Written by Dan Konstantinovsky
Strategic Marketing, RH Blake

Most B2B marketers recognize the value of creating meaningful content. And in theory, developing content sounds straightforward: identify a unique differentiator about your offering, provide educational information or compelling company news, communicate it to your audience in an impactful way and watch the quality backlinks and inbound traffic pile up.

And in practice, this works for a period of time. But after a while, identifying new and interesting topics becomes more challenging. Your monthly newsletter becomes quarterly. Your  editorial calendar that was once jam-packed with ideas now looks sparse. And in turn, the number of qualified inbound leads begins to decline. So what do you do now?

Content marketing generation idea for manufacturing-focused businesses

One approach to helping generate new ideas for content that drives leads and backlinks is by one-upping existing content. Although no one likes having a friend that’s a “one-upper” personality, in marketing, this is one case we should make an exception.

At a high-level, by one-upping, I mean:

1. • Find successful content

How do you find successful content? One way is to leverage Buzzsumo, a tool that identifies the most shared and linked content for a particular topic and keyword. Another way is to search for a targeted keyword in Google and then leverage Buzzsumo to identify how many quality websites have shared and/or linked to the content.

1. • Make the content even better

Once you’ve identified a piece of successful content, you should work to improve it: make it more in-depth and comprehensive; more current; more engaging and more interesting. Your goal should be to improve the existing content in multiple ways.

1. • Communicate your new content to the right people

Once you feel your content is significantly better than the original, leverage a tool like AHREFS to identify which websites are linking to the original piece of content and reach out to them explaining that you now have something more valuable for their audience.

Effective content marketing is an ongoing opportunity to drive quality visitors to your website – we hope the outlined technique will help accelerate your growth efforts.

Want to learn more about this approach? Contact us – we’d love to help you.