Every organization is full of valuable ideas that are worth incorporating into marketing and communications assets. The problem is that these ideas tend to pop up in unexpected places, and most marketing and comms teams haven’t built the system to identify and track them effectively.
Here are four habits to help you consistently capture the ideas that fuel great content.
1. Talk Less, Listen More
Before investing in market research or a customer survey to better understand what customers care about, pay attention to what customers have already told the people in your organization. Sales calls, support tickets, onboarding sessions, and renewal conversations are just a few places to look for these insights. What you’re listening for:
- What are customers saying, doing, and experiencing?
- What are they buying—and buying again and again?
- How is your product or service meeting their needs?
How to capture what you need: Start pulling direct quotes from calls and support tickets into a shared doc as you encounter them. Tag them by theme. When it’s time to plan content, use this doc as a resource.
2. Look for Unique Perspectives
“Thought leadership” has become one of the most overused and least earned terms in marketing. Most of what gets labeled thought leadership is well-formatted commentary on what everyone already agrees with.
Real thought leadership makes someone stop and reconsider their perspective—for instance, by posing a question they hadn’t thought to ask or naming a tension they’d been feeling but couldn’t articulate. That kind of insight already exists inside your organization. It rarely makes it into content because it shows up in passing—in a meeting, on a call, in a Teams thread—and then gets forgotten.
How to capture what you need: Pay attention to the times when an expert at your organization says something that surprises you, contradicts conventional wisdom, or reframes a familiar problem. Write it down right then—a sentence is enough. Then, follow up later: “You said something interesting on Tuesday’s call. Can we spend 20 minutes unpacking it?”
3. Follow Industry Trends
Industry trends can be useful fodder for content, but proceed with caution. There’s a difference between chasing trends and contributing to them. Chasing looks like adding your logo to whatever everyone else is talking about. Contributing means bringing a specific point of view to a conversation your audience is already invested in.
A few questions worth asking before joining any industry conversation:
- Do we actually have something new to add, or are we restating the consensus?
- Does this trend connect to a position we’ve already taken—or want to take—about where the industry is going?
- Is the audience we’d reach here the audience we’re trying to reach in the first place?
How to capture what you need: The work of monitoring trends shouldn’t fall to one person—and the insights shouldn’t live in one person’s head. Set up a lightweight channel where anyone can drop a link or a quick note: “Saw this take. We disagree, and here’s why.”
4. Show the Work
Some of the most valuable content you can publish provides a window into how your organization actually operates: the decisions you’re weighing, the problems you’re solving in real time, the reasoning behind a change in direction. Being transparent about how the work gets done is the kind of “showing, not telling” that builds trust with discerning audiences.
The questions worth answering:
- Why and how did the team change its approach to a recurring problem?
- What tradeoff did the organization make that a competitor didn’t?
- What did the team get wrong before they got it right?
How to capture it: After a meaningful discussion, take five minutes to write down your takeaways. The specifics are what earn trust, and those are hard to reconstruct from memory three months later.
Content Sourcing Is an Ongoing Process
None of these habits are complicated, but they require a shift in where you focus your attention. The ultimate goal is to stop treating content sourcing as something that only happens during a brainstorm or at the start of a project, and start treating it as an ongoing process.
If your team needs support surfacing the ideas that fuel great content, Every Little Word can help. We work with busy marketing and comms leaders to turn the expertise that already exists in their organizations into content that’s worth publishing. Book a discovery call to learn more.
