If you’ll list the 3 things every content marketer struggles with, the top 3 would probably be:

Time Getting new ideas for content Promoting their content.

While adding more hours to the day is still beyond human reach, methods for getting new content ideas is something that is totally doable.

The content marketer’s real challenge in creating content is the combination of large quantities of content in a short period of time and keeping it relevant to the target audience and engaging.

So how do you come up with tons of content ideas that will be read and shared by thousands of users every time? You use data.

3 Ways top marketers create engaging content every time

The secret behind creating engaging content is being able to create content that will answer a need your target audience has. To answer a question they have or helping out with a challenge they are facing.

In a perfect world they would just tell you in your face: “Hi, can you write a post about…?”, in the real world your users aren’t that straightforward but if you know where to look, they are telling you just that.

I’ve done a step by step breakdown of 3 methods well-known marketers use, and you can start doing today.

1. BuzzSumo

The most useful thing about BuzzSumo is that you can use it’s share stats per article as an indicator of what works and what doesn’t.

When you think about it, knowing what people share is about the same as them telling you what type of content they want to engage with, right? In that term, BuzzSumo is like a giant light house.

How can you use BuzzSumo to get popular content ideas? It’s pretty simple and highly effective.

1. Think of the topic you want to target. Do you want to write an engaging post about content marketing? about ecommerce analytics? gardening? Choose one topic you’d want to create your content about.

2. Go to the BuzzSumo App

3. Type in the relevant keywords for your content topic in search field and click “go”

4. Format has a lot to do with some specific content will resonant. For example, if you’re creating a tutorial for ‘how to use photoshop’ a video might be more effective than text, but if you’re doing a content piece about writing great headlines podcasts and text articles might perform better.

Go to the top-left side of the screen and mark only the types of content you are able / willing to create at the moment so you will get a clearer understanding of what are the popular topics for the type of formats you can actually create.

5. Do you want to create evergreen content (content that will always be relevant) or something that is trending right now and might give your blog a boost of visitors. Creating evergreen content is usually great for SEO and for getting backlinks and shares over time, but it could take longer to hit waves.

Trending topics will resonate for less time, but might get you more shares and raise more awareness in a short period of time. Covering trending topics is also a better way to engage with influencers or getting a guest post in big publication.