? Why should anyone care about what you have to say?
As Simon Sinek, author of “Start with the Why” says “People buy the WHY you do what you do.” You need to go back to the roots of why you decided to build your financial service business. Going back to the WHY will help you identify what cause you believe in and what problems you are trying to solve. This could lead to exceptional blog ideas.